186. Own Your Impact: How to Communicate Your Personal Power

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Your personal power can turbo charge your messages. It's not just about what you say and how you say it. It's about how you approach it. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. 

[00:00:24] Today, I am really excited to speak with my friend and former colleague, Chris Lipp. Chris is a lecturer at Tulane's Freeman School of Business and the author of three books, the latest of which is The Science of Personal Power. Chris, it's good to finally get to chat with you on Think Fast, Talk Smart. Thanks for being here. 

[00:00:42] Chris Lipp: Pleasure to be here. 

[00:00:43] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:44] Chris Lipp: Absolutely.

[00:00:45] Matt Abrahams: You wrote two books, one on pitching and one on persuasion. What motivated you to write your third book on power? 

[00:00:51] Chris Lipp: When I was younger and I wrote those first two books, I like freedom and working for managers, having colleagues, and this idea that my success professionally dependent on other people really rankled me. It was really hard. And it was, how do I get around that? And I felt persuasion was really the way to do that. So I studied persuasion as you know, I wrote a book on pitching and then persuasion. Even as I was doing that, you became very skilled at that, helping startups raise money. But I would notice these situations where I would help a startup and they'd walk into a room that have perfect structure, perfect delivery. There's this feeling in the room that the person was not going to succeed. And anybody who's ever watched Shark Tank before they see this, like sometimes the investors are like fighting each other to invest in a company. And other times they're all disinterested. This invisible power dynamic that's going on in these high stakes situations. And I really wanted to understand that from a communication side. 

[00:01:41] Matt Abrahams: Power is something that we've talked a lot about on this podcast. We've had Jeff Pfeffer. We've had Deb Gruenfeld, Melissa Jones Briggs. How do you define personal power and how can we benefit from understanding it and using it?

[00:01:54] Chris Lipp: The way I define personal power is it's our belief in our own capability to create impact. But at the end of the day, I really wanted to understand a lot of how people respond to us is obviously through our language. And so what was the language of power? And as I explored this, I really had to realize that you have to understand what is the psychology that creates that language at the same time. And so a belief in our own capability to create impact. And then what happens is, when we have a belief in ourselves, what we say changes. For example, people who are powerful tend to be a lot more action oriented. And there's been a number of studies conducted on this. But one of the studies conducted at Stanford, they took two people, one person, deliberating on making a decision, like, should we do this, pluses and minuses?

[00:02:35] And the other person saying, I've made the decision and I'm going to implement the decision, you're just talking about the implementation plan. And the person who focused on implementation and the person who focused on deliberation, they were seen as equally competent, but the person who focused on action over deliberation was seen as more powerful. They did a follow up study in looking at the strongest presidents, people who were elected president who were seen as more powerful presidents. Those who focused on action plans, versus deliberating what to do, were seen as significantly more leaderly. 

[00:03:03] Matt Abrahams: Interesting. So personal power from your perspective has to do with our mindset and approach.

[00:03:08] Chris Lipp: Hundred percent. 

[00:03:09] Matt Abrahams: And then it directly impacts what we do and how we say it. 

[00:03:12] Chris Lipp: This is a beautiful thing about personal power, is when we think about power, a lot of times people have come up to you and there's this kind of Machiavellian perspective, right? Like I can do these certain things on the outside to get power, but it doesn't necessarily make me feel good on the inside, right? And then in personal growth, there's a lot of things that make us feel good on the inside, but don't necessarily lead to results on the outside. And I was like, that doesn't make sense. Evolutionary, there should be things that we feel good doing. And then they automatically lead to results on the outside. And personal power really is that bridge. So just what you said, there are certain things that when they shape on the inside, things happen within us, and we think differently, we behave differently, certain psychological mechanisms are triggered, and we radiate that out, and other people perceive that power. And so they're saying, this person's a leader, regardless of what their status is, their formal status is externally.

[00:03:59] Matt Abrahams: So share with me, imagine I'm somebody who would like to hone and develop my personal power. What are some things that I could do to change that mindset or adjust that approach to help improve the perception of others of my personal power? 

