Free Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both by Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer Page A

nightclubs. Like knowledge, a little power can be a dangerous thing.
    Research we have done with Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California has shown that when we put people in positions that are not well respected but command power over others, those people become prone to turning into Little Tyrants. In one study, for example, we gave everyone a chance to assign tasks to another person. When participants had power but felt disrespected, they were almost twice as likely to assign tasks that were particularly demeaning to others, like having someone repeat “I am filthy” five times or bark repeatedly like a dog. These Little Tyrants demean others to compensate for their own wounded egos.
    Power is precious but precarious. Whether it is hubris and hypocrisy or low status and threat, there are many paths people can take to abuse their power. When the powerful demonstrate little concern for those around them, they make themselves vulnerable to losing their power. So how can a king hold on to his crown? The key is finding a way to capture the benefits of having power without falling prey to the temptations that lead to the loss of power.
    Finding the Right Balance: How to Speed Without Crashing
    As we’ve seen, power acts almost like a wonder drug, giving you agency and confidence and optimism. But it’s important not to get
too
high on your own power. For these benefits to emerge, you need to know your place in the power hierarchy and act accordingly. Those who act as if they have more power than they do, like Alexander Haig did, get ostracized. And this is bad news for the powerful, for as we saw in our introduction, the greatest form of torture is social isolation.
    So, how do we reconcile these two points—the fact that power can be primed and lead to power, and the finding that if you act too powerfully for your position you will be socially punished?
    To resolve this seeming contradiction, we need to understand two truths about power and social behavior. First, for each person at any point, there is a
range
of acceptable power that you can display relative to the actual power that you have. If you exceed that range, you are likely to be punished, but within the range, you can express more power than you actually have…but only up to a point. That is, you have some latitude, but don’t get too cocky.
    Second, we need to recognize that confidence and deference are not mutually exclusive, and it’s usually a lack of deference rather than excess of confidence that gets powerful people into trouble. Take the job interview—the most successful candidates are those who display confidence but
also
show appropriate deference to the interviewer. Thus, the key is to be confident but also deferential. You need to find the right balance.
    We mentioned that power is a psychological accelerator that encourages people to speed down the highway; it makes us more confident and optimistic, and helps us reach our destination faster. But to accelerate without endangering ourselves and others, we also need some mechanism for keeping our egos in check and preventing us from careening off the road. We need a steering wheel.
    Our steering wheel is something we call perspective-taking, which is simply the ability to see the world from the perspective of others. Indeed, as we will discuss later in this book, our research has shown that the ability to take another’s perspective is a critical ingredient for managing both our friends and our foes.
    A crucial element to finding this balance is to know and consider the perspective of your audience. Take the power pose: Standing in front of your boss with a power pose may not go over so well; your boss may feel threatened and feel as though you are challenging their authority. This is why the power pose is best done
before
the interaction. It gives you a dose of confidence while still allowing you to appear deferential.
    The ability to take the perspective of others helps the