Handling Toxic Coworkers with Tessa West

If I'm just rude to you and I'm explicitly rude and my nonverbal behaviors are rude and I'm aggressive, you're kind of more comfortable with that version of me than the version of me that's trying to regulate what I actually think and feel and I look less genuine, you're less likely to trust me. A negative person is more trustworthy when those things are aligned than someone who is saying one thing and saying it in another way that doesn't match that. And, and I think that's where things get really fascinating because you get these people who are super motivated to be nice at work, to appear non prejudiced, to look like they're accepting of others, but they're weird and awkward and frozen and fidgety and people trust them even less than the ones that are like, I don't even like you. At least you know what you're getting with that, you know. So I really think that the alignment is a key piece of the discomfort.

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Thank you for having me on.

Yes, it is our pleasure. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. So I am a psychology professor at New York University, and I'm an expert in studying uncomfortable conversations people have. And this can be anything from talking to your physician or your dentist to asking your boss for a raise, to having a negotiation with someone who comes from a different country. And you have no idea how to interpret their behaviors, what their cultural norms are. But, you know, you want to win the thing, and so you're tiptoeing around kind of a lot of potential taboos. And I've been studying these interactions for about 20 years all over the world, really, starting in the U.S. but also I've gone to Abu Dhabi, I've gone to Australia to try to cast a really wide net to understand, kind of across all these things, what are some of the main themes that stick out no matter where you're from or what the conversation's about?

Incredible. And rumor has it you have written a couple of books. Can you tell us about those two?

Yes. So the first book I wrote is called Jerks at Work, which freaked out all of my colleagues, as you can imagine. And that book is really about understanding relationships at work and why they're often difficult. I kind of uncovered in that book that a lot of the jerks we deal with are pretty unaware of their bad behaviors. We do not live in a great feedback culture, especially when it comes to things we could potentially correct. And so really understanding why people behave badly at work and what we can do about it, and if that person is us, what we can do about it often is. I think we all have our inner jerk. And the second book, Job Therapy, is really kind of borrowing from, I don't know, 15 years of my work trying to understand what makes relationships work. I teach close relationships at NYU to undergraduates and the problems they have with things like online dating, ghosting and simmering and icing, breaking up with someone who doesn't love them back, feeling identified with a partner but, you know, not feeling satisfied, all of those kinds of juicy, messy emotions I realized we also have at work. We don't usually think about our job as a relationship partner. We think about it as a thing we do. We. But I really kind of come around to thinking about your career as another thing that you're in a relationship with. And why not have a little bit of therapy to help you understand what you could do to improve that, in the same way you'd go to therapy to help a marriage or a relationship with your mom or whoever.

Incredible. And, Tessa, the challenge that I'm going to have with this interview is the fact that in Your brief introduction, you identified at least 32 different episodes that we can talk about.

So there's a do a choose your own adventure approach.

Exactly. Well, let's, let's do that because I think let's center in on your research. When we talk about uncomfortable conversations, when people hear that, they probably have names and faces and instances that immediately come to mind. But I would love to hear from your perspective, from a, like a more like research based perspective, what makes a conversation uncomfortable?

Yeah, I love this question. And I can tell you, I started doing research in this area as a freshman in college at UC Santa Barbara. And the way we kind of figured out what is uncomfortable is by actually looking at the mismatch between what somebody does, what they kind of say explicitly. So how nice are you? What are the questions you're asking someone? The behaviors that we often think of as controllable behaviors and the things that they can't control. So those are often your nonverbal behaviors. Are you fidgeting? Are you avoiding eye contact? If you walk into the doctor's office and that doctor's looking down at the chart the entire time instead of making eye contact with you and you're going to pick up on some cues of discomfort and then we layer on that, we measure physiology. So I look at people's beneath the skin stress responses, how their bodies are responding physiologically to these interactions and uncomfortableness usually manifests as super positive, over the top controllable behaviors. Things like, how are you? You look great. Anxious, non verbal behaviors, fidgeting, twitching, a shaky voice, a high pitch, and then kind of, you know, really off the charts signs of physiologic stress. All of that is kind of being cooked together to give off really kind of weird mixed signals in communication. And that is usually that's kind of the profile of what discomfort looks like interpersonally. But you really need all of those pieces to kind of actually understand what's going on in the interaction.

