How to Appear More Powerful

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How do you feel about powerful people? Are you powerful yourself, or do you wish you were? What do you expect from powerful people?

When I ask speakers and executives how they want to be perceived, hardly anyone ever says, “powerful.” They often say “strong, expert, confident,” but hardly ever “powerful.” We perceive power to be morally ambiguous, especially in the last decade or so, and so perhaps we are reluctant to assign the term to ourselves.

And yet powerful people get attention, invitations to speak and lead, and rewards, both financial and status-driven.

The research shows that one of the ways powerful people signal their power (and therefore one of the ways that we recognize it) is through minor rule-breaking. For example, powerful people might arrive late to a meeting, put their feet on the table, and their hands behind their head. All of these are body language signs of power. We might not like these signals, or we might think that they are rude or gauche, but we also perceive them as powerful.

More subtly, powerful people take up more space, smile less, prolong their eye contact more, touch other people more, interrupt others more, and speak more loudly. And we’re likely to attribute power to these and other such small variations in body language. And so there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy at work. We see…