WorkLife with Adam Grant
The secret to success isn't power — it's status (Transcript)
September 24, 2024
Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.
Adam: 3… 2… 1… go!
Kids: It’s Wednesday night! Survivor time.
[CONCH SFX + DRUMS]
Watching Survivor is a family tradition. We love to analyze the social dynamics of the game, and try to figure out who will gain status—and who will get voted off the island.
Kids: The best blindside ever was when the Black Widow Brigade tricked Erik.
Adam: When was that?
Kids: Season 16.
The Black Widow Brigade is an alliance of four women, including some of the best to ever play Survivor.
PARVATI SHALLOW: I'm Parvati. I am the notorious leader of the black Widow brigade.
The alliance is so strong that they make it to the final five. The only man left is Erik–they’re planning to vote him out. But that day, he wins the challenge, which gives him immunity.
PARVATI SHALLOW: \\ and the final puzzle that he wins says guaranteed a spot in the final four. So we're all devastated. I'm like, no, I really wanted this to be a final four of all women and I was crushed.
So we go back to the beach. \\ it's me, Natalie, Amanda, and Cirie, sitting on a log mourning the loss of the Women's Alliance.
It’s not just the end of the alliance – Erik is now a strong contender to win the whole season.
PARVATI SHALLOW: So then all of a sudden Cirie \\ kind of out of nowhere, is like, well, what if we could convince him to give up the immunity necklace?
[MUX]
And all of us look at each other and we're like, no way, he would never! And then we sat with it for a minute and we were like, but... Could we?
To win Survivor, you need the jury of players who’ve been eliminated to vote for you. So the Black Widow Brigade decides to appeal to Erik’s insecurities.
PARVATI SHALLOW: Because he knows at the end, if he's sitting there, he needs these people to respect his gameplay.
And what we're saying at Tribal Council is, Erik, no one's going to respect you unless you make this big, bold move of giving up your immunity necklace to Natalie. And then you'll earn the respect of the jury.
ADAM GRANT: \\ how confident were you that the plan was going to work?
PARVATI SHALLOW: 10%.
ADAM GRANT: I was confident that you were confident.
PARVATI SHALLOW: I was not confident. I was like, you know what? We did our best and it's like a quarterback throwing \\ the Hail Mary at the seven seconds left in the game. And you're like, well, if this lands in the end zone and someone catches it, cool, but it's probably not going to happen.
They’re all sitting around the firepit, waiting to see what Erik will do…
PARVATI SHALLOW: \\ and he all of a sudden is like, all right, you know I've been thinking about it and he unhooks the necklace and my jaw drop– I’m sitting behind him, so he can’t see me, thankfully. But my jaw hits the floor.
Instead of keeping the immunity for himself, Erik decides to give it away.
PARVATI SHALLOW: And it, when it happened, \\ time stood still.
And Erik hands the necklace to Natalie, giving up his protection. And then we go vote him out.
Erik thought giving up his immunity would solidify his standing. But he misjudged his status. And it cost him a good chance at a million dollars.
Status isn’t just a big deal on reality TV. It’s a core dynamic at work… and we often misread who has it– and how to earn it. If you want to get ahead and get along, you need a deeper understanding of status.
[THEME]
I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck.
In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces.
Today: Status, and what it really takes to improve your standing in relationships and groups.
[THEME OUT]
SEG A
At work, status signals are everywhere. We pick up cues about who’s important from the job titles people have and from how quickly their emails get answered. From whether they have an assistant, a corner office, and a parking space. And from how much leeway they get to leave early, show up late, or work remotely.
We don’t just pay attention to status—we seek it.
ALISON FRAGALE: So it governs so much of how we interact and what we aspire to. It's a fundamental human need.
Alison Fragale is an organizational behavior professor at UNC. She’s a leading expert on status– it’s the subject of her forthcoming book, Likable Badass.
Her work has changed the way I think about status—a topic that people often hesitate to discuss explicitly.
ALISON FRAGALE: it's always present, but often not labeled. \\ and if you were to admit that you were doing something in the quest to achieve status, I think you would be seen as less likely to get it.