Oh, this got really deep really fast. This is so interesting because you, you mentioned a mismatch between these behaviors and mixed signals. Then are you suggesting that if these signals are aligned appropriately, we remove a little bit of that discomfort?

Yeah, I think so. In fact, some of the kind of more fascinating work is if I'm just rude to you and I'm explicitly rude and my non verbal behaviors are rude and I'm aggressive, you're kind of more comfortable with that version of me than the version of me that's trying to regulate what I actually think and feel and, and I look less genuine, you're less likely to trust me. A negative person is more trustworthy when those things are aligned than someone who is saying one thing and saying it in another way that doesn't match that. And I think that's where things get really fascinating because you get these people who are super motivated to be nice at work, to appear non prejudice, to look like they're accepting of others, but they're weird and awkward and frozen and fidgety and people trust him even less than the ones that are like, I don't even like you, you know, at least you know what you're getting with that, you know. So I really think that the alignment is a key piece of the discomfort.

I think this is fascinating. It reminds me of the studies where they found that the frenemy causes more stress than an outright enemy. Because at least I know where you stand if you're an enemy. But if you're like a frenemy, sometimes you're nice, sometimes you're cold. I don't know what to make of this. So consistency seems to be important.

Yeah, consistency, a lack of ambivalence. So you want people to be consistent not just in the sort of, you know, what we would call channels of communication. So you're, you behave the same way on email, on Slack, in person, you know, on zoom, but also over time. So kind of one thing that can create all sorts of like complicated relationships with your career, including being identified with something that, that doesn't love you back, is intermittent reinforcement. Someone is really nice to you one moment, then they're kind of terrible to you the next, and you can't predict when the niceness and when the terribleness is going to happen. That kind of intermittent schedule, that unpredictable schedule of treatment actually keeps us tethered to relationships and to jobs that are pretty awful for much longer than even a consistently sort of positive experience with that person or with that career. So the consistency is both in terms of the channels of communication and consistency over time.

Okay, so tell me if I'm way off on this because I'm drawing a whole bunch of connections and the listeners will be familiar. I'm wrong quite frequently. So don't feel bad about it. Okay, so when I'm thinking about the, the, the, the addictive nature of gambling, we have the randomized reward kind of reinforcement there. It's like I don't know exactly when I'm going to get the reward, which is what makes it addictive. And so are we. Is it almost like when it comes to our relationships with our career and our job and the relationships we have within our career and our job, we can create almost like a toxic addiction to our job and those relationships too.

Absolutely. I think you, you just. Can you write all my op EDS on this topic for me? Because that was perfect. The way you just described with gambling is the classic paradigm of intermittent reinforcement. It's actually like what psychologists have been doing since 1930 to demonstrate intermittent reinforcement. And it's why you keep going back. And I think what you just described is that happens with our relationship work and with the people at work as well. What's kind of critical is we often don't actually see it. You kind of have to collect data on yourself to know when you're being reinforced. What people typically do when they're being intermittent reinforced, and this happens when you're dating someone as well, is every time you're reinforced, you do some kind of meaning making exercise where you tell yourself, oh well, the reason why my boss was nice to me today is because it's a Tuesday and he doesn't have to talk to his ex wife on Tuesdays. And then the next time you come up with another explanation. And so in an attempt to resolve that uncertainty, we create kind of like falsely predictable narratives in our minds. And any given time you can come up with an explanation, but every time the explanation is a little bit different. And so you aren't actually finding patterns in the noise, you're just making something up every time it happens in an attempt to make yourself feel better about this pattern that you can't actually control.

