Triangle Tweener Talks

00:00:03 - Alison Fragale
Power is a fundamental human need that all people want. Status is also a fundamental human need that all people want. But status is how much we're respected and valued by other people. And so unlike power, which we can hold even if someone opposes it, status has to be given voluntarily. Because again, our status exists solely in other people's brains. It's their judgments of us. It's their opinions of us.

00:00:32 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to Triangle tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between. With an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Tweener Talks is produced by Earfluence. Now here is your host, serial founder and General Partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo. Welcome to this episode of Triangle tweener talks featuring Dr. Alison Fergale. This episode is sponsored by bank of America. Bank of America's transformative technology group helps game changing tech businesses and founders realize their boldest ambitions across a wide range of technology sectors. Robinson Bradshaw, a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle's startup ecosystem. Smashing Boxes, a Durham based Lean design centric digital transformation company and special thanks to our friends at Earfluence who produced this podcast. Allison is a professor at UNC's Keenan Flagler Business School where she teaches organizational behavior and is an Assistant Dean in the MBA program. Allison first came to my attention when many of the Triangle female founders and execs I know started gushing about her new book which was recently published. It has a very attention grabbing title, Likable Badass How Women get the Success They Deserve. I reached out to Alison and I'm excited to report I was able to get her for the podcast. In this interview we go over some of the main topics of the book such as the dynamics between power and status. In the second half of the interview we go into new territory where we discuss how to apply the psychological and other frameworks from her book for female founders. So kind of a founder discussion. As Allison mentions in the interview, while her target audience is largely female, I do think the persuasion and psychological frameworks we talk about here would be good for any founders or any gender. I know I learned a ton and I really enjoyed this interview and I hope you get Allison back on the show to go into more. I feel like we just hit the tip of the iceberg and hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Now, without further delay, here's my interview with Allison.

00:02:37 - Alison Fragale
So I'm a Professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. That is my tie to the area. I have been on the faculty for 20 years. I lived for the first 11 years on the faculty in Chapel Hill. All three of my kids were born at UNC Hospitals in the same hospital room, just as luck would have it. And then I relocated 10 years ago to Chicago for my husband's job. And I commute back and forth, but being a professor was not my childhood dream. And the way I even got to become an organizational psychologist and a business academic was I was in worked in management consulting for McKinsey right out of school. And it was there that I started to realize how important and frustrating it could be to be able to understand and move people and get them to do the things you wanted to do. Because when you work in consulting, no one reports to you. Lots of people don't like you, but you're highly dependent on getting people to work with you. And so it made me appreciate psychology and human behavior. How do you motivate people? How do you influence them? How do you negotiate with them? So that brought me to study organizational psychology, get my PhD, do all the things that brought me to the Triangle. And then my work to the book was another evolution in that I went from teaching and speaking to everybody to putting more effort to serving women. And the way that that happened was that although most of my audiences would have more men in them than women, I always found it was the women who would approach me after an event and talk to me about a challenge they were having. Negotiating, influencing, advancing, something like that. And in those conversations, what I realized was that women had questions that their male colleagues might not, and that there was behavioral science that could help answer these questions, and that it wasn't science that we had done a good job distributing until that point or making people aware of. And I started to realize how much I had used my own field to navigate my own problems as a woman at work. And I realized that I could help other people do that, too. So I started taking behavioral science that I thought was relevant to women's questions and disseminating that in classes, in talks, and now in a book. So this is the same me, a lot of behavioral science that I have. I myself have done or I have relied on over my career now bringing it just in a different form to reach a bigger audience of women.

00:05:03 - Scot Wingo
Very cool. When you were at McKinsey, was your undergrad more like technical? Or did you have kind of a general business degree? Or what kind of things did you do? At McKinsey?

00:05:12 - Alison Fragale
Well, I wanted to be. When I was in college, I probably would have been a business major if I had gone to a place that had a business major. But I went to Dartmouth and they didn't. Had no such thing. So I became a math major and an economics major, which was the closest thing I could put together to doing that. And when I went to McKinsey, I was doing general strategic advising mainly. I always joke that in consulting there are revenue generating projects which are help, you know, help companies like make more money, fun, sexy. And there are cost reduction projects, spend less, very unsexy. I did the least sexy of the sexy. I did cost reduction in traditional manufacturing, like heavy industry engine manufacturers, generator manufacturers, things like that. And as kind of a generalist, before I ended up taking this total left turn in my career.

00:06:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. As you reflect back on McKinsey, were you working through some of the likable, badass playbook? You just kind of didn't know what to call it and you didn't have the toolbox that you got later from the psychology?