So in that sense, I think it, it has a taboo to it, which I'm actually actively trying to, to correct. Because it's \\ an issue that we all navigate, and we can't navigate if we don't know what it is and we don't really know what it is that we're trying to achieve.
Status is a fundamental aspect of social hierarchy, which exists in every workplace. So is power. And we often lump the two together. If someone has a big title and a corner office, we think they have high status. But Alison finds that power and status are not the same.
ALISON FRAGALE: Status is another person or person's opinion about how respected, admired, valuable you are. \\
Power is controlling resources that other people want. So you control money, you control, um, the ability to hire and fire and promote. That's power.
If status is respect and power is authority, why do we confuse them?
ALISON FRAGALE: Well, because they can be highly correlated, right? If someone's very respected and admired, we often give them the resources to control. And so those two things go hand in hand.
Sometimes, if you're powerful enough, people will respect you. So just knowing that someone is the CEO of, insert your favorite multinational organization, you might immediately go in and respect that person and think they got there because they have a lot of really good characteristics and qualities.
But status and power often diverge.
ALISON FRAGALE: The particular category that ends up being problematic is when people are high on power, but they're low on status. So I, I often will use airport security, TSA, as an example of interacting with what you'd think of as a low status power holder.
It's a person who has a tremendous amount of power in that moment. But in the grand scheme of life, based on occupation, which is a source of status, it's not the highest status occupation that somebody could identify.
And so someone has more power than they do status. \\ and it's often why, you know, there's a lot of talk about how people in those roles are mistreated, people in those roles often feel miserable because when \\ they have to interact with the world who sees them as a low-status power holder, what we've seen through a lot of my research is they get a lot of mistreatment and it doesn't feel particularly good to be in those roles.
[MUX]
Research shows that when people are given positions of power but don’t have status, it threatens their egos.
They often respond by trying to assert their authority with behaviors that are controlling and sometimes even demeaning. You’ve probably seen that happen at work. It’s the colleague who vies for a promotion by badmouthing peers, and the manager who tries to get ahead by dumping grunt work on subordinates. When people pursue power but neglect status, they become bad apples that spoil the barrel.
The outcomes are very different when people have status without power.
Think of the junior IT technician everyone respects as knowledgeable and reliable in fixing bugs, or the longtime administrative assistant everyone appreciates for being able to cut red tape.
ALISON FRAGALE: Basically, what I've found is once you have status, how much power you have becomes irrelevant for the variables that I'm concerned about with, which is, you know, how the world interacts with you, how you're treated, the- the characteristics they assume you to have.
Both power and status are really important. Life is a lot easier with them than without them. \\ living a life without being respected or controlling things is psychologically just as damaging as living a life without friends. So we need both. We seek both. Those are great things.
\\ And so I don't want to say, let's forget about power. I acknowledge how important it is and it's every bit as important as status, but \\ there's a sequence that we can see that if we can pursue status and we're surrounded by people who respect, admire, and value us, then one, it doesn't matter how much power we have, \\ and two, um, getting power becomes a whole lot easier.
If I see you as highly valued, I will just start giving you resources to control.
If you’re feeling stuck in your job, or you’re not getting the promotion you think you deserve, there’s another path to advancing. You need to figure out how to gain status. So how do you get it?
ALISON FRAGALE: Well, by definition, it can't be taken. It can only be given, right? Power can be taken, right? If money is the value resource and you steal all the dollars and you're sitting on them, well then like it or not, you have the power.
But status is other people's judgments about how much they value you. \\ Status is a phenomenon that exists only in the heads of other people. \\
You can influence it, but you cannot take it. And so I do think that's frustrating for people because it's like it has to be kind of won and earned, you know, again, again, and again, and again.
I think the very positive part is it can be done without it being your full time job in ways that are very authentic and fun for you to do.
Sociologists have long found that initial status judgments are affected by factors outside our control.
For example, tall people get more status. So do attractive people. But over time, who gains status depends on our actions.
ALISON FRAGALE: I need to \\ influence the way other people's brains assign value to me. And I only have to work with the variables under my control. So there's a lot of things that your brain might be using like my gender, like my age, like my race or ethnicity that I don't have any control over.