[00:04:13] Chris Lipp: One of the things that, and this is the very first thing I talk about in my book, The Science of Personal Power, is the blame is the antithesis of personal power. So when taking responsibility, people who feel capable in the world, they tend to have a sense of control. And so they feel like what happens in the environment is within their influence. And so naturally, if something goes wrong, they take responsibility for it. Like I could have done something, right? If we do the opposite, let's say we try to dodge the bullet, something bad happens, you know, in work, they say, associate yourself with wins and distance yourself from failures.

[00:04:44] And this seems to be great advice, but actually It's terrible advice when you look at it through the lens of personal power. Because if you blame in order to get out of a situation, you communicate a everybody listening will say, oh, this person's powerless. Okay. Yeah. If you take fault, it's like, at least you could have made some difference. And so you're good, you'd be a good employee. But if you blame, you're signaling to everybody, hey, I have no impact on the situation. So it's like, why do we even have you in the office if you don't have any impact? So blame weakens your power perceptions by others. But also when you blame, it changes your psychology as well.

[00:05:14] And you're communicating that you're powerless in the environment to yourself. So I think one of the biggest things somebody can do if they want to tap into their personal power, is simply take responsibility for what occurs. Take responsibility for the way you manage your emotions. If you're feeling stressed, don't blame it on your work. Recognize that, hey, I've got this big work. It's causing me a lot of stress. I need to take responsibility for how I'm holding my emotions. 

[00:05:40] Matt Abrahams: So responsibility, accountability lead to that. And we can all reflect on ways in which we can do that to help. Excellent. Thank you. Like me, I know you appreciate the impact of language in words. You've mentioned that words really matter when it comes to power. Help us understand the role words have in our personal power. Perhaps the words we say to ourselves and the words we communicate to others. 

[00:06:03] Chris Lipp: Concrete speech has been something that every great communication coach talks about. And concrete speech means like having something that we can almost visualize with our words, right? We create an image with our words. So research suggests that abstract language is actually more powerful. And people who speak more abstractly are seen as more managerial. Why? First, it signals that perspective of power, but also it signifies a wider view of things. So like when you see the big picture.

[00:06:29] So if we think about a hierarchy, people at the bottom, they're right there in the stuff, right? But as you go up, your perspective has to widen from the technical to, for example, the strategic, having this bigger picture. So the more you speak on this big picture, well, obviously you can see how that relates to strategy. Regardless of all the business lingo and what big picture could do for your business, just psychologically people who hear you speak abstractly will see you as more powerful. So you were asking, what's one thing we can do to tap into our power? One simple thing based on big picture, is they found that twenty minutes before you go into an interview, if you can tap into your power, going into the interview, doing nothing else, you're eighty-one percent more likely to get the job. 

[00:07:12] Isn't that crazy? So just to say this again, if you access your power right before you go into an interview, for example, or you go into a pitch of your entrepreneur and you tap into it, you're almost twice as likely to succeed. So what do you do to tap into your power? We're thinking big picture. What the researchers found is if you identify your top values. And then you pick your top value and for four to five minutes, you write about why this value is important to you. Now, values are abstract, right? If you write about why this value is important to you in your life, even if it has nothing to do with the business, you tap into the psychological mechanisms of your own personal power, doing nothing else, not interview skills, not a better resume, you're almost twice as likely to get the job.

[00:07:53] Matt Abrahams: So one way we demonstrate our power is by showing that we have a bigger picture view of things and using language and words that help. And then also, it seems to me deploying that in circumstances and context where that's most appropriate make a lot of sense as well. And I like what you said about there are things we can do in advance of our interactions that prime us, that set us up to show up the way we want to.

[00:08:16] One way if we want to show or demonstrate our power is to spend time thinking about higher order things, not specific tasks or examples. And I think my experience with coaching interviewing, I know you've done this as well as you want to have a nice blend, right? So you go in, assert your high level position or view and what's important, but also be able to demonstrate examples that are concrete. So it's not one of the other necessarily, but it might be the blending that helped as well. 

[00:08:40] Chris Lipp: I like how you say that. What differentiates somebody who is powerless, let's say, or out of their power versus somebody who's in their power, is somebody who's out of their power sticks really with the concrete detail. And somebody who's in their power can really move back and forth smoothly between those two. 