Hey listeners. As a lawyer, CEO, entrepreneur, husband and father, I know the pressures of trying to fit everything into a limited amount of time. And over the years, I've come up with a variety of hacks for continuing my personal and professional development journey while still handling business at work at and at home. And now I'm ready to share some of those with you if you're looking to do the same. Join Negotiate Anything Premium today. It's designed for busy listeners just like yourself. It's everything that you love about our traditional feed just packaged to save you time and make it easier for you to apply these expert insights in your difficult conversations. Not only will this save you time, but it will also make preparing for your difficult conversations that much easier. Just download a quick mini episode or takeaway guide and you're on your way to negotiating more of the best things in life. So what are you waiting for? Get started with your free trial today. I think that's one of the most important psychological findings that we really need to pay attention to. Humans regularly make stuff up all the time. We make it up all the time, and we believe it. And there's a difference between beliefs and truths. And so it really takes a deeper level of analysis to really challenge those beliefs internally. And so it sounds like there is an internal, external type of interaction that has to happen. So we have to be able to slow down and have an internal conversation with ourselves to figure out what it is that's actually happening, to be honest with ourselves, and then evaluate whether or not this relationship with this individual or this job is worth keeping. And then if it is, how do I analyze that situation to try to make it better?

Yeah, I think that's totally true. I think one thing people don't tend to do is collect data on themselves. And our memories are pretty terrible. Right. And so if we try to understand why we're in a good mood or why we're in a bad mood, what stresses us out and what doesn't? What I've learned in my research is we actually have no idea, even for things that are pretty common. You know, I did this one study for job therapy where I asked people in the morning, what's going to stress you out the most today? And then at the end of the day, what stressed you out? And there's like, I don't know, 50% overlap. But the things that stress them out at the end of the day, they didn't predict that were super stressful, they didn't prepare for, were things they didn't counter about 70% of the time before. So even though they know these things, they don't anticipate them. And in the moment, they don't encode them as stressors. And because of that, they're not planning ahead of how to deal with those things. And I'm a huge fan of do not trust your instincts, don't trust your memory. Just write it down when it happens and collect data. Data around who was there, you know, what were the other contextual features of the situation, and then look at that data over time just like a scientist would.

I agree. And to bring a, like a specific example to this, this is something that I've done with myself and I've been shocked every single time. I'm a. I'm a journaler. I love to just journal. And I review my journal, like at the end of the month and at the end of the year, and there I'm shocked at how frequently there are times that have been incredibly stressful. But my memory, just because of primacy and recency, I remember the joy at the beginning of the process and the relief at the end of the process. And I forget how tumultuous the process itself was. And I would have that same realization about three separate times in the same year and forget it every single time. And so collecting data on yourself, just for the listeners, I really want to hammer this home. Do not assume that you will remember because you most likely will not remember.

You're not going to remember. You're also not going to see patterns. So stress, for example, it takes a couple days for an acute stressor to lead to sleep deprivation. It takes about three weeks for you to catch a cold from it. And so I've done a lot of work on measuring people using what's called experience sampling. So kind of daily diary type things. And the major reason why we get sick is because we felt a lot of stress 3 days ago, not last night, not yesterday. It takes a while for that stuff to affect your cortisol levels enough for those kind of stress hormones to negatively impact your immune response. Just physiologically, that's just how it works. And so if, if you are sick now, you probably don't know what happened three days ago. You know that it could have been anything. And that, and that's why, kind of collecting data on yourself, because there's a sleeper effect for a lot of these things. The crappy thing, it's going to take a while for it to show up in your actual physiological responses.

Incredible. I'm, I'm having so many revelations right here, right now, because it makes a lot of sense. And if we don't know, there's no reason for us to intuitively understand that. And so again, it, it inhibits our ability to collect data on ourselves effectively because we're not recognizing the nexus between the actual events and then the impact of said events.

Yep, that's right.

Incredible. Okay, we covered a lot in a short period of time. So let's, let's get to the, the difficult conversations because I'm, I'm loving the fact that we had to reveal the fact that there's so much that goes into what makes these conversations difficult. And it's almost like that, that iceberg analogy there' beneath the surface. And we only pay attention to the point that's sticking out at the top. And so let's say somebody who's listening to this podcast, they're saying, listen, I've got a jerk at work. They've been a jerk for a long time. And I want to deal with this because I want to continue to work at this location. I want to advance my career. And this is a person who's going to be with me in this journey whether I like it or not. So if they find themselves in this position and you're coaching them through this, what advice would you give them and how should they start?