00:06:13 - Alison Fragale
100%. So I felt like one of the things I was really good at was making friends in new environments where people were not excited McKinsey was there. And to use what was unique and disarming about me, I was young, I was often the only woman. And there was a way in which some of our clients would be more willing or happier to interact with me than they were with some of the older men on my team. And I really leaned into the idea that if people were going to do anything for us, if our clients were going to cooperate with us, they were going to be much more cooperative if they liked us. So I really set about trying to get to know people, trying to make friends. And when I think about some of the things that I did, like I remember at one place I worked, I found out that all of the people that worked in the area where we were doing our project, they all went up to the roof and sat on these little tin cans and smoked cigarettes during the day. It was like the 90s, back when you could conceivably still have a group of people that smoke cigarettes at work, right? And I didn't smoke, but I was like, well, if that's where the conversation's happening and that's where the friendships are happening, then that's where I should need to be. And I even lit a few cigarettes up there. Cause I was like, well, I gotta kinda hang. So I'm like, I can hang with this cigarette in My hand, if talking to people is going to make me friends. And then I remember admiring another woman that I worked with as a client, and she had this very distinctive jewelry that I thought was really cool. And she said, oh, it's from a local artist. We were working in New Mexico. It's from a local artist. Do you wanna go sometime? So next thing you know, I'm like, in a, you know, an artist shop, like, browsing jewelry. And it was very authentic. It was like, her jewelry is cool. This is, like a fun thing to do with another person. But the general idea of, like, building the relationships and leaning into those things was something that I did at that time. And I also noticed that it was a differentiator between some of my colleagues who just thought, like, your boss has paid us to be here to do this work. It is your job to do this work. You must do this work. And that was kind of a mentality versus. People are going to find all kinds of ways to make it easier or harder on you. And if you have this good status in their eyes, they're going to make everything a lot easier for you. So I didn't have a lot of the science and have the tools. I was feeling my way. But I did have the mentality of, you know, if you make everyone love you where you are, you're going to get a lot more out of people. And I did a decent job of that.

00:08:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. My mind McKenzie people are like the two Bobs from office Space. Just one of my favorite movies because it makes so much fun of, like, the corporate stereotypes and kind of leans into them. What would you say you do here kind of thing?

00:08:56 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, I was like. Yeah, I was like, they make movies about the fact that the consultants are coming. Like, that's how people felt about it. They didn't want you there. And when you go into an environment where people are skeptical or whether you're a consultant or not to say, I need to win you over. I need to make you value me and respect me. And if you like me and you respect me, you are going to give your best to what I. I'm doing. And I did notice how many of my, you know, smart consulting colleagues did not have good sense when it came to that. Some of them had very good sense, but some of them, I really remember thinking they were just like bulldozers in these organizations and not recognizing that that wasn't how people. That wasn't how people worked.

00:09:37 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's an IQ EQ thing.

00:09:39 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, totally.

00:09:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. What have you been teaching at unc. Like what are. Can someone take a likable badass class? Is that like a thing or.

00:09:47 - Alison Fragale
I mean, not yet.

00:09:48 - Scot Wingo
You should.

00:09:49 - Alison Fragale
We do need. I know. Likable Badass Academy. I'm all for it, 100%. Just needs a little bandwidth for me. But what I have done for 20 years, and it's how I got into this space, is I have taught a bunch of stuff in my, in all my years, but I've always had negotiation and influence as a cornerstone of something I'm teaching either to MBA students, professionals and organizations. And that really is where likable badass comes from. Negotiation. I always say it's not a deal making toolkit, it's a relationship management toolkit. How do I get what I need and what I want out of the relationships that I'm in? And that those skills can be used to do all kinds of things, but basically to advocate for yourself to live the most satisfying life that you can. And really it was women's struggles, trying to negotiate for more power, particularly to be paid more and promoted more, that kind of were the crux of making me realize how all the skills in likable badass were really needed. So that's again, currently what I do. And then in terms of my non degree stuff, there's not a likable badass course, but I do do a lot of speaking on the science of status building to women in organizations, virtually in person, all that to bring that kind of skill set to working professionals to talk about how they can show up at work authentically and strategically to get the results that they want and they deserve.

00:11:18 - Scot Wingo
Got it. Cool. And then as a. Are you the type of professor that just teaches or do you do research? And was there some research that kind of like enabled you to kind of do the stepping stones to get here?

00:11:29 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, I do do research and the. My research on status is a foundation of that book and I incorporate a lot of other great research from the field as well. But yes, so I have studied status, empower and negotiation and all these. These topics for the 20 plus years that I've been in academia.

00:11:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. For, for founders listening, regardless of gender. I would, I would have been very skeptical about psychology, but then I found. So I have a technology background, kind of not unlike you a bit. So, you know, I would have never guessed. I do so much selling as a CEO and founder, so I'm just like selling all the time. It's almost ridiculous. So persuasion is an interesting area that's kind of been my gateway into Psychology where I'm like, okay, I can actually apply this. It all seems so like, you know, on the mountaintop, not helpful. Until I kind of realized that some of the persuasion stuff. So Cialdini, his two books, Pre Suasion and I forget the name of the one, that's the persuasion one.

