Powerfully Likeable

I am seventeen years old, and my acne and I have just sat down after speaking at the National Debate tournament. Look, I hear you. Debate is not cool, but this was what I lived for. I felt truly alive when speaking as if I was exactly where I was meant to be - weaving ideas together, watching them land, and persuading an audience to believe my case. I've loved debating since I was ten years old; when I used to get so nervous, I’d turn bright red and physically shake - you could see my little palm cards tremble in my hands.

The strict rules of engagement, the logic, the skill of making a compelling argument, and the democratic way everyone got the same amount of time to speak: Absolutely everything about this sang to me. I remember wondering, why wouldn't you love this? Why isn't everyone doing this? I had spent months preparing for this tournament, highlighting issues of The Economist and doing countless practice debates, and I felt I had done a great job, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my beloved male State representative teammates. 

After the debate, a senior and well-respected coach gave our team members some feedback. My teammates were congratulated for their 'gravitas' and 'presence'; their deeper voices and serious faces were seen as authoritative and commanding, and their arguments were complimented for their clarity and impact. When the coach came to give my feedback, she sighed and said, “Kate, you just can’t be angry about everything.” On the one hand, she was right. I learned in that moment that tone and variance are crucial to being a more compelling speaker.

Manner, it turns out, really matters to our likeability. The ways we use our voice, tone, and affect can contribute positively to a perception of warmth and being approachable, for instance. In the inverse, our manner can be construed negatively, reading as aloof, detached, or, at the extreme, downright aggressive.

The other emotion I felt when the coach gave her feedback that day was fury. I had debated with the same level of intensity as my teammates, but it didn’t land the same way. I knew my arguments were sound, and my logic was strong, but she didn't comment on what I said, only how I said it. This type of feedback, of course, wasn't new to me.

Throughout my debating career, I was consistently told that I was too aggressive, too unsmiling, too arrogant, or too intense. And so, I tried to change. I slid up and down the scale of masculine and feminine communication styles, trying to find a place where I could still be me. For example, I toyed with being a gentle, feminine speaker while simultaneously trying to emulate all the successful, mostly male speakers I had ever seen. Imagine me, if you will: 5’5’’, blazer and pencil skirt, lips ablaze with Cotton Candy Lip Smacker, loudly arguing, “Ladies and Gentlemen, time and again, I have asked the opposition to come up with even one way they are protecting human rights, and instead all we can hear is SHRIEKS OF SILENCE!” before smiling sweetly and returning to my seat. This did not, as you might be able to tell, go smoothly.

I craved an external demonstration of my autonomy, strength, and potential, but it didn’t get me what I wanted. When I was playing feminine, I was perceived as being too soft or easily beatable; when I was too masculine, I was "too much.” Oops, I did it again. And again, and again.

Today, I am a coach, and I know that my early struggle to find a comfortable way to communicate with authority but still be liked by a crowd is a familiar story to so many of us. I help organizations like Netflix, Uber, Google.org, Microsoft, and many more elevate the way their employees present themselves and boost their signal, presence, and value. I work with hundreds of leaders, and I see recurring communication patterns that affect everything from who gets heard to who gets promoted. In fact, for all these women, it still feels as if life has two doors: the powerful one or the likeable one.

What is the powerful/likeable binary?

You are probably well acquainted with these doors. Behind each is a set of B-movie characters: the Ice Queen and the Bad Bitch on one side, and the Girl Next Door and the “nice lady” on the other. You can choose door one or two, but switching after you have decided is almost impossible.

We usually discuss these doors, this one-way choice, when we consider the process and struggle to gain power at work. We strategize before meetings, second-guess in bathroom stalls, text outfit options to our best friends, run through scenarios in our heads, and try to anticipate every possible variable of our performance. We know in our bones that we must choose between being powerful or likeable, and also that we're destined to lose, whichever way we jump.

This shrinking, reductive binary of powerful versus likeable is a disaster, if you haven't already noticed. What is especially vexing is that we experience penalties that men don't and that it is also incumbent on us to figure out how to solve this inequity when we didn't even ask for it in the first place.

But here we are! And worse, we are guaranteed to lose when we are boxed in because we don’t show our true selves or capabilities. This is dire for us and can make us feel small, unimportant, and unworthy. It is also a significant loss for our organizations, families, and communities. Because we have chosen to be, say, the Girl Next Door, we

might acquiesce to unreasonable demands for fear of being perceived as unlikeable, or we might hesitate to give a direct order. Real power will feel foreign to us.

Or because we chose the route of the Hard-nosed Ice Queen, we get feedback that we need to soften; that people find us off-putting and aggressive, that we’re unapproachable, and that we have poor partnership skills. We find ourselves being overlooked for special opportunities or promotions, excluded from team events, or bitched about in the break room.  

