Are you a Female Likeable Badass?
Lessons learned from Alison Fragale and personal experience
My BFF always gifts me books to read so we can discuss them later. She’s a huge Brene Brown and Adam Grant fan and those are usually the types of books she sends me. She’s also a high school principal with her doctorate in educational leadership, and leadership topics inspire her. Her most recent gift to me was Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, by Alison Fragale, PhD.
Growing up on the east coast, she and I both have a warm, kind edge to us making you either like us immediately, or you want to punch us and flip us off. Hence, why this book was so appropriate for us to discuss!
Some Key Takeaways
Already? Yes! Why write some long drawn out post when I know you want the skinny.
One key takeaway from Alison’s book is that women need to have both status and power to be considered likeable and badass at the same time. She says research shows power is based on status and if women have lower status, they then have less power. In other words, you can’t achieve ranks of power without having achieved status first.
Her basic theory is: when we get others to respect our value, we have a much easier time getting/negotiating what we want, including power, a raise, a bigger budget, etc.
Supporting research on Status
In her research she found a few things to be common characteristics among how people assign status to other individuals, which I found fascinating.
Speech rate - The fast you talk, the more confident, competent, and knowledgeable you seem. People with confidence, competence, and knowledge are often regarded as having high status.
Speech response time - The quicker you enter a conversation after someone else stops speaking, the more confident and knowledgeable you appear, thus improving your status.
Talking time/air time - Ever wonder why the people who talk the most and say a lot of nothingness often get promoted? This is why. The more one talks, the more they are seen as having the potential of meaningful contribution, thus you’re granted more status.
Eye contact - Maintaining and sustaining eye contact conveys assertiveness. It also boosts perception of you being a warm, caring person, thus attributing to your status.
Selecting your (power) seat in a conference room/meeting - If you select your seat at the head of the conference table, as opposed to another one in the room or it being left open because it’s the last seat, you are seen as more confident and thus a person whose ideas will be held in high regard.
Using more humor - People who use humor in an appropriate way are seen as having high status
Being helpful - Giving more than you receive in return is considered to also boost status. For example, giving advice demonstrates assertiveness and when its done to help someone else it also signals warmth.
Using powerful (straightforward, no hesitations, weak words are eliminated) over powerless speech (think, might, asking permission, etc) - Turns out that there are advantages to each of these because powerful speech is seen as assertive, but powerless speech is seen as exuding warmth. What she found was that if you were expected to work closely with someone the other person valued warmth over assertiveness and awarded a person more status for using powerless speech. However, when people didn’t expect a future interaction with someone, powerful speech was given higher status.
How we judge people
Fragale says in order for us to be able to understand the definition of what a likeable badass is we need to first understand the science of how we judge people. She says our perceptions of people are organized into two dimensions: Warm or Cold and Assertive or Submissive. Therefore you can be warm and submissive, or warm and assertive, or cold and assertive, or cold and submissive.
If you want to be a likeable badass then the goal is to be perceived as warm and assertive. (You want to be somewhere in the upper right quadrant here).
According to Fragale, when you are both warm and assertive you get more status, thus ultimately more power.
In my experience…
As I was reading, I came across one of my CHIEF sisters and colleagues, Victoria Pelletier, whose experience was used as a case study in this book. She said she was known as the Dragon Queen. Can you imagine? She was badass, but people didn’t like her. I read her story and 🤔 I am sure there are people I’ve fired along the way, people who I said “no” to a lot, those who thought I was just being unreasonable, or those who hate me and think of me as much worse.
But I’ve learned in my experience you can’t please everyone. While we may put a lot of our heart and soul into it, work is not personal. Everyone wants to be liked, but it’s hard to be likeable all the time.
I’ve always been assertive, but being sympathetic or empathetic were things I’ve had to work on over time.
No one’s perfect. Being self-aware of your shortcomings or things you need to work on is part of self-growth.