I’m sure you’ve all had an experience, where you’re chatting with someone and they surprise you with a totally inappropriate question or comment designed to cut you down and make you feel small. Or the sort of experience where you’re in a room full of people and you realize that there are certain social rules that you’re being judged on, and people are looking down on you because you’re not meeting their social standards or following their social rules. And we’ve all encountered those dreaded power games and political manoeuvres going on in the workplace. Either these sorts of experiences are basically universal, or I attract people struggling with these dynamics, because just about everyone I’ve ever coached (including myself!) has felt frustrated and conflicted about how to deal with other people’s judgments, negativity, power games, aggression or blocking behavior at some point.

How NOT to handle intimidating people

This video of comedian Zach Galifianakis interviewing actor, Michael Cera, is a great example of the worst kind of inappropriate, knee-grabbing, awkward and even abusive power games that we’ve all witnessed in some way or another. I just love Michael’s work, and it astounds me how much abuse he’s willing to take in this interview, all in the name of being polite. Watch Zach steal Michael’s power and Michael’s vain attempts to get it back… (the tickle part near the end is just unbearable!)

(For sensitive viewers, beware that there is a little swearing in these videos…)

We’re all playing status games all the time

On some level, every interaction we have with someone else is a status game, where we’re each checking out for signs to decide how much status or power the other person has, and how powerful we feel in relation to the other person. We have a bunch of social “rules” that we use, to decide how much status we’ll attribute to someone else – like how well they’re dressed, what kind of job they have, where they live, how much money they have, how attractive they are, how tall they are, and so on. Most people think that these are the real indicators of status and personal power, and that’s why we think we have to earn more, wear certain clothes, look attractive, live in the right areas, and so on, in order to earn acknowledgment, respect and influence in the world.

I’ve always been pretty allergic to overt power play, company politics and status games, and for the most part my strategy has been to exit myself, rather than participate. I’d love to say that the answer is to just not play the status games, but the reality is that we can’t not play status games. When you leave a conversation or say, “I’m not playing these games with you,” that’s a behavior that in itself communicates something about status and power. Because communication is about behavior as much as it’s about words, we can’t not communicate, and we can’t not play status games.

Agile leadership

Leadership is all about your ability to influence other people to get involved and contribute to making a particular vision a reality. If you want to sell something, lead a team or head up a social or political movement that’ll make the world a better place, you’re going to need to develop your ability to influence others and, like it or not, people will only follow you when they perceive that you’re high status and have a lot of personal power.

In the old order, you could rely on positional power and dictatorship to influence other people. So you could simply say, “I’m the CEO” or “I’m Dr…” “I have 30 years experience in…” and people would perceive you as powerful and follow you. The internet has introduced greater social and informational diversity into all of our lives, educating and empowering us to know our rights, to find examples of leaders who don’t fit the conventional mold, to demand accountability and results from leaders, and to challenge positional power. Traditional hierarchies and social rules are dissolving and the world is becoming flat, with power shifting from the corporate to the individual, as a result of the self-publishing and communication tools available to the individual through the internet. Dictatorship and positional power doesn’t work anymore.

Agile leaders know how to deal with power play with grace and elegance. They know how to empower their followers. They know how to feel powerful and raise their own status, even when other people are trying to take away their power or diminish their status. And they know how to respond creatively within power games, to get the outcome they want.

Charlize Theron does agile leadership with style

This video of Zach trying to pull his nasty stunts on South African actress, Charlize Theron, is a great example of Agile Leadership in action. Note that Zach is playing the same power games, but Charlize handles him in a totally different way, and that changes everything.

How to deal with intimidating people with grace and style

If you want to get the kind of results that someone else is getting, you can model them. So, as I did with the sand artist, as I watched Charlize, I asked myself, “What must Charlize be thinking and believing about herself and Zach and the meaning of their interaction, for her to be able to respond in the way she did?” and what lessons can I learn from her? Here’s what I got…

Relax

Being relaxed is in itself a high status behavior. It’s what impro storytellers call a “happy high status” role, because it lets other people keep their high status too. Leaders will always get better results when they take up a happy high status role and empower other people, rather than creating their power by trying to diminish someone else’s power, because we’d all rather follow someone who makes us feel good.

The other benefit of remaining relaxed is that, because of the limiting effect that stress has on our perception and thinking, you’ll be much more able to access your natural genius and creativity when you’re relaxed. So your first thing to remember when dealing with intimidating people is breathe deeply, so you can remain relaxed and resourceful.

Play

When you’re smiling and laughing, you show that you’re not feeling diminished by the other person’s words or behavior, and that raises your status. Being playful is another happy high status tactic, because it lets you raise your status without diminishing someone else’s status.

Being in a playful mindset also immunizes you against being hurt by someone else’s behavior, because the story you’re telling yourself is, “This isn’t serious, we’re just playing.” And being playful and not taking yourself too seriously will allow you to relax and that, in turn, will enable your creative responsiveness.

Stay in your own business

When you watch the video with Michael, it’s obvious that he’s uncomfortable with the way he’s being treated and he wants to stop it, but he’s paralyzed by trying to be polite and nice and worrying about what other people think about him.

A quick strategy for dis-empowering yourself and feeling afraid is to focus on what you can’t control. What other people think of you is out of your control, so it’s none of your business. When you focus on your own business, your own thoughts, feelings and behavior, that’s when you’ll feel powerful, because you’re focusing on something you can control. Charlize seems to get this, so she doesn’t take Zach’s behavior very seriously at all, and because she’s not worrying about what Zach (or anybody else) thinks, she’s able to be relaxed, playful and creatively responsive… and much more influential as a result.

Be aware of your body and consciously use high status physiology

I said earlier that we’re all using social “rules” to decide each other’s status. That’s what we do consciously, but on an unconscious level, we pick up on their unconscious cues about how powerful they feel, and we respond to that. We find these cues in their tone of voice and physiology – how fast they speak, what pitch of voice they use, how much they move their body, whether their body is in open or closed postured, how much they touch their face, and so on. Watch the two videos again and you’ll be able to see how Charlize uses low status physiology at first (fidgeting gestures, slouching, giggling, less eye contact, biting her lip, tilting her head to the side, crossing her arms over her chest) and then switches to high status physiology (deeper tone of voice, smooth deliberate gestures, more upright posture, eye contact, smiles, confident laughter, uncrossing her arms, stroking her legs) as she cottons on to Zach’s games. If you’re aware of how your physiology conveys how you’re feeling about yourself, consciously using high status physiology will have two benefits: firstly, you’ll give the other person the message that you feel confident, and secondly, you’ll start to actually feel confident, because our mind and body are essentially one complex system – so changing your physiology will change the way you feel.

Be flexible

Try something, see what results it gets, and if it doesn’t get you the results you want, be flexible and try something else. Charlize starts off in humility, using low status behaviors, (a very gracious way for a leader to enter) and, as Zach cuts her down and tries to unsettle her, she calmly, playfully, gently raises her status in a way that allows him to maintain his personal power. But when he continues to try to diminish her power, she deftly pulls the rug out from underneath him and puts him in his place, and makes it totally clear who the leader is.

How you behave isn’t who you are, and neither is what you believe. So you can be free to try on different beliefs and behaviors, and test out the results you get. To be an agile leader, develop your comfort in using a wide range of behaviors and communication styles, so that, rather than trying to force all your interactions and relationships into a formula, you can easily adapt and change the way you relate and the status you convey, in order to get the results you want.

What else did you learn from watching Charlize?

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