Women of color may experience even stronger penalties, with different cultural standards for deference, humility, and the act of pushing back, which only goes to further underscore the deltas between us and our male counterparts. Being stuck within the powerful/likeable binary also means we’re stuck within the various other binaries that these doors invoke, too: quiet/loud, pleasant/aggressive, ambitious/deferential, brash/demure. All of this sets us up to feel undervalued, unnuanced, and unfairly pigeonholed. 

So, what happened to me after that debate? After I stopped being angry about everything (and stayed angry about that very act in my head), against the odds, I made it into the state team. From there, I was then selected to represent my national team, Australia, at the World Schools' Debating Championships in Johannesburg, South Africa. We won the tournament, and I was ranked 9th best individual speaker in the world.

Winning a world title (yes, even a pretty dorky one) at eighteen gives one an unusual perspective, to say the least: it seemed, well, obvious that anything was possible with a lot of hard work and practice. I had come a long way from that shaky, red-faced ten-year-old.

But here’s the thing. I think I won because I played the only game I saw around me: I was stern, adversarial, and hyper-aggressive. And while I was obviously good at being those things, the experience left me with a sense of longing: I had won the tournament but lost something of myself. I look at photos of me from that time and I see a self-conscious and defensive-looking young woman, carefully calculating exactly how to show up; calibrating just how angry I was allowed to be. I don’t see the full me. And it stayed with me, this feeling of incompleteness; of not knowing how to show up as my true self. It didn’t go away because I won the trophy: if anything, it only revealed itself to me even more. This is the challenge of powerful likeability.

What can Powerful Likeability look like?

It took me some years, but I finally dialed into a mode that communicated much more of who I actually am and reconciled many of the contradictions I had felt when I was seventeen. Through painful trial and error, I learned I could embody a broader array of communicative patterns, ideas, and interests than I had previously felt I had license to. I could hold my own boundaries and connect with warmth; I could present myself with authority and have close friends; I could articulate what I wanted and not alienate those around me. I began to find a space for myself in which I could start to communicate and feel like I was showing off my true sense of self.

And so, I headed straight to law school intending to become an attorney and then went on to do my Ph.D. in literature, all the while bright-eyed in my knowledge that I’d be contributing to a field that was more than ready to hear women speak. After graduating, I took a sharp left turn from the humanities and into tech. I worked in senior levels of male-dominated technology companies for over a decade, working with exceptional men and women and coaching them to present the best versions of themselves. I assured myself that all these complex issues of communicating while female I'd grappled with in debate wouldn't be present in the real world. Yet in this work, I continued to observe the gendered ways women wrestle with power and recognized many of the same double binds and tensions that existed for me as a debater. 

I learned that the male domination and often confrontational style I was used to from the world of debate more than existed in the workplace: it governed it. Being talked over, dismissed, excluded from meetings, and having ideas stolen. It was a depressing game of bingo. And, of course, it’s not just in Silicon Valley, where I'd spent five years in big tech and startups.

I’d speak to my friends about the same problems in the legal profession in London, in the advertising crowd in New York, and in the consulting firms of Sydney. They may have been wearing different outfits, but the cultures were almost the same regarding the challenge of being comfortable and communicating within a predominantly male workplace. From Tokyo to Toronto, San Francisco to Sydney, women balance how they present themselves to the world and how the world reflects us back. Like me in debate, the women I met and worked with struggled with how to push back, be assertive, give direction, hold our ground, and be ambitious, all while still being likeable?

It's not just women in the corporate world, either. Women from all walks of life struggle in a similar way. Whether a mother standing up for her child at a school meeting, a patient advocating for more from her doctor, or an activist articulating her position, time and again, I hear variations of, "What if they don't like me?", "I'm not sure if I'm ready," and "I don't want to come across as being too aggressive."

This is an intriguing paradox. These women know that likeability is one of the keys to their success, but they don’t know how to exercise power without giving it up.

The good news is that likeability by itself isn’t the problem – it’s great! Liking people – and wanting to be liked – is a deeply human and non-criminal urge. It’s the quality of wanting someone to exist in your orbit, or equally, wanting to exist in theirs. Think about the people you know that you deem likeable: they likely have an energy which makes you want to be around them, to show up where they are. You might be pleased when you see a message from them on your phone, or happy to know they're invited to that upcoming dinner. When I was working at Google many years ago, we used to ask ourselves when hiring new people: would I want to sit next to this person on a plane for 14 hours? That, to me, is the essence of positive, generative likeability: an energy which works in your favor, helping you to create teams of allies and friends, wherever you are. Likeability is the ability to corral people around you and your cause, and it's critical to building trust and deepening relationships. Instead of understanding likeability as something to avoid, or to negotiate intensely, we can conceptualize it as a compelling currency that doesn't have to be forgotten in order to access power. Likeability is power. If power offers us opportunity, it’s likeability that lets us take it.