00:12:31 - Alison Fragale
Influence Psychology. Persuasion. Yeah.

00:12:32 - Scot Wingo
And that's it. Yeah, yeah. So. So I would encourage anyone listening, don't tune out. This will actually give you a toolkit, regardless of gender, that you can use in a lot of your everyday interactions.

00:12:43 - Alison Fragale
Okay, I'm going to give everyone the speech that I give to my students, which is the problems that keep people up at night are not spreadsheet problems or accounting problems, engineering problems. They're people problems. They are people not doing what you want them to do. They are people who like, may not trust your idea. They are people who you aren't buying what you're selling. There are people who are not doing their best work or whatever it is. They're people problems. So I always told my students, I said, look, you have two choices. You can pay attention to me now when I know you're very concerned about your finance, your accounting, or you cannot pay attention to me. And then when you're leading something, running something, whatever it is that you're going to do in your life, even if it's super technical, you have to work with and through other people. Nobody gets to do anything where they are cut cut off from human beings. So when you work with those other people and you're not getting them to do what you want them to do, and you wish you had paid attention, now you're going to have to come back and you have to pay me like 10 times as much to tell you all the things that I would have told you all over the. And my husband's in finance, different field, but again, very quiet. Right. But the things he comes home and complains about are never something that has to do with the spreadsheet. It's always, these clients are unhappy. These people won't let us, you know, invest the way we want to invest, et cetera, et cetera. There's always a people element. So that is, that's where psychology comes in. And the thing is, there is a science to it. So for I like, I was a math major, I like things with right answers. But I actually really like human behavior because people are fairly predictable. They are not as predictable as, as other. As other things. But there's, there's a lot of similarity and a lot of regularity and so once you start to see that the things that feel idiosyncratic or complicated start to make sense in a world, and then you start to feel like you can have a bit of a scientific approach to approaching people.

00:14:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, And I like frameworks because they help me kind of have a mental model for all these things work. So I want to dig into a couple of your frameworks that you present, because I really enjoyed those. Before we go there, I think the phrase likable badass, it's easy to just skim over that, but I think there's a bit of genius in there because that's very good marketing. Because it really makes you curious, right? Because you would. You would kind of think maybe there's a little oxymoron in there. Can a badass be likable? You know, it makes you. It's a very good title and a good phrase. When did you first come up with that? Like, what was the. When did that kind of, like, pop into your brain? Do you remember? Was there a moment or.

00:15:08 - Alison Fragale
There wasn't a single. Like, I remember the day where I was when this kind of thing happened. But it predated the book. And as we'll probably unpack, it's a reference to something which is very psychological, which is that the two dimensions that we study in psychology that are related to how we perceive people are a dimension of warmth or other orientation and a dimension of agency or capability. And that's where the likable badass is my catchy term for those two things. So I. So the science was like something that was so foundational to everything I ever did and everything I ate and slept and breathed and researched all the time. And then. But then I had to find a way to talk about it to people who are not academics, who are not interested. When you say, do you want to hear about the interpersonal circumlex of person perception? Everyone, you know, hangs up the phone. So I was like, yeah, yeah, right. You got two things. You got, like, your likable dimension and your badass. So it was an evolution of me figuring out how to talk about what I was doing in a way that people who needed to know about it but weren't academics would actually care. And so by the time I got the idea of, I'm going to write a book on status and helping women think about navigating status, I already knew that the book would be titled Likable Badass, and no one gave me any pushback through the process on that. But I agree with you that I don't know what the percentage is. That's unofficial. I'm going to say 80% of a book being appealing is people have to pick it up first. And that I. When I looked at books that were quite successful and that people were really excited about, one of the things they all had in common was they all had a catchy, memorable title. And I was like, okay, we gotta get catchy.

00:16:55 - Scot Wingo
I like the color. The color, like, jumps off the shelf, too, to, you know, most. Today, most books kind of a black background in a white kind of a font. So I like that you did kind of like a. You know, really offset colors. It really kind of jumps out at you on the shelf, too, so. Very good.

00:17:08 - Alison Fragale
All the credit for that. Random House. Yeah, all the credit goes to Penguin Random House. They were like, how do you. How do you feel about this as a color cover? I said, great. And I didn't really think much more of it than that. But then you're right now when I go to the airport and my book is sitting there next to other business books, you realize most of them are written by men and most of them are black and navy. And then you can. I can literally tell if my book is on the shelf from, like, three gates away because I can just see it there.

00:17:33 - Scot Wingo
So, yeah, that blue on orange. I have a little bit of a color thing. It, like, really. It kind of like, almost vibrates for me. It, like, you could see it a mile away.

00:17:40 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, yeah, it fits.

00:17:42 - Scot Wingo
And you sure the editors didn't push back at first on that? It must have been like your first treatment was, I'm going to call it this.