Yeah, I think the first piece of advice is we have a lot of stereotypes about jerks. They're out to get us. They don't know any other path forward to success other than to kiss up and kick down or to torture people around them. Our boss knows about it and doesn't care. Other people know about it and don't care. And jerks don't have a lot of talent. And I think, you know, when I wrote this book, I really got a lot of data to dispel all of those things. Most jerks have a talent which allows them to get away with this behavior or helps kind of create the breeding ground for it. And that could be anything from they have a lot of status. They know how to read a room. They can tell who in the room has status to their charismatic and fun to be around. So you let them free ride. You know, all of those kinds of stereotypes you need to get over. And then I think the kind of next psychological hump before you figure out the strategy is most of us have a spotlight effect when it comes to being mistreated at work. We assume everyone sees it, you know, feels the pain we feel, and they don't care. But chances are people are less aware that you're being victimized by a jerk at work than you realize, because they're in their own heads, their own time, all the time. And this could happen even if the person say credit steal is right in front of you. It's just, it's not common for us to pay that close attention to how two people are treating each other unless we're super motivated. So you have to get over those kind of psychological humps. And then, you know, I. I'm not a huge fan of outright confrontation as the first step. I think you want to understand how widespread the person's behavior is. Are you the only victim? Are there a lot? And that requires kind of networking and talking to people about their experiences in a way that focuses on the behavior of the person, not how you feel. And then I think when it comes to actual confrontation, whether with that person themselves or with, say, your boss or manager, our instinct is to open up about all of our fields. You Disrespect me, you don't trust me, you make you belittle me. But all those kinds of emotions tend to just trigger people and put people in a threat state. And I instead like to focus on specific behaviors and frame them as a question. You know, I noticed in the meeting that I felt like you cut me off these three times. Maybe you saw that, maybe you didn't, like, let's actually talk about whether the thing happened. And then from there, you can just really yoke the whole, whole conversation around the specific behavior, what was intended versus what wasn't. And I think what we often find with jerks is we are making up the intention piece. They will fight us on that. We need to actually just get on the same, you know, just shared understanding of whether the behaviors even happen or not. And then from there, we can talk about interpreting the meaning of them and how they make us feel. But it's a lot of steps before you can even talk about feeling like someone doesn't trust you, for instance. And a lot of this work is really just based on how we confront someone in a marriage that, you know, doesn't empty the dishwasher or whatever. Some of those basic tactics.

First of all, don't talk about my marriage, Tessa. Okay?

I'm divorced, so I can talk about my first marriage all day long.

This washer has been such a point of contention, but I've evolved.

Never actually about the dishes.

Yeah, this is so good. Because I, I, I think one of the main takeaways with this is that we often start at the wrong place. And when you start at the wrong place, it's going to be very difficult to be successful, because first we have to collect data, pure data. In order to collect the pure data, we have to evaluate our own biases and stereotypes that are clouding up the noise, Right? Making, creating the noise so we can see the signal, so we have the stereotypes. People don't care. They see it and don't care. They aren't jerks, aren't talented, and they just want to hurt you for the sake of hurting people. Right? So that's something that we have all thought from time to time we need to overcome. The spotlight effect, I think, is a great call out here too. Other people are less aware of the problem than we realize. So we have to recognize that the world doesn't revolve around us. People aren't just always looking out to see whether or not you're being victimized in this particular moment. And so once we can overcome those internal biases and psychological challenges. Then we go into collecting real data. So I'm going to write my notes, pay attention, and then I'm going to ask other people if they're experiencing the same thing. And then we lead, get to the conversation. But we recognize that it requires a lot of homework in order to get to that point of conversation where we can have an informed conversation and approach it the right way.