So I just have to work with the variables that are left. But the good news is we see a lot of science \\ that behavior generally trumps demographics.
When it comes to behaviors that work, psychologists have converged around two key drivers of status.
I’ve come to think of them as competence and care.
[MUX]
ALISON FRAGALE: So status comes from being both of those things. And so, the more we can show up to all of the audiences around us, I am competent \\ and I am giving \\ and helpful.
Voila. That's all you need to do. Right? \\ But it's simple and it's hard.
To sum up: You become valued by adding value, and the way you add value is to be competent and caring. That’s something Chynna Clayton figured out at the start of her career.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: So I'm from Miami, uh, family roots are Georgia. So, you know, Southern hospitality, all the things. And when I came up to D.C., the biggest shock for me was that before somebody even asked me my name at a happy hour, it was, what do you do, where do you work?
When she was in college, Chynna landed an internship at the White House. And she still remembers the day she met the other interns...
CHYNNA CLAYTON: so I pull up in this black Chevy Impala. I get out, I have on \\ this jumpsuit thing, and I have my purse on my wrist. And they're just like, Oh, wow, where did she come from?
She felt like an outsider.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: and I come into this space where I never expected to be in a million years, right? I really came into it knowing enough about the White House, but, you know, not nearly as much as \\ I felt that everyone else did.
One of the interns actually told me, um, that I didn't deserve the internship because my background wasn't in political science.
ADAM GRANT: Wow.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: Oh yeah, \\ and I did a dual degree, so technically it was event management and political science, but because, you know, public service wasn't the way I was, what I was leading with, that I didn't deserve that internship and that it took the opportunity away from someone else.
Chynna knew she lacked power and status. She saw other interns try to gain power.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: you do have some interns that come in just because they've had these experiences in high school and in college where they were, you know, the top dogs \\.
And so they come in, um, with this mentality of being able to \\ impact change and make policy and do all the things, but it's just like, no, you got to really understand your function as an intern, which is \\ to listen and to learn and to get things done.
Chynna concentrated on status. She wanted to prove that she was competent and caring.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: I think that a lot of \\ being perceived as someone of status, just comes with how you treat people, right? And I am one who always leads with kindness.
\\ And then I think it was a lot of \\ showing people \\ that they could trust me with the work.
So when they assigned a task to me,\\ it was putting my all into that one task. It was, you know, making sure I delivered things on time. It was making sure that they understood that like, you know, I am taking heed to all that you're putting out.
And I'm showing you results as a part of it. \\ so I think that's what really helped me to build genuine and trusting relationships was, you know, come in with the right attitude and showing people that I was capable of the tasks that they were putting in front of me. \\
[MUX]
As an intern, Chynna was focused on connecting and contributing, not getting ahead – which ironically helped get her ahead.
A few years later, she got a big promotion… she was hired as special assistant and trip director to Michelle Obama.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: The tables had turned, right? And now everybody's respecting me and looking at me.
On a trip to Vietnam to highlight the Girls Opportunity Alliance, they were joined by various celebrities. Michelle Obama went out of her way to highlight Chynna’s status:
CHYNNA CLAYTON: and she introduces me and said these things: How fond she was of me. How vital I was to her operation, um, and how any follow up that these said celebrities needed to do after this event, how I was the go to person, right?
And that was super powerful because... Mrs. Obama took the time to emphasize my importance to her, which then made me also important to them.
By earning status, Chynna gained power.
But what about her peers? Research shows that people are often threatened by competent peers.
My favorite demonstration is a paper titled Get Smarty Pants. Highly capable people were more likely to be undermined by envious colleagues.
But if competent people were also caring, that risk dissipated.
There are many ways to show that you care about others. But the most basic signal of care is attention.
Think about your team meetings. There’s evidence that lower-status members of a group gain influence if the more powerful people just look at them. Even making basic eye contact is a way to grant others status.
Chynna understood this. She wasn’t only focused on earning the respect of the people above her. She was determined to treat everyone with respect.
CHYNNA CLAYTON: \\ if we are engaged in conversation, and let's say it's three of us talking, and you are only making eye contact with the other person of status, or the other person who has, you know, a higher title, and you are completely ignoring the third person in the room, or who is a part of the conversation, that can be perceived as, you know, you keeping that person out of the conversation just because \\ their title is junior.