00:17:48 - Alison Fragale
So, yeah, so when I sold this book, I have an. You know, I have an agent, and she was fine with it. And the book is a title and a subtitle. Right. So we tend to call it Likable Badass. But the full title, then is How Women Get Success They Deserve. The subtitle has changed over time, but when I sold the book, I told the people, the different editors who were bidding on it, that there were two things that were very important to me and that they shouldn't buy the book if they didn't like these things because we were just going to get in a fight and there would be no point. And the two things were that I wanted the book to be titled Likable Badass. And the second thing was I wanted the book to be for women. And there was a good argument to be made that this book should be for everybody. Because when you put women on the title, you potentially cut off a good percent percentage of your readers. And that there were not. There's nothing in it that's only unique to women. It's not a book on menopause, you know, it's a book on managing status, which everybody has to navigate. But I told them that that was important to me, that it was an audience I cared about and that I wanted to create a space of belonging in those pages. And to everyone's credit, nobody who bid on it pushed back on either of those things at any point. And those things stayed. The subtitle did get moved around quite a bit, but the rest of it stayed. So I wanted to, you know, I wanted to work with people who shared some of my vision for it. Obviously they were going to edit it and shape it, but they had to share my fundamental vision, which they did.

00:19:14 - Scot Wingo
Cool. That was very smart of you. On to your negotiating point to make. These are my non negotiables. Take care to leave it.

00:19:20 - Alison Fragale
Yeah. Think when something's really important to you and you don't want to move, it's, you know, it's good to at least tell people. It doesn't mean you can't change your mind, but to let people know where you mentally sit so that they don't think of it as, you know, people don't know what's important to you unless you tell them.

00:19:34 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And you don't come off as crazy because you're just like, I have a lot of flexibility over here, but these are non negotiable. You didn't say, like, I'm going to have total control over this entire process. Which they would probably be like, oh, boy, that's a. That's a weird flag.

00:19:47 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, exactly. And the reality is in this thing, you don't like you. But so you have to be collaborative and. Yeah. You know, to realize that people shape these things and they do make them better. So it's a team effort.

00:19:59 - Scot Wingo
So the first framework that caught my attention is you talk about the dynamic between power and status. And you know, I've read that book, Power, and it's like a macho, you know, like Genghis Khan, kind of like Sun Tzu, you know, kind of the 48 laws one. Yeah, yeah. And that's good. And it has a lot of interesting kind of like, you know, political strategies and stuff. But, you know, you would read that and you would think that power leads and status follows, but you have a different framework. Walk us through your approach on that.

00:20:31 - Alison Fragale
Yeah. So first I'll pause to Talk about what they are. Power, when psychologists talk about it, it matches what you tend to think, which is power is having control over resources that matter to somebody. So if you have all the money or the gold or whatever it is, then that's a valuable resource. But other resources could be. You hold the information, you hold the network relationships, you hold the ability to hire or fire or give a good performance review or a bad one. There's lots of things that we can have control over that can be a source of power. And power makes us influential. Because if someone has something that you want, you're much more likely to do what they say and do what they want you to do. Because you want to be in their good graces. You want to get the resources and the rewards. So we seek power. Power is a fundamental human need that all people want. Status is also a fundamental human need that all people want. But status is how much we're respected and valued by other people. And so unlike power, which we can hold even if someone opposes it, status has to be given voluntarily. Because, again, our status exists solely in other people's brains. It's their judgments of us, it's their opinions of us. And it also, as I said, is a fundamental human need. It's very critical to our life satisfaction. And there is a tendency to pursue power above status for, I think, a variety of reasons. One, we talk about power a lot more than we talk about status. In fact, one of the most common questions I get when we start a conversation like this is, what do you mean by status? It's. We've heard the word. We sometimes use the word, but we don't really have a clear definition of what it is. And so it's hard to pursue something if you can't identify it. If it feels squishy and mushy, you don't know. The second thing is that it does can feel harder to influence. Like, if I hold the money or the authority to tell you what to do, then I have the power and I don't have to worry about it anymore. I keep it, I have it. But with status, I have to kind of earn it. Every day I have to earn it with more and more people because there's 8 billion people in the world, and each of them gets to have an opinion about me. So that starts to feel really overwhelming. Like, how could I possibly do that? Never mind, I won't try. I'll just focus on trying to get the resources. But the challenge with that is two things. One, if you are not respected, it's very hard to convince people to give you resources. So if you want whatever it is, the raise, the promotion, you know, I always say if you have a teenager and you want, the teenager wants the car keys and you're holding them like that's your power and are you going to hand them over if you don't think that the teenager is going to use the resource very well? Probably not. So being respected makes it much more likely that people will give us power. So without the respect, we might be pushing and pushing and pushing and trying to get the power and continuously failing. The other challenge is that having status makes any power you do have a lot easier to be able to use. We don't really like people who have control over us if we don't respect them. That doesn't feel right.

00:23:40 - Scot Wingo
The only it's the ahole boss usually is in that, that quadrant. Yeah, that could be your next, that could be your next book.

