Powerfully Likeable

Powerfully Likeable

One

The High Price of Being Agreeable—­and How Not to Pay It

In which we bravely venture forth to explore why agreeableness is held in such high esteem, discover the weird communication expectations on us women, work up the courage to have a tricky conversation about pot plants, observe how people-­pleasing seeps into our communications, and conduct an inventory of all the things that turn our power up (and turn it down).

Recently I caught up with one of my brilliant friends, Niki, who works in crisis communications. She told me she had done seven hard work things that day, but the one task that was proving the most challenging was figuring out how to raise a difficult conversation with her neighbor about pot plants in their shared yard. It’s not that Niki doesn’t know how to have that conversation (or that she can’t handle a discussion about pot plants!), it’s that it took an enormous amount of mental energy to write a note that was nice but not minimizing, warm but firm, and clear but not aggressive. Not only did scripting the note take a long time, but as she said, “I’ve still spent the rest of the day wondering if I’m a bitch.”

For many of us, just like Niki, it’s not the actual role we’re doing that is hard; most of my clients are women at the heights of their careers who more than know how to do their jobs. It’s much more that our system is slowed down by worrying about these extra concerns. Many of us always have these draining tabs open in our mental browser, metaphorically depleting our batteries when they could be used for so many other useful things.

The pursuit of agreeableness is exhausting.

Historically, communicating while female necessarily seems to involve balancing being amenable while also trying to pursue our goals. This skillful act of influence is a deeply powerful one: we already know something, but we have to demonstrate our competence to others so that they can see what we see and believe what we believe. Most of the time, we don’t have physical props or, sometimes, even evidence; we’re using our words and emotion to convey authority, credibility, passion—­whatever is required in the moment—­to change someone’s mind or to go after an outcome. And we do all this while also not alienating or irritating or overshadowing our listener. We must be the most persuasive, most compelling, and most engaging while also being emotionally aware, non-­threatening, non-­triggering, and more.

While most of us don’t study Interpersonal Communications 101 in college, these skills are deeply integral to how we show up at work, whether that’s in the corporate world or as a teacher in the classroom, and even how we show up in our personal lives. Much of the practice of developing our authority and credibility lies in our successful ability to communicate in a compelling manner. What are the tools of communication that we can use to help give our arguments weight, structure, and credibility? How can we hold our ground and get the thing we want, while also maintaining relationships with those around us? And why does this always come back to the powerful/likeable binary?

Skilled communication so exquisitely engages the powerful/likeable binary because it requires both of those qualities from us in equal measure at the same time. In moments where we need to change someone’s mind, we need to present with power—­maybe it’s authority, credibility, knowledge—­at the exact same moment that we present a sense of warmth or friendliness. We know that, in order to respond meaningfully to someone, we can’t alienate ourselves from them in the moment: more than ever, we need for them to see us as allies—­or at least not antagonistic to their goals. Even better, we might be seen as empathetic or deeply understanding of their motivations.

And cute paradox ahoy! Being amenable often means that we diminish or minimize ourselves to engender closeness, which results in us losing any power we might have held in the first instance. Conversely, the very instant we transition to bulldozer power mode to push our idea forth with energy or brashness, we lose the likeability war. It sounds like a perfect storm, and it really is. And, of course, the penalty of seeming “difficult” is real, too. We know that being labeled “difficult” is itself a tricky label to shake once handed out or decided upon. It means we’re not amenable in the ways a largely patriarchal world would expect us to be. Ironically, it often means we’re raising a point that absolutely needs to be discussed.

The Unfair Expectations on Us Women When We Communicate

The next questions we must ask ourselves are: Is the communicative burden higher on women? Is more asked of us, or expected at the outset, when we offer a response? You can probably already imagine my answer here. I’m certain this is true, in part because our literal voice is often called into question when we are in the act of communicating. There’s even a special vocabulary saved up for women who communicate outside the “amenable” sphere. Consider the fact that we women don’t remind, we nag; we don’t complain, we whine; we don’t go over time, we waffle; we don’t laugh, we cackle; and when we express a strong feeling, we’re emotional, bossy, hysterical, moody, hormonal, shrill, and other descriptors that are rarely ever used when discussing men. Even when women speak with each other, we’re not sharing information, we’re gossiping, gabbing, or prattling. In short, it feels like we’re f***ed.

It goes without saying that men can display a fuller version of themselves communicatively without any of this nega­tive vocabulary being directed at them. When men are not amenable—­if they shout or get angry, for instance—­they’re passionate, animated, or engaged, very often without facing penalty. (And sometimes they’re even lauded for their emotional range!)

Like me in my debate days, when the stakes are so high and we need to communicate something of great importance, we sometimes go too hard and too fast and bulldoze our way through to the end. See? See how right I am? This insistence is likely doomed for failure. No one—­man or woman—­likes to be bulldozed over. (And trust me on this one—­I have done my fair share of bulldozing.) And of course, the opposite can be true, too; we can meekly raise a point, not cutting to the heart of the issue, and the other person can leave the conversation unpersuaded and unchanged.

And of course, there are a lot of different suggestions for what to do in these response-­heavy situations. I recently came across a video online about delivering your message with power. In slow-­motion horror, I realized that the (female) creator was advocating literal words to use at work, a list that included phrases featuring “masculine verbs” such as “I advise,” “I declare,” and “I implore.” All I could think of when I saw this was Elle Woods’s words from Legally Blonde: “I object!” With respect to the featured coach, a “masculine verb”—­whatever that is—­is just not going to be the change you want to see in the workplace. Or in the case of “I implore”—­we don’t live in Dickensian times, so the less said there, the better.

One of the challenges of being amenable is that we remain heirs to many of the same old ideas and norms when it comes to assuming speech or power (not always the same thing, but often). Sure, men don’t wear togas or lecture in the forum anymore, but women are importantly often still positioned as being outside of power. When we “break the glass ceiling” (or fall off the glass cliff or bump into a glass wall), for example, there’s an assumption that we were in one place and had to move to another to have power; it was never inherently available to us. As author and social commentator Elise Loehnen notes, “Women are expected to ‘know their place’—­firmly outside, yet supporting circles of power—­and abide by it.”