So, at the end of the day, \\ status is all about everybody else's perception of you, right? So if I am literally only focused on this one person of status, then \\ in the third person in the room's eyes, I've now gone down a notch because I'm not giving them any sort of attention.
Chynna didn’t need the “right” degree. Her competence and care proved that she belonged, and convinced others that she deserved the role she got.
But establishing competence and care isn’t always straightforward.
Sometimes the way you signal competence can make you look uncaring… and the way you show care can make people question your competence.
How do you overcome the tradeoffs?
More on that, after the break.
AD BREAK
Think about the last time you were in a meeting that got dominated by a few people with strong opinions.
Most people think that to earn status, they need to be assertive. To establish competence, you need to sound confident. But that can make it look like you’re not open to other people’s ideas. That you don’t care.
To show you care what others think, Alison Fragale finds that it helps to use powerless speech. You could make a disclaimer…
ALISON FRAGALE: “This might be a bad idea, but.”
Or soften your suggestion and ask for other people’s advice…
ALISON FRAGALE: So turning something that could be a statement into a question by adding right, or, you know, or what do you think, onto the end of it.
This kind of tentative talk is often called weak language. But surprisingly, it can be… uh, well, kind of a source of strength.
ALISON FRAGALE: \\ powerless speech is not a verbal tic that half the population was born with. Powerless speech is a behavior that people can use consciously or not that helps them show up as more other oriented.
And in many cases for many people, not just women, that is to their advantage.
In her research, Alison found that powerless speech helps people gain status in collaborations.
ALISON FRAGALE: So if we are working in a very independent way, I don't really need to rely on you. I don't really care about how giving you are. And so assertiveness wins.
But the more we have to start to work together, the more I would care about \\ how giving and caring you are.
So I \\ always think, I don't really need a warm pilot \\. As a passenger, right? I could care less. Like, we are not in an interdependent relationship. You just fly that plane as best you can and \\ I'm fine with it.
But if I were the co-pilot, I might actually want a very different set of skills in the pilot sitting in that chair. Because now I have to collaborate with you and I have to work with you and I need you to be competent enough, but now I, your ability to interact with me and work with me is a much bigger part of what I'm looking for there than when I'm the passenger in the back of the plane.
Powerless speech doesn’t seem to signal competence. But competence is best conveyed through what you say, not how you say it.
And showing receptivity to others’ views doesn’t have to suggest a lack of confidence. It can actually boost other people’s opinions of your intelligence.
[MUX]
Say you have a suggestion for improving your team’s culture.
If you pitch your idea and then ask for guidance on how to make sure it doesn’t get shot down prematurely, you’re showing good judgment.
There’s evidence that when you ask for advice, it actually makes you look smart. “You’re a genius! You knew to come to me!”
Whereas advocating for your views can be threatening, inquiry is empowering. New research suggests that leaders are more likely to adopt ideas when they're presented as questions rather than suggestions—especially if leaders have big egos.
When people are power-hungry, you can earn their respect by asking, "Have you considered...?" or, "What do you think...?" or, “What would happen if…”
We don’t always get to see these techniques in action at work— they often happen behind closed doors.
But you can see them vividly in Survivor, where people talk openly about status—and their strategies for acquiring it.
From the first time I saw Parvati Shallow on the show, it struck me that she was a power user of powerless speech.
PARVATI SHALLOW: Okay, so in Micronesia, I was with the women. I could be super direct with them. They liked it when I was direct with them, and I was like, Hey, here's what I'm thinking. Like, now's the time to blindside Ozzy.
When I played Heroes/Villains, I had an alliance with a power hungry guy, who felt insecure about his power, and a girl who was a great, like, loyal ally, but also \\ we didn't have that much power.
So Russell was our, like, power piece. And we knew if we showed up with directive language, like, hey, here's what I think we should do, he would block it. He would need to come up with the idea. It would have to be his idea in order for it to happen.
This was highly effective, at least for a while. Parvati even coaxed Russell into giving her his immunity idol.
PARVATI SHALLOW: And I already had one in my pocket and he was really mad about that.