The problem is that we’ve been taught that likeability for women is different. It’s not just being a good egg: it means displaying virtues like agreeability, extreme selflessness, suppression of anger, and deference, to name just a few. We’re taught not to raise our voice, to smile, to laugh politely at inappropriate jokes, not to rustle feathers and so on. There’s a perception that we care too much about likeability or have to concede too much to acquire it in the first instance. In many cultures, likeability as a woman can be read as one who smiles, who defers, who isn’t argumentative or who doesn't take up space. If a woman shows strong emotion, pushes back, or even disagrees with you, she becomes unlikeable. Or hysterical. Or too emotional. You’ve seen this movie before.

We’re also not wrong to be concerned about being unlikeable: study after study shows there are penalties for not being 'likeable enough': inequitable salaries, never-eventuating promotions, and an endemic lack of funding for our ideas. It's even suggested that juries are more likely to believe expert testimony when the expert is likeable. I see your collective eye roll from here.

Power isn’t a problem by itself, either. When we talk about empowering people, we mean we want to facilitate their ability and capacity to do more, to act on their own behalf, to influence behavior and the events around them. Power doesn’t have to be the loudest voice in the room or the firmest handshake. I like to think of it as the ability to stand in our own space; to be comfortable, unrattled, assured, and alive in any given situation. To many women, power feels obvious and to others, it feels radical; we are all spread out on the spectrum of how much power we have been used to exerting – and how much we feel we can comfortably adopt.

We call our own power into question often, wondering what – if anything – we’ll say if someone asks us to take notes in the all-male meeting. Or when we question, Did I sound too harsh? When should I follow-up afterwards? Or my personal favorite, Did I put enough exclamation points in that email to look friendly? (or too many to look psychotic?). On the one hand, we want to be able to inhabit authority and on the other, we're also managing our emotions and everyone else's at the same time, or at least trying to. Exhausting, no? My women clients tend to share that they're exasperated to spend so much time on how their message is landing, as well as crafting the actual message itself.

How does this binary affect us?

Against this backdrop, even the most exceptionally credentialed women ask me: How can I be seen to be in charge and be likeable? Is it possible to be authoritative while still being "nice"? Moreover, how can I communicate all the complex parts of my personality?

You might identify as one of these women - I work with many. Consider these two exceptional women leaders with impeccable credentials, sophisticated headshots, and impressive-sounding roles. From the outside, they do not seem concerned about how they show up in the world. But when I talk with them, a different story emerges. 

Take Michaela, who runs strategy and operations for a finance start-up and, like many in tech, is the only woman on her all-male leadership team. She says pragmatically, "As I get more senior, more is put on my plate, and I'm just incapable of saying ‘no’. It always feels gendered, and I find it hard to push back, even when I know I should." 

Or Hyo, who works at a large media company and emanates a quiet sense of calm. She describes how she looks to other women in her organization to role model and what sorts of behaviors to avoid. She says that women who are assertive in her organization are "...very negatively perceived. So, I overcompensate and apologize for everything. I basically apologize for existing so that I don't seem like them." 

And of course, let’s not forget women who experience almost the opposite challenges. Consider two more women of similar credentials and seniority who are equally troubled by how they’re showing up in the world, but for entirely different reasons.

Lake is a hyper-competent business manager who is forthright and direct. She explains she recently didn’t get an overdue promotion because of a perception she “overmanages” senior executives. She tells me she’s “trying to take the feedback constructively but it’s hard not to feel like it’s gendered and personal.”

Sadaf works in a PR agency and is a loud, serious presence. She says one of her primary criticisms is that she can be abrupt with people when, in her words, “I’m just trying to do my job the most efficiently”. She suspects her people management feedback is the reason she’s not asked to lead big client pitches, despite being senior at the agency.

So, dear reader, just how did we get here? Is it even possible for women to be powerful and likeable simultaneously? It's not an intuitive idea, which seems bananas on the face of it, but it has deep, old roots. For hundreds of years, men have had the luxury of defining what power looks and sounds like. Classicist Mary Beard points to the fact that in Ancient Rome, "public speech was a - if not the - defining attribute of maleness… A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition, not a woman".  We’ve obviously carpe-d a lot of diems since then to accept the idea of women speaking in public, but still, there persists an underlying, insistent bias against women who are forthright, loud, shocking, embarrassing, or who speak their mind as not symbolic of accepted and acceptable femininity.

Quick fixes, we know, don’t work. We can’t remedy decades of inequity with the things we’ve already tried. Two decades ago, we were told that 'Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office', which frankly seems mean; roughly a decade ago, women were being told to "lean in" and build executive presence (whatever that means). Pithy, rhyming aphorisms embroidered on pillows or bedazzled on water bottles (I’m looking at you, anything that mentions the word “badass”) just won’t get us there.

