Power techniques

After my last post on power techniques, the ways people make someone smaller in a meeting, several of you messaged me about your own experiences.

So for the next couple of posts I’m going through how they work, what actually stops them, and how you can use them yourself once you see them. They’re far more common than I understood early in my career, when they first happened to me.

For years I was the only woman in the room, and usually the youngest. I’d make a point and nobody would pick it up. Ten minutes later a man would say the same thing, and the room would treat it like it was new.

I thought it was me. I was too young, too new, not sharp enough yet. Years later I found out it had a name, long before I ever walked into that room.

You say the thing and the room moves on. Someone repeats it later and it counts. You raise a concern and get told you seem a little worked up. You find out the real decision was made in a room you weren’t in, about work that was yours.

None of it leaves a mark. Nobody insulted you, and nobody said anything you could quote. You walk out knowing something happened and unable to point to it, and that’s exactly how it works. It needs you to wonder if you imagined it. You didn’t.

The Norwegian social psychologist and politician Berit Ås named these decades ago. She called them master suppression techniques.

I work with a General Counsel who is the most prepared person at every table. She couldn’t figure out why she left certain board meetings feeling small, so we traced it. Every time she raised a structural concern, one board member called her risk-averse. He never argued with the substance. He just called her risk-averse, which is quite a thing to pin on the person whose job is to see the risk before anyone else does. After a while her judgment started to read as nerves.

She’d spent a year trying to look bolder, when what was happening to her had a name and she couldn’t see it yet. You can’t fight what you can’t name, so you assume it’s you and you try to fix yourself.

The instinct is to fight back, match it, call it out hot. But these techniques run on your reaction. Making you invisible works because you shrink or you overtalk. Ridicule works because you get defensive, and then the caricature looks earned.

What works is naming it, plainly and calmly. “I notice we moved past my point. I want to come back to it.” “That’s the second time this has been called emotional. Let’s stay on the substance.”

Staying calm is the hard part. Everything in you wants to answer at the same volume as what was done to you, and if you do, you’ve given them exactly what they needed. The one who names it calmly and keeps going keeps the room. The one who blows up loses it.

I didn’t learn this because I’m calm by nature, on the contrary. I learned it because I was the only woman in the room, it happened constantly, and every time I reacted I lost ground I couldn’t afford to lose. /Ulrika