by Matthew Kohut on April 4, 2018
A fundamental challenge that all managers face at one point or another boils down to a single, provocative question: why should anyone listen to you?
I recently had the opportunity to share my insights to answer that fundamental question when I addressed senior House staff at a March 23 event hosted by CMF in conjunction with the House Chiefs of Staff Association.
Are you Cersei from Game of Thrones or Oprah? Exercising Informal Influence Using Strength AND Warmth
My hot take, which is firmly rooted in social science, is that there's a two-part answer to this question. You have to be able to demonstrate that you know your stuff, and that you care about the same things as the people around you. Think of those two parts as capability and shared intentions.
The measure of capability is strength, or the ability to combine competence and assertiveness (i.e., skill + will) to get things done. Grudgingly or gladly, we respect people who project strength. We look to strong people as leaders because they can protect us from threats to our group. Strength is essential to effective leadership in any group setting.
But strength alone can only take us so far. To move beyond respect to admiration, we also need others to trust us. And to do that, we need to project warmth. For our purposes, warmth is what people feel when they recognize that they share our interests and concerns. It is the sense of being on the same team. If strength is about whether someone can carry out her intentions, warmth is about whether you will be happy with the result. When people project warmth, we feel an affinity toward them.
Once you grasp this insight, it opens up a whole new window on the human experience. You can understand why certain people are appealing by looking closely at how they project strength and warmth. Or you can see what makes others seem cold or weak.
Knowing that strength and warmth matter is one thing, but acting on that insight turns out to be tricky. It's very hard to project strength and warmth at once because these qualities exist in tension with each other. The things we might do to project strength — standing tall, barking orders, or spouting reams of data to make a point — tend to make us seem less warm. Likewise, an abundance of warmth — engaging in people-pleasing behaviors or bending over backwards to help others all the time — can leave us seeming like lovable losers.
This presents each of us with a dilemma. Do we choose to project warmth, so people like us? Do we instead show strength, so we command respect? Or do we try our best to project strength and warmth, knowing that one undermines the other and we might end up failing at both?
It turns out to be a false choice. Strength and warmth are complementary, not mutually exclusive opposites, and there is a lot of interplay between them. Think of strength and warmth as dials you can learn to turn up or down in different contexts. (Learn more.) Some situations require more strength than warmth, and vice-versa. All of us have our own ways of expressing these qualities; there is no one-size-fits-all answer. The challenge is finding a balance that works for you in a professional context.
The Choice Is Yours
Character is a matter of who you choose to be. People judge your character by the way you act, and especially by the way you interact with them. Once you discover the lens of strength and warmth, it changes the way you see others ... and yourself.
About the Author
Matthew Kohut is the managing partner of KNP Communications and co-author of Compelling People, which is required reading at both Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School. He has coached public figures ranging from Members of Congress to presenters at TED talks, and has served as a speechwriter for leaders in the government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors. He has written for (or been quoted in) publications including Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, Fast Company, CNN, and Forbes.