But the price for this hovering in binary-limbo is intolerable. The societal limitations concerning what we can say, do, wear, eat, and watch inhibit our enthusiasm and capacity and force us to walk in smaller and smaller circles. We feel controlled by invisible forces that keep us tiny.

Here is the thing: we don’t need to change who we are. Becoming a more authoritative, warm communicator doesn't mean imitating what men do; it’s instead about choosing different tools or practices to help us find and then amplify our own presence, and in turn, ourselves.

How to move forward

In this book, I’m going to show you that to embody a powerful likeability, we must change the definition and play the game differently. There are as many ways to show up and communicate as there are women in the world. I’m going to give you the tools to be your true selves, the ability to communicate that self in any situation and to be as Powerfully Likeable as you want to be.

You can reject this powerful/likeable binary that you never asked for and find your own road map to being both powerful and likeable at work, at home, and beyond.

Let’s reimagine power as a verb—it’s not something you have; it’s something you do. It needs to be practiced over time through building skills and trying different tactics throughout our careers.

I want to show you how many traditionally feminine-coded attributes, such as community, empathy, and cooperativeness, can actually amplify your sense of power. Rather than being perceived as weaknesses, they can fortify our presence in powerful ways.

Leaving behind the powerful/likeable binary allows us to say our message with techniques that fit us best and allows us to construct a new version of power and authority. I want to help you think about how to find the answer that feels right for you and where you are in your career and life right now, by imparting tools to be the best contributor and leader possible. Not everything in this book is going to resonate with you, but just as a toolkit has lots of different tools, hopefully you'll be able to pick up the ones that feel right to you.

By reorienting our focus away from how we’re being perceived and instead working on who we are, we can amplify what is special about ourselves and show up as an individual rather than a stereotypical character. This practice helps to unlock our value for ourselves, our communities, and our organizations and strengthens our voice, reach, and impact. This type of warm power is an internal unassailability: the ability to steer our respective ships through still or troubled waters, navigating in the directions we wish. That we can speak and be listened to; that we can contribute and be recognized, and that we can ask and receive.

The primary goal of this book is to enable you to learn and practice tools that will help you engage your audience so you can deliver the most powerful and likeable version of yourself. This book will help you reflect on the things you do and work out whether your actions and words are based on fear or on potential. My wish is that you can reconcile that divide within yourself and find a space that feels comfortable, warm, and inviting.

I’ve purposefully made the ideas of Powerful Likeability a system by which you can adapt what you need and when, illustrated in eleven chapters that move along a continuum. I begin by looking at how we even got to this point by situating the culture of agreeableness and the price we pay for abiding by it. I then move on to the different ways we can show up in our body, reimagine confidence, and avoid the Imposing Syndrome. (Yes, not imposter, but imposing).

I do not pretend to speak for other womens’ experiences: but I will help share them, here, through anecdotes and stories from the hundreds of women I’ve worked with over the past twenty years. I want to help you think about how to find the answer that feels right for you and where you are in your career and life right now.

The book in your hands

Powerful Likeability isn’t a prescription but rather an invitation to try out different parts of yourself and see which ones serve you and make you feel good. In each chapter, I’ll invite you to experiment with different ways of communicating yourself: you’ll see sections entitled “Try This” where you can actively apply ideas to your own contexts, in a way that feels appropriate and comfortable to you. I want to help you increase your volume: amplify what you already have and build on all your hard work until this moment.

By the end of the book, you will know that:

1. We don't need to choose to be powerful or likeable, and we can re-imagine power as a verb: as something we do, not as something we have.
2. The high cost of agreeableness has historically influenced our communication and, subsequently, our opportunity, status, and agency.
3. We can overcome Imposing Syndrome - the disease of playing small and not taking up space - and amplify ourselves and those around us.
4. Our bodies can be sites of power and authority, despite looking unlike historical models of both.
5. The Confidence Combination is a new, more authentic way of showing up. By killing our confidence and presence dysmorphia, we can find our true power.
6. By using clear logic, evidence, and debate strategy, we can ask and answer questions without appearing 'difficult'.
7. We can recast our differences as strengths to help us connect more with people around us and to open up opportunities. We can also use warmth instead of deference.
8. We can learn a new, lighter-touch preparation framework and avoid the Preparation Expectation placed on many women. We can also learn to rest and avoid exhaustion in our communication.
9. Even when under threat, we can overcome and mitigate against high-pressure situations and find our calm.
10. We can reject Failure Privilege and succeed more easily when we reconceptualize 'failure' as experimentation.

Powerfully Likeable can also be your workbook: make it your own, scribble in it, bend the spine, dog-ear the pages, and when you get to the end, it should feel like we’ve written a book together, with a plan to call your very own. It is by giving permission to be ourselves that we can find a third door behind which is the role of a lifetime: our best and most powerful self.