[00:08:53] Matt Abrahams: Chris and I have taught similar classes for a long time. And I think what we see in our students and the people we coach is that flexibility and agility is what really leads to communication success and the ability to appreciate. I like how you say that, in my power and not in my power. So when you want to be in your power, that flexibility I think is important. 

[00:09:12] I want to switch gears. Your first book was the startup pitch and in some of our courses here at the GSB, we leverage your pitch model, I like it very much. I'd like to ask you how power shows up in pitches. But before we get there, can you share your four foundational building blocks of your pitch structure and some of the best practices that go with that?

[00:09:32] Chris Lipp: Absolutely. To understand the context of this book and the structure, you really have to go back to twelve years ago in Silicon Valley. So twelve years ago, I'm at the GSB at the time and I was also engaged in a startup. There was no real ubiquitous pitch structure. So back then, if you looked at the pitch books that were available, it was like very marketing techniques. We as communication coaches really saw pitches back then as much more like TED talks, like got to focus on delivery. We got to focus on telling a good story. I have an engineering background. So one of the things that I was like, what does it mean to really tell a good story, right? I kind of wanted to understand how do we operationalize that? And what is the structure that we're seeing in pitches that get funded? And so I spent a year here in Silicon Valley, looking at pitches that got funded in the boardrooms, in big pitch events, big conferences, like TechCrunch Disrupt. After seeing hundreds of pitches a month, it finally just clicked. Like every pitch that wins has this exact structure.

[00:10:26] And the structure is, you start with the problem that the customer faces. Then you move to a solution, your solution, your product. And then you talk about the market where you're going to bring the solution and ultimately the business aspect of that with your go to market strategy, how you're going to make money bringing it to market. So I call this the four point formula. It's like problem, solution, market, business. What's funny is today, this formula is ubiquitous. So back when I had it, if you go to accelerators, every accelerator had their own formula, nobody really knew. And structure was a huge differentiator. Today, I think this is no longer a unique structure. But that's because most of the places you go, the seeds of their structure, they're using really came from this book. So structure is a huge issue. 

[00:11:07] Matt Abrahams: One of the things that I really like about the pitch model, and part of the reason I use it in one of the courses I teach, is that you really help people understand that it's not about features and functions, it's about benefits. Talk to me about why it's so important to focus on benefits rather than the nuts and bolts of what your product or service is? 

[00:11:27] Chris Lipp: Investors or any audience, clients, they're not looking for, again, it's not really about your product. It's what they get as a result of having your product. And the benefit is that, I think the challenge for entrepreneurs is we know our products so well that we intuit that the benefits of the features. But the audience never works that way. They're literally listening to what you say, they're not trying to extrapolate what that means. No matter how simple the product is, if you talk about features, people don't automatically intuit the benefits. You need to lead them to that. And it's the benefit that really is that you focus. What's the value to the audience, right? 

[00:12:02] Matt Abrahams: You know, we often make the assumption that if we just share the information that people will automatically see the benefits. And one of my very first psychology professors, the very first thing he said on the first day of class is, the funny thing about common sense is it's not so common. And we just assume that if I say, here are all the things my product does or the service offers, that you're going to see all the value in it. And that's not always true. And what I like is that your model really forces us to think about those benefits. So let's connect some dots here. How does personal power show up in pitching and persuasion?

[00:12:36] Chris Lipp: I'll start with the Harvard study. They did Harvard study it's '21, '22 that it was published. And what they found was that individuals who spoke more abstractly during their pitch, for example, they framed the benefits more abstractly than concretely, those pitches were seen as more investment worthy. Isn't that crazy? It's a shift in language to the abstract. And there were two reasons the research really postulated. One was, when you speak abstractly, it also expands to a future view and a wider picture. And so it demonstrates more of a future opportunity for revenue, which is the value to the investor. And number two, it conveys more powerful leadership.

[00:13:12] Matt Abrahams: I want to turn to nonverbal communication, because it is important and it is a way that we assess people's power, by the way they hold themselves, what they do with their bodies and their voices. What can we do to assert our personal power in terms of what we do in our nonverbal communication? 