Sure enough, research shows that men are often threatened by female power. When women talk tentatively, they’re more likely to gain status with men.
It shouldn’t have to be this way. It’s outrageous that women have to soften their speech to cater to fragile male egos.
PARVATI SHALLOW: It is strategic language. It's very strategic when a person is aware of a power imbalance in a relationship and a person is aware of a fragile ego. And women can have fragile egos too.
But powerless speech is just a tool.
[MUX]
Alison Fragale wants you to think about other ways to show care.
ALISON FRAGALE: One of the most common questions I get is, well, what does that mean from, like, should I be using powerless speech?
And I said, I think it means you don't have to be afraid of it, but I don't think it means you need to use it either.
For one, trying to control your speech style is a lot of cognitive effort, and I think your cognitive effort is better spent on other things. But I think you should be aware of the signals you give off. And so if you say, I tend to have a really powerless style, it's pretty natural to me. Great. Roll with it. It's a good signal of warmth.
But then what I would say to you is what are you going to add in that will be an equally good signal of the other things I know you are, which is competent and confident and decisive.
Versus you have a really strong dominant speech style. You're really assertive. You know, you, you can't add in any of those words. Roll with it, go– but then what is going to be your way that you are going to authentically signal that I am giving and that I am caring.
One of my pet peeves is when people apologize for things that aren’t their fault. I’m so sorry it’s raining! Although it shows care, I worry that it undermines competence.
ALISON FRAGALE: \\ So, you and I, we will agree to disagree, but for the same kernel of reasons, on apologies. Apology rejected is your, is your line, right? You shouldn't be apologizing. And I go with, it is for me, way too much cognitive effort to strip those out of certainly my verbal speech and, and even out of my emails when I'm writing quickly.
And so I've, I've given up on trying. Because I'd say, look, I'm, I'm an apologizer. It's a warm, but submissive behavior, but I got plenty of other ways in my life that I can showcase my assertiveness. So I'm just letting that go, unapologetically. I'm an unapologetic apologizer and I will remain that way.
ADAM GRANT: I'm going to make you apologize for that statement.
ALISON FRAGALE: Um, so, so I think, you know, \\ one of the things that I've been able to do because I understand the science is to let go things that work for other people that don't work for me and realize that the, the game that I'm trying to play is to show up as competent and caring to as many people as possible, as many moments as possible.
And that can look different from moment to moment. And the way I do it can look different than the way you do it. And that's the advice I really want women to hear, which is, I don't think we want to go to, how you show up doesn't matter, and it's other people's problem.
Like, it's not your fault, but you are left with the consequences nevertheless. And so that's the message that I want people to get, which is: Competent and caring, non-negotiable. How you get there, highly negotiable.
[MUX]
I used to think that instead of telling women to stop using weak language, we should tell men to start using more of it. But now, I think what we all need are additional techniques for showing care that don’t call competence into question.
My favorite approach to demonstrating both competence and care is called prototypicality. Psychologists find that the people who gain status are the ones who are prototypical of their group.
Prototypicality is about exemplifying what the group stands for.
If you want to gain status, you should identify your group’s core values–and then make it clear that your achievements are advancing those values.
I remember watching Parvati do it on Survivor.
PARVATI SHALLOW: And I think that is the way into any group, is if you come in with a sense of your own inherent worthiness, your own inherent, I belong here.
Then you already have a solid foundation from which to create a relationship. So it's like, I belong here. Oh, all these other people also belong here. I don't have to prove myself. I don't have to demonstrate how smart I am or how strong I am. I don't have to control anything. I just need to get to know what these people in this group care about.
And I need to show them that I also care about those things.
Research reveals that when they advocate for themselves, women in particular face unfair backlash. Their assertiveness is misjudged as aggressiveness. But when it’s clear that they’re advocating for others too, women are more likely to get the results they want– and they’re also better liked.
After Parvati’s Black Widow Alliance convinced Erik to give away his idol, she made the final two. She had to stand in front of the jury and convince them to award her $1 million.
She argued that although she tricked Erik, it was in the interest of a greater good. She was looking out for her alliance. She cared about them, and she was fighting for them.