Yeah. And I think perspective taking is really key. It seems like a very obvious point, but I think you. You have to exercise perspective taking at so many different points. You know, before you go to human resources, you have to perspective take. Is this something that they could take action on or even care about? Or is this in that gray area, you know, before you talk to your boss? Do they actually prefer this person over you because they're high performer? Are they. Would they be up against a very steep hill? Should they recommend any kind of action against this person? What is their reputation? You know, and if you were to complain about a free rider on a team, maybe your team doesn't care that they have to do a little extra work because your free rider always gets them dinner reservations because they have all these connections. And I had a free rider like that. And then the end, the team was like, we actually just care about getting dinner reservations. We will suck it up and do a little bit of extra work for that social connection. And, you know, human beings are petty and often have preferences that don't align with your own. So just kind of don't assume the world is always has the same priorities as you do when it comes to sort of like dealing with difficult people. And I think that's just the truth is sometimes we just want the dinner reservation or we don't want to deal with the bulldozer because, you know, they're grouchy and annoying. So you got to know those things.

Wow. No, that's brilliant. And all of the years doing this podcast, like, that's a very, very, very, very, very novel point because essentially, really what we have to come to terms with, I'm just. I'm going to kind of dumb this down. Call me out if I'm off. Essentially, it's like, hey, this might be a problem for me and it might not be a problem for anybody else. And then taking that a step further, perhaps me addressing the problem could make me the problem because it's not a big enough problem for anybody else.

Yeah.

Wow, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. And I think also when you were talking about perspective taking, I think one of the things that really stood out to me is that when we say that semantically, I think most people would be able to follow, okay, I'm going to try to theoretically put myself in the shoes of other people, see myself from their perspective. What is it that people do not understand about the process of perspective taking that holds them back when it comes to actually doing it effectively?

They don't understand the true motivations of the person. I think it's easy to say pretend that you are listening to yourself or you know, pretend that you're your mother or something like that. But I think often the perspectives we don't understand the role of the person that we're trying to perspective take. You know, if it's, if it's a boss for them to do something like punish your kiss up, kick downer. If I was to perspective take as a boss, the first thing I would think of is how much social capital are they going to lose if they punish my person? What's it going to cost them to do me a favor? Because every action that is punitive or involves conflict or involves taking something away from someone cost people social capital. Any action that involves giving someone a raise, giving someone a promotion, giving them that big project cost someone something. And so I almost always walk into, and this is true for negotiations as well, you know, I'm sure as you're the expert. And I always walk in thinking what will this cost the other person to give me? Is this the kind of ask that is just too costly? And I think thinking about costs for other people is just not something most of us think about. We think, well, they want to, they do care, they want to help and they don't want to see me suffer. It's going to cost them to punish this person. And in what way are they going to have to have a conflict with another boss that works parallel to them? Are they going to have to ask their boss for yet another favor? And right now, you know, they're in the red favor wise. So you just, you don't actually know these things often I think. And we tend to underestimate costs of ask.

Yeah, I think that's a really great point because even if we think about cost, we think about it at a very surface level. So even just think about it from a deal making perspective, okay, we're buying and selling a product. Yes, there is a cost in the terms of like dollar amount, but we don't consider the other more intangible costs that might actually be more expensive in the minds of the other person. And so when it comes to addressing and acknowledging the cost, like the true cost, two questions on that. How do we go about determining what that could be for the other person? And then in the conversation, how do we acknowledge and address it?

Now, the first question, you know, how do you know what. What something costs someone? Is an essential question around a different construct that you didn't ask about, which is how good is our knowledge of other people's status? And I've done some work on a construct called status acuity, where you can kind of figure out by watching people interact who has the most respect and admiration in the group and who has the least. And knowing how much status someone has. Status of difference in power, which is control over resources. Status is soft. And if you have a lot of status, then you have a lot of sort of coins that you can kind of hand out. You can ask for a lot of favors from people, so the cost for you is less. So status is something that's, like, directly yoked to social costs of favor asking. Like, you don't want to ask someone with low status to do something, even if they're in a high power position, because they simply don't have the social capital to pull it off. And so it's almost like you need to know what people's status bank accounts look like, and then you can figure out what you want cost. I want this 100 coin. Ask how many. How many coins are in your status account? You know, and you can't ask people with less money than the cost to do you a favor. And I think we're not very good at actually reading status hierarchies unless we really, really try, because the cues are subtle and indirect and require a lot of them. But that, I think is kind of like the magical ingredient is like actually knowing a status hierarchy and knowing how much social capital people have.