00:23:47 - Alison Fragale
But yeah, totally. Every time you go to the DMV or the, or the tsa, you often end up like being kind of snarky because you have somebody in this position who has absolute power over something you definitely need. You need, you want the driver's license, you want to get on the plane, you're going to do what I say. And they're often. Because those roles are not necessarily the most respected occupations in society as a whole compared to others. There can be what we call a low status power holder phenomenon. Like, why do you get to have so much say over me and what I do? And that kind of reaction of I'm going to just act out in ways that are subtle enough to not get me in trouble, I'm not going to get kicked off the plane. But like I might roll my eyes, I might be a little bit more curt or short, like, why do I have to take my belt off at this airport? I didn't have to take it off at the other airport. But a lot of that comes from when someone has a lot of power over us but doesn't have the respect. They're not treated very well. And this has been a big theme of my research. And as a result, people aren't treated well. They don't stay where they are if they have any choices. And so we see all kinds of examples, including with women, where people who have power but not status end up exiting their situations and organizations because they don't like the treatment that they get. So this is why if we, I'm not and I don't, we don't need to stop Caring about power, it is very important. But if we bring an equal recognition to status and an equal effort to building our status, we will get a lot better results on both dimensions than we will if we simply keep chasing power.

00:25:19 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it kind of ties into a lot of the leadership books. They don't use the same language, but there's, you know, one of the classics, good to great talks about the servant leader. And when I talk to other founders about that, they don't, they don't understand. They're like, but does that mean, like, I get coffee for people? And I'm like, no, it means you, you lead by showing, right? You're like, if you want people to work harder or, or to do something, you go do that. Right. It's kind of like you, you set an example, you earn their respect, and then they will come along. So, so it, that is the path to power. I totally agree with you. I've seen it a million times. But it's weird because I never thought of it in that, that particular framework, the interaction between status and power.

00:25:58 - Alison Fragale
Absolutely right. And so once you have the word, you start to realize, oh, wait, I've been thinking about this for a long time, but I haven't really been able to articulate it and then make it feel like it's something that I could go after. And what am I actually trying to do when I'm being a servant leader? Like, what are my specific goals? And that's where I break it down, where likable badass comes from, which is that being respected by people is not a random judgment. So we, when you look at other people and you decide, do I respect that person? And when other people make that same decision about you, those are not random decisions. They're based on two things that people are evaluating. They're based on, do they think you care about them, care about people other than yourself. So part of servant leadership is to show I don't. Not just out for me, I care about some entity other than myself. Right? Whether it's my end user, whether it's you, my employees, anything. I am out there to do something beyond just advance my own interests. That's one thing. So that's the light I use likable to capture that big idea. And then the other one is, are you good at what you do? Can I rely on you? Can I trust you? So if I give you a task or if I put myself in your hands, you're going to execute well. You're not going to let me down. And that's a Capability piece. And so when we think about what are we trying to convince people of, whether they're our subordinates or our employees, whether they're our clients, whether our colleagues, whether they're our family, is we're trying to convince you, I care about you and I know what I'm doing. And when you can convince your audience of those two things, respect follows. So as we start to think about how we show up, how do we serve as a leader, how do we engage just as a human being in relationships, you can start to think, okay, are the signals that I'm putting out into the world, are they showing people that I care about them? And are they showing people that I'm good at what I do? And if they're not, then how could I tweak my signals so that they start to see the, you know, the true me? And I always do say to people, if you don't care about anyone but yourself and you're not good at anything, then I can't help you and you're just a fraud. But let's presume as a starting point, you do care about people other than yourself and you're good at something, in which case you are inherently a likable badass. And now you're just trying to say, how do I show my audience? How do I get the credit for that? I have it in my heart and in my brain. How do I convince them? There is a PR piece of this.

00:28:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, absolutely. Another framework you talk about in the book is this kind of interpersonal circumplex. And I never heard that before, and that was really interesting, and you already mentioned it, but what the heck is that? Does everyone have one? Do I need my doctor to go look at it? Like, what is this thing?