PARVATI SHALLOW: I don't want Erik in the end with me. I want these women who I've played with, who I've aligned with, who I have this emotional, very deep connection to, and this is what I'm willing to fight for.
And the way she did it was prototypical of a Survivor winner: she outwitted everyone.
PARVATI SHALLOW: I think I earned the respect of the jury by just standing in the truth of, here's what I did that you guys didn't like. \\ And I did all, I did all those things. I own up to it.
Like you can vote for me or not vote for me, but \\ I played by the rules of Survivor. \\ and I think they liked that.
Spoiler alert: Parvati won.
[SURVIVOR THEME/CONCH REDUX]
In real life, unlike Survivor, there isn’t just one winner in the end. As Alison Fragale notes, it’s possible for everyone in a group to gain status– and maintain it.
ALISON FRAGALE: it's not completely zero sum. But, it's not something that we can all have equally because then it loses its meaning. If everyone has the same amount of status, then there's no status at all. \\
But that said, the piece that we haven't talked about as much is that status is very context bound. \\
I can have a certain amount of status at work. I could have a certain status when I go onto a stage and talk to an audience. I can have a different status when I go into a faculty meeting and then I can come home and deal with my kids and have a different status still.
So where I think there's room for everybody is to say everyone is going to have their domain where they have been able to really achieve on this competence and this caring. But then if we switch domains, it's someone else's turn. And so, we're not all equal all the time on our status, but we can all be high status in certain situations.
And I think that's the thing that we can all work toward and feel like it's not just you or me, it's you have your, your context, I have my context. And as we switch between them, our statuses will switch and we're okay with that.
ADAM GRANT: I think it's really empowering to think about status as something that doesn't require us to jockey for position as long as we can agree who, who earns the most respect or deserves the most respect on a given task.
ALISON FRAGALE: Exactly. And that the other thing I think that is hopeful is that even if one were jockeying for position, the way you do it with status is by adding a lot of value in terms of your competence and being really giving.
And so when we do those things, we are also making our groups better off.
[MUX]
Status shouldn’t be a dirty word. If you understand it better, you can be more genuine—and more effective—in your quest to get it.
Seeking status is not about keeping up with the Joneses. It’s not about how much money you make, how many fancy titles you collect, or how many prestigious organizations you join. It’s about earning the respect of the people around you.
CREDITS
This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Courtney Guarino, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Gretta Cohn, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar and Roxanne Hai-Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Chesneau [shay-no]. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.
Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.
For their research, appreciation to the following lead authors and their colleagues: Jen Overbeck and Maggie Neale on status versus power; Nate Fast on power without status; Tim Judge and Dan Cable on height and Kelly Nault on attractiveness; Susan Fiske on competence and care; Eugene Kim and Theresa Glomb on get smarty pants; So-Hyeon Shim on eye contact; Mohamed Hussein and Zak Tormala on receptivity to others; Katie Liljenquist on advice-seeking; Chak Fu Lam on the power of questions; Linda Carli on gender; Alison Wood Brooks on apologies; Daan van Knippenberg and Michael Hogg on prototypicality; Melissa Williams and Lara Tidens on gender backlash; and Hannah Riley Bowles and Linda Babcock on overcoming it.
EASTER EGG
ADAM GRANT: You just left out one important detail.
PARVATI SHALLOW: I'm a mom. I have a five year old daughter. I, I am writing a book. I don't know.
ADAM GRANT: Ok, those are– those are all important, but this is important in a different sense, which is, you also play in a Survivor Fantasy League with me.
PARVATI SHALLOW: Oh, yeah! How could I forget? That is...
ADAM GRANT: How could you leave out the fact that we're in a Survivor Fantasy League together, and that you've never beaten me?
PARVATI SHALLOW: Adam, let's take a beat. Okay, let's land this in reality for a moment.
You and I, we're gonna fly to Fiji and we're gonna put it to the test. First of all, is there enough sunscreen for you, Adam, to make it 39 days without turning into a bubbling lobster? Do you think you could survive just the sun alone?
Kids: ‘Cause your– like, the baldness would burn.
Adam: What else would be a challenge for me on Survivor?
Kids:Eating bugs and fish. You could never do that.