I'm having a good week, Tessa, because this is the second time in two days that somebody mentioned status on the podcast. And I love it. I think it's. It's not addressed enough. And the thing that's tricky about status is that it completely exists in the minds of somebody else. Right? So you. I. I cannot just flip a coin and just flip a switch and just give myself more status. You know, it depends a lot on the perception of the other person. And so we can see very quickly how this can become very complex. So a lot of times people don't have a good understanding of their own status, and then they don't have a good understanding of the status of the other person, person in the conversation. And let's say you're going to HR or your manager or your boss to address the behavior of somebody else. We don't understand the person's perspective of the other person's status.

Yep.

Right. So there's, there's a very intricate web of status that will play a significant role in this interaction that often goes unaddressed or unanalyzed, which often holds us back in these conversations too.

Absolutely. And I, and I'd add another layer of complication, which is often when you're interacting with someone who is in a position up from you, you don't have a whole bunch of data on their status because their status interactions you're not invited to be a part of. You know, big decisions are made in small rooms of five very powerful people, all of whom probably have. There's a clear status hierarchy to you. All five of those C suite execs are high status, but trust me, they're not all the same. And if you were to approach one, not the other, you know, then you could just be banking on the wrong person. And so we often don't even get status queues one or two levels above us in the hierarchy at work because we're just not around to see them. We're not invited to the meetings. Now I remember the first time I was invited to a real meeting at New York University on the promotion tenure committee. It's all the deans and all the fancy people. And I was like, holy crap. Like I thought that guy was the top of the ladder and he is at the bottom of the ladder. And I know that because he got yelled at for going to the bathroom in the middle of someone else's sent, you know, but I had no idea until I got that 30 second thin slice of information. But if I wasn't invited to that meeting, I would have just gone 20 years thinking, this guy acts like a big deal and he wears big deal clothes. He must be a big deal.

Oh man, this is getting. This is fascinating because we need to analyze status. And if we don't have enough status, we might not even have access to perform such an analysis. This is really interesting because essentially I don't want people to get hope feel hopeless in this. But I think what we might recognize is that in some of these circumstances when we're making these requests, it might simply come down to the fact that we don't have enough juice to get what we want. And the person we're asking doesn't have enough juice to get what we want. And this makes us realize that the conversation that we're having today, the foundation for that conversation, has been laid out from the moment everybody in the organization laid eyes on you. And so we have to play a very complex game because, of course, you need to drive value by doing good work. None of this works if you're like a bad employee or a bad teammate. So that's. First of all, we have to check that box. That's just one box. We have to be playing this game of office politics where we can recognize that, hey, my status will matter, and I need to make sure that I have enough political capital to get what I want accomplished in these conversations.

Yeah, I think, you know, the good news is this is a super complicated game of thrones that we're all playing here. But there are little cues that tell us a lot about status at work that if you know where to look, you can figure it out. We just often aren't told what they are. So kind of. My favorite example is when you write an email to the boss, how quickly does your boss reply to you versus how quickly do they reply to other people? Time delay from a high power to a low power person is a wonderful indicator of status. If you never get replied to, you're probably pretty low on the totem pole. If you get it immediately, you're pretty high. And so little things like that, or even if you work in an office, if you go to an in office meeting, don't just leave the minute the meeting is over, Stay for an extra couple minutes and see who is talking to whom and who sticks around. Because those two people probably have some alignment and. And some kind of status relationship that you wouldn't see on the Zoom call or on the Slack channel or whatever. So there are little things you can do. And then I'll give you one more. My favorite one is when you bring an idea up in a meeting, do people stick to it and build on it and say, wow, Tessa, that was interesting? I also think that. Or is there a silence for two seconds and then the conversation shifts to a new topic? If your ideas are conversation killers and things are always shifting, then you probably have low status. You know, people might not tell you that idea sucked, but they pause and then it's like, does anyone else have any other ideas? You know, that kind of thing? So those are just like a couple examples of things people can do.