00:28:38 - Alison Fragale
Exactly. So that was the alternate title for the book, the Interpersonal Circumflex of Person Perception, the book that no one would have ever read. But that's really what likable badass is. It is the idea that there are two dimensions. So, like a X axis and a Y axis that organize the different perceptions we have of people than people have of us. So the X axis is this. Are you warm or are you cold? Are you friend or are you foe? What are your intentions toward other people? This is an important dimension. If we're warm, it's going to be we're honest, selfless, you know, giving, likable, agreeable, etc. So that's one thing we're evaluating in people, and then the other thing we're evaluating is this vertical, this Y axis, we will call it in psychology, like your assertiveness or your competence, it's can you control your environment? Can you get things done? Are you decisive, persistent, organized, dependable? These qualities, and so they create different, you know, quadrants of space. And this is how we organize our perceptions of people. And obviously. Well, I think it's obvious if you ask people, would you rather be perceived by other people as really warm and likable and helpful, or would you rather be perceived as selfish and difficult and quarrelsome? Everyone says, I'm going for warm, I'm not going for cold. And then if you say, would you rather be perceived as dependable, reliable, persistent, organized, or would you rather be seen as meek, timid, self doubting, unreliable? Everyone picks the former. So what it means is that we are all, in our own way, trying to be likable badasses, trying to be assertive and warm to other people. It's where we want to be. And the trick is figuring out how to signal that so that another person reads those signals and interprets them, you know, the way that we intended so that we get credit. Because it doesn't matter what we think we are when it comes to our status. It only matters what another person sees. Does another person see us as, you know, as warm and other oriented? Does another person see us as capable? And we can all think of times where we had perfectly good intentions and we got some clue from our audience that they did not interpret our good intentions the way we meant them. And that's a perception fail. Right. Our intent was in the right spot, but when it translated into our behaviors and actions, the audience didn't read it that way and they coded it as either really selfish or really kind of incompetent. And we didn't get the benefit that we were hoping we would get. So that's what the circumlex is.

00:31:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. I've, you know, I've built teams up to like 800 and I've spent a lot of time on this. And there's, there's a couple of things I want to pick away at there. So. So I've had that where people are communicating and the audience gets it wrong and then they blame the audience. How do you, how do you get people to realize it's always you. Like, if, if there's a, you know, an audience could be two people or even one or, you know, or you're in like a, you know, speaking kind of a thing. How do you get people to. They're almost like they're in cognitive dissonance where their ego or something is stopping them from realizing that it's a them thing, not a not the audience thing. This is especially true with technical people. They have a high opinion of themselves. Typically, yeah.

00:31:57 - Alison Fragale
I mean, I go back to thinking about sales. So I may, you know, make the analogy I talk about in the book, like, if you had to sell vacuum cleaners as a job and you wouldn't go in assuming that without saying anything, everybody would understand why your vacuum cleaner was the absolute best vacuum cleaner.

00:32:12 - Alison Fragale
You would assume, I probably got to tell them something about the vacuum cleaner for them to believe it. So part of it's on me to convince them. And then you would say, well, not every person's going to get it right away. You would anticipate some people are going to resist. Maybe some people just aren't that smart at understanding vacuum cleaners. But if you have the attitude of, if my customer does not understand why my vacuum cleaner is amazing the first time I say it, then my customer is an idiot and that's their problem, you are going to starve. As a vacuum cleaner salesperson, you would recognize this. You would say, yeah, okay, sometimes people don't get it right away. It might not be my fault, but it is my problem. I'm going to have to come back with different messaging that's going to convince them and help them see what I need them to see.

00:32:57 - Alison Fragale
And so it's not about really blaming, but the idea is that what another person thinks of you ends up affecting your life in a very meaningful way. And so rather than blame, like, I did the right thing, it's your fault to say, just like in sales, I might have had a very good sales pitch. And that sales pitch might have worked with the audience yesterday, but it's not really working for you. So how do I, as the skilled salesperson, change my approach to reach you and rec? And that's going to start with, like, really understanding you and saying, okay, I understand what you value.

00:33:29 - Alison Fragale
I understand what you're paying attention to. What can I do that's in your, like, language and value system and attention to reach you? And when we come to actually selling products or services, people have that mentality when we go into, like, internally communicating, like, in our own organization and saying, here's my message. If you don't get it the first time, then you know you're an idiot and I can't deal with you. That is not the same attitude we have when we try to sell things.

00:33:54 - Alison Fragale
So I say, this is still a sales process. And if you bring the same mentality of sometimes customers don't get it the first time, and even if it's that, that might be their fault, or maybe they just weren't listening to you because they were thinking about something else and they missed the entire message, you still then are left with the responsibility to be able to convince.

00:34:13 - Alison Fragale
And so I think that doesn't make it any less frustrating. It's not fun to be misunderstood. It's not fun, you know, for somebody to think you're something that you're not. I get it, it's frustrating. But if we can have the mentality of I can influence this, I can't perfectly control it, which means I might have to come back two or three different times in the same way. And technically, for people who often get to work with things they can control and it comes out right the first time, people can be frustrating in that regard because, you know, I quote in the book this. I don't even know what century it's. It turns out to be really frustrating to quote people who are long dead because then you can't Internet search that they did it. But Christopher Marlow allegedly says, in like the 15th or 16th century, we control 50% of a relationship.

00:34:57 - Alison Fragale
We influence 100% of it. And that idea from moving from control to influence, I think is important because sometimes people say, if I can't control it, if can't get it to go exactly the way I want, then I'm not even going to try to be influential. I'm just going to say, forget it all, I do what I want. But in between, there is a big fat important middle, which is to be influential, which is, yes, sometimes I don't get the outcome I want. But if I am strategic and I try, I can shape how you see me, more times than not, I can be influential. And that's what we're going for.

