It starts with our non-verbal cues. Social science demonstrates that people assess and make judgements about other people fairly swiftly. First impressions happen really quickly and often they put a lot of primacy on our visual and our vocal cues: what we look like and what we sound like. Much less is weighted to what we are actually saying if our nonverbals are distracting or inconsistent.

I am going to be showing examples: a combination of imagery, stories, and data that is going to support the need for this kind of framework. The idea is what if we want to be projecting both strength and warmth.

In this study, half of these students were presented with a case that had Howard as the CEO  and the other half of the students had the same example, but with Heidi as CEO. Everything was identical except that the CEO’s gender was changed. The professor was testing to see how students reacted. When this test was initially done a couple of decades ago, people loved Howard. They thought he was authoritative and decisive. They really did not like Heidi. They thought that she was overly aggressive and too demanding. That gap is actually improving significantly. So it’s interesting that today, when the study is being replicated the results are not as stark. Yet when men project warmth, they are not seen as less strong. However, when women project strength, they are often seen as being less warm. So as women take on leadership roles, they  sometimes have to dial up both the warmth and strength simultaneously to be able to stay in good standing. We look at examples of how to do that for both men and women.