Yes. I feel like I'm feeling so exposed here, especially with the first one. I don't want my team to notice. I'm just very, I'm chronically slow to responding to everybody. I. This is so fascinating because what was, what's interesting to me is that we've been talking about kind of like the, the nebulous soft power of status, right where it's kind of hard to ascertain, but you've given us really three clear ways to ascertain your status. And I think there are going to be a number of people listening to this podcast who become, who became immediately terrified because I think it's we, we've. We've all been in that position when we've been on the, on the other side of that. So if somebody's in that position and they said, okay, I see why I'm not getting what I want. I don't have the juice. So I want to make sure we're ending on an empowering note. How does one acquire said juice?

Do not jockey. So don't try to pull it from someone else who has juice in the moment. Status jockeying is the quickest way you can lose whatever small amount of status you actually have. What you need to do is actually network with people who don't necessarily have status, but are really. They're what we call central nodes of a network. So I used to sell shoes, men's shoes, at Nordstrom's, and my favorite node, my favorite person to talk to was in the, in the Nordstrom's cafe, the coffee shop, because they knew everyone and they had the most accurate map of status. And so what I would do then, I was clearly very status oriented even when I was 19, is I would go to them and ask them about people's reputations and ask them who would be good for giving advice for different types of things. It is possible to climb up the status hierarchy at work, the status ladder, but you need to gather as much information and advice from a wide variety of people who have non overlapping social connections. So you don't just want to go to one group of people and say, what do I do to gain status? You go to one person for your boss and say, how do I gain status of my boss? Well, here's what they, here's what they say they care about, here's what they actually care about. You know, this type of performance, you know, how do I gain status with this other type of person? And you just have to find what itches need to be scratched and then do a good job at scratching those itches and don't ask for some kind of like public pat on the back for it. I think what most managers and bosses care about are good performers who are low maintenance, who they can go to in a pinch for advice. And so if you are one of those people, then you'll be able to gain status. But if you're too thirsty and you want it to all be in the public and you want lots of people to know about it, then that's not a way to gain status. It's actually just simple. It's like, do good work, do it in a one on one context with someone in power and don't expect them to tell everyone how great you are in return. And whatever you do, do not DM them on LinkedIn and say, can you please share my post? Because it would help me gain status. And that happens all the time. I'm saying that for real listeners, don't do it. It is not a legit path to gaining status.

This is equal parts hilarious and helpful because what I'm recognizing here is that I think a lot of times when people say, all right, I want to try to gain status or play the office politics game a little bit better, whatever it happens to be, they think about a bunch of sneaky, conniving, really all up in your face ways of doing it. And, and the beautiful thing about what you said is that first of all, no. Second of all, even if you do it that way, it makes everything worse. And so I think for people, especially who might be introverted, who might not feel as comfortable being up in front of everybody, you've given them a path that is really doable and can really fit into an authentic form of expression as well.

Yeah, and this is true for things like credit stealing. People want to know, how do I gain the credit? I'm like, problem is, it's predetermined before you even walk into that meeting. If you don't have status, your ideas aren't going to stick to you. They're going to stick to the person with status who said them in a more eloquent way 30 seconds after you did. And so it's really hard to get those ideas back to you if you're low in status and you have no voice. You got to kind of predetermine how you're going to work that meeting to get people to echo your contributions, to get those ideas to stick to you. You need to learn how to say them in a more succinct way so you don't have an outer monologue. And things like that are the way you gain status and the way that you deal with credit stealing at work, not like screaming over people and being dominant. In fact, verbal dominant behavior, talking a lot. Those are not cues of status. Those are cues of dominance. And they don't correlate at all with how much respect and admiration you're going to have.

That is great. And Tessa, for a lot of people, they've been feverishly taking notes, probably like me, but even though I've really enjoyed this conversation, they might be looking for more. Could you suggest maybe one or two books that they could refer to that has all of this goodness in it?

I can tell you about my two books. I could probably wax poetic about other people's books all day long. So I have jerks at work and I have job therapy, which is out July 23rd. And you can check out my work@tessawestlab.com for those who want to read my research and to Tessa westauthor.com if you want to check out my books. And also I have quizzes that give you immediate feedback from both my books.

Great. Oh Tessa, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

This was so fun. Thank you.

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