00:35:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And that persuasion, influential is a really key skill in my world of founders, because you. It ends up just like opening up all the doors. You get more investment, people come work for you, people stay customers. Like, it's useful in every situation that we're in. So it's a huge part of that 100%.

00:35:45 - Alison Fragale
I mean, you can't build anything if you can't work with people and you can't influence people. You just can't. So it doesn't matter who the people are. Getting practiced at that and getting comfortable with that and recognizing that's part of the process, that the ones founders who get that are the ones who are really successful. Right. And the ones who say, and this is the same in my world as well. I mean, one of the things I learned when I was a young academic was you want to publish research and you think research is very quantitative and there's right answers, but at the end of the day, your research gets published when the luck of the draw set of reviewers that you have for said journal thinks your research should be published. That's an influence act. Yeah. It doesn't mean that the science isn't part of it, but this reviewer might want something different than the reviewer that happened to draw your paper last time. And one of the good pieces of advice I got when I was a young academic was the biggest predictor of success is the people who can basically hear the feedback they're getting from their audience and work with it rather than say, if you don't get it the first time, you're an idiot. And there's definitely a mentality in academia, if the reviewer doesn't like it, they're an idiot. And my, you know, one of my early mentors just said, I've seen people who are brilliant basically ruin their careers that way by being so unwilling to recognize that their audience has a viewpoint. And if I can't influence my audience's viewpoint and take my audience's viewpoint as a valid way for them to believe, I won't succeed. And I think the same is true in any kind of thing, including, you know, founders.

00:37:19 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So in the book, you take a lot of these and you apply them to kind of what I would say, more corporate situations, which is good, but our audience is more founders and maybe they work for a startup kind of a thing. And you found a really big audience here in the triangle, female startup and people that work, most of them, a lot of them have worked for me. So one thing we were wondering online we had kind of a funny exchange was what do you call, you know, organically, some book clubs have kind of formed where groups of women are getting together and kind of using the book as a springboard into talking about, you know, different situations that people are encountering kind of a thing. And almost like a support group, maybe that's more. It's less a book club than more of like a book club slash support group. So then we had the ultimate question, like, what do we call a group of likable badasses? Do you. You have you opined on that?

00:38:14 - Alison Fragale
I will. I don't think we can't. First of all, as I said on Social media. So Scott puts this question there. And I said, of all the questions I've gotten in this process, that is hands down the best one. And it generated a few, including for me, people going back and forth using this, like the animal kingdom of all these different things that we call gaggles and prides. And I think pride was a good one. And cuddle with penguins.

00:38:38 - Scot Wingo
Cuddle is probably not good. You can't really have a cuddle of likable Venice.

00:38:41 - Alison Fragale
No, and I didn't. I was saying, like, it was a very. I pondered over that for days before I could respond to you because I thought, I thought about it. Like, I was like, you know, what did I say? Like a galaxy or a. Something that was kind of on a path to world domination. I pulled a couple of political ones too. I can't even remember, like a cabinet and a parliament or something like that. But we definitely need. We definitely need one. And a colleague of mine, Al Seeger, is also at the University of North Carolina. He posted something and then he. He did a hashtag, Likable Badass Nation, which is not the same as your question, but I did think that was catchy. I was like, I'd like to that to catch on. Likable Badass Nation feels. It feels very good to me because I am born and raised in Pittsburgh. I'm a Steelers fan, and Steelers nation is a thing. You could have towels. That's right. 100%. They could be. They could be coral and blue. Like, oh, my gosh, Scott, I really like your. We should have worked on this sooner because I can see your marketing genius coming out here. You say this could be your next.

00:39:41 - Scot Wingo
Book is like taking it to like a, you know, a national movement kind of level.

00:39:45 - Alison Fragale
100%.

00:39:48 - Scot Wingo
So what are some examples of female founders? So I spent a lot of time with female founders. We were fortunate in the triangle. I think we punch way above kind of the national average. And our little fund has an index strategy, so we make lots of small checks. And so we've done 130 investments and we have, I think 20 to 30 female founders in there. So pretty, you know, you know, it should be half at some point, like demographically, but, you know, it's not. But we're working on it. What have you seen? Is that a cohort you've worked with at all? I can ask some specific questions because I've seen some things I want to get your opinion on, but I thought I would open it up to you. You know, do you have any techniques from the Framework of likable badass that would fit a female founder specifically or any interesting thoughts on that?