[00:13:29] Chris Lipp: So much of the nonverbal work has been done in Amy Cuddy's work and power posing. I call the values thing the emotional power pose, when we tap into our values before we go into a high stakes situation. But in terms of nonverbals, I recently found this research that I thought was so fascinating and so counterintuitive. We tend to think that powerful people have a deeper voice, right? And the research actually suggests that as you go up the hierarchy and as your personal power increases, your voice actually gets a little higher. Isn't that interesting? Well, what are you saying, Chris? Is this true? 

[00:14:00] And you're like, I know people who when they're, they like, get really high voice. Yeah, when you get really high voice, sometimes you're afraid. And so your vocals are constricting from that fear and that's an extreme. But if we look, for example, Steve Jobs does not have a low voice. Bill Gates does not have a low voice. The people in power, it's a natural voice. And so I think the message here is, sometimes we worry about our nonverbals to the point that we become self conscious, which then is, I'm trying to be liked. And so you're going to get into this downward spiral, whereas if you're like, actually, I'm just going to be comfortable with myself, right? My voice might get a little higher pitch. That's okay. 

[00:14:37] Matt Abrahams: So I like this idea of not fixating so much on the nonverbals because then you get in your head and it actually negatively impacts the power. I do think there are some fundamental things that audiences expect from people who have power. And I do think those can be overcome, certainly with your passion, your vision. I don't want to use the word forgive, but we don't see these cues and clues, they don't weigh as strongly, for example, but I do think we have some expectations. But I like the advice of, hey, focus on your value, focus on what you're passionate about, and then worry less about the specifics. You can do everything right with the nonverbals and still lack personal power.

[00:15:20] Chris Lipp: And one thing you said that's spot on too is, come in with a vision. Vision is the ultimate big picture, right? So in my own research on pitches, over seventy percent of successful pitches incorporate a vision somewhere within that pitch. Usually at the beginning or the end, most often the end. But you can see how the vision is that wide abstract view. So you're communicating power again through your language. Not worrying so much about your body. 

[00:15:42] Matt Abrahams: Before we end, Chris, I'd like to ask three questions of everybody. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar for everyone I interview. You up for that? 

[00:15:50] Chris Lipp: Absolutely. 

[00:15:51] Matt Abrahams: So you and I are in a similar profession. We teach at business schools and we also coach and work with others. What have you found is the big aha moment that's really helped impact and change people in terms of having them improve their communication? Is there one thing that you have found really makes a big difference? 

[00:16:10] Chris Lipp: The thing that I see in all of my clients and my students at the business school is when they recognize that good communication is not focused on I's, focused on you, right? Value focused. 

[00:16:22] Matt Abrahams: The other focus instead of the broadcast focus, really important. I see that too. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:16:33] Chris Lipp: This is going to be such an off tangential thing. I love the Dalai Lama. And when you listen to the Dalai Lama speak, you feel warm inside. But he's not a fluffy speaker. And what he communicates from a place of let's say personal power is, number one, he's very factual, very direct. That's one of the ways we speak with power. Number two is he's very authentic. Personal power has nothing to hide. Us hiding our authenticity happens as a result because we're trying to get a positive evaluation, right? So it's actually inauthenticity is low power. They've done a lot of research, came out of UC Berkeley and things. When you show up more authentically, people perceive you to have more power. And when you're more powerful, people, you're more authentic. And the Dalai Lama just emanates this authenticity that's so open and connected with the people around him. 

[00:17:26] Matt Abrahams: He is a very direct communicator. Question number three, final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:17:37] Chris Lipp: Bad communication focuses on your ideas, good communication, focuses on the value of your ideas, number one. Number two is focus on the big picture. Always, no matter what you're talking about, or how in the weeds you are, even if it's a very deep technical problem, always maintain the wider picture and the goals. Number three, focus on action. 

[00:17:59] Matt Abrahams: So it's about value, it's about seeing the big picture, and it's about the action. And those ingredients will lead to not only effective communication, but communication that comes from a source of internal power.

[00:18:13] Chris, thank you for powerfully explaining your position point of view and sharing with us very specific and actionable things we can do to not only pitch our ideas and be persuasive, but more importantly demonstrate our internal power. Thank you. 

[00:18:26] Chris Lipp: My pleasure, Matt.

[00:18:26] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about power, please listen to episode 12 with Deb Gruenfeld or episode 130 with Jeff Pfeffer. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, english language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anything, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.