00:40:36 - Alison Fragale
Yeah, I mean, so yes, this is a population I've worked with for sure. And when you look at the stats, you have the same stats on founders that you have on employees when it comes to women. Right. In terms of the paltry amount of funding that goes to female founders. Right. And funding is a source of power for a founder because when you have capital, you then can have a lot of power to do a lot of things. And so when we restrict funding to women, we restrict women's power. But I think one of the pieces of advice I would give, founder or otherwise, is the best time to build your status is long before you need it. So and being married to a one time business founder who's now sold his company, I am sure that people that you work with, who are founders, they didn't start deciding to do their company like the day before they did it. It's actually been something they've been thinking about for a really long time. And it might have been a side hustle, it might have just been a dream, et cetera, while they're doing something else. This idea has a long Runway in their brain. And what I would advise everybody to do is to start thinking about building your status long before you need it. So to think about, okay, if I want to start a company that does X and I want that company, you know, to like, here's my grand vision for that, that company, who support what I need, who would need to respect and value me, how do I start getting in front of those people long before I need to make an ask of them. And that's what I would really encourage people to think about. Because if you're, if you're, if your idea is something that's far off in the future, like a year, two years, three years, then building relationships feels fun, authentic, it's joyful, it's easy. The second you start realizing like, I'm going to ask you for money, I'm going to ask you for advice, I'm going to ask you to be on my board, I need something from you. Then you start to worry about, you know, how am I seen? And so that's what I would encourage people to do is not just the founders, but the aspiring founders, is to think about building those relationships. Or if you've already found it, like, what's your next iteration of this company? What's your next vision for this business? What are the relationships you need? Like one, three, five years from now and start investing in them. Now that's going to be the big. And we can talk about how to do that. But that I think is the, is the biggest key and the thing that smart people and especially smart women miss is to just think I'm doing the work. And then we tend to think about the relationship piece at the very end when, if we're doing it all along, we can start to build those relationships. And they're, and now they're already on decent footing at the time when we show up and we need something.

00:43:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that, that's super good advice. Let's pull the thread on it. So, you know, I'm a young lady. I've, you know, let's do this kind of like your path, which is pretty common. So I've got an undergrad, I do some McKinsey, and then maybe I go get an MBA at UNC, maybe Duke, maybe NC State. And I, you know, in that journey I come up with a company idea, maybe I meet a co founder and now I'm ready to kind of, you know, pursue that. What, what are some tactical things, you know, in my head, I think. All right, to your point of laying that groundwork, you're going to want to know, you know, some of the lawyers in town, the finance people. There's, there's like the service people you kind of need, they're always a gateway into funding and then the local VCs and that type of thing. What's a very tactical way people would start building that, that status with that audience.

00:44:03 - Alison Fragale
Yeah. So as you first say, to identify the people you would need. And I also think even taking one step back, even a lot of times founders have more than one idea and sometimes the first idea doesn't take. So if you second, you know, you have entrepreneurial ambitions. Right. And even you're not exactly sure what the company that you'll work on first is. Doesn't matter because a lot of this stuff transfers. Right. It's idea agnostic. But you're going to say, here's all the different kinds of people I'm going to need to rely on.

00:44:29 - Alison Fragale
And those people believed in me, my entrepreneurial journey would be better. So I would start thinking about how do I use my unique talents and contributions to make those people's lives better. And it can be deep things or it can be shallow things. So examples would be this is maybe where I develop my thought leadership on social media. I start talking about interesting things that are happening in the industry where I think I want my company to eventually be people I start to bring into my network.

00:44:59 - Alison Fragale
People who then might follow me or see me in their feed and say, oh, my gosh, every time I see Scott posting, look at something interesting. And over time, I'm sure, well, this is how this happens, right? We built a relationship through social media, you and I, right, Because we got connected by mutual people, and then we start appearing and, you know, interacting with each other, and voila, here we are doing this, this conversation so you could start that.

00:45:24 - Alison Fragale
And honestly, one of the best things I did in launching my book was. And I didn't know I was going to write the book at the time I did this was. I got on LinkedIn. I got on LinkedIn because I was bored in Covid and I couldn't. I wasn't going to make sourdough bread. I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm sitting here. I started posting on LinkedIn, but by the time I had a book, I already had a lot of people who followed me because they thought I had something to say in the space of women and leadership. And then, guess what? That's my audience. So then when I say, hey, I have a book. Hey, I have a company.

00:45:54 - Alison Fragale
Hey, do you want to be my customer? Do you want to be my. Do you want to invest? There's already people who know who you are and like your message. So that is an example of what you could do. But that took. It took me four years of posting with no objective other than just to put content out there before I was doing anything with it. So that could be an example. Looking for opportunities, small or big, to pay attention to when you meet people in a context, to think about how you could add value to their life. If you meet somebody in an airplane and they start talking about what they do and you think, okay, this is a relationship, maybe I would foster.

00:46:29 - Alison Fragale
Maybe I don't have to say goodbye to this person. When, when the plane lands, what do I have available to me? Whether it's, you know, a skill that I'm good at, I'm. I have a time on my hands, so I'm able to actually, like, do some work for somebody. I pay attention to the things they care about. They can even exist outside of work. So, you know, if I, if I know something about your personal life, right? And I know that, you know, you like restaurants, you like music, is.

00:46:59 - Alison Fragale
I could say, oh, my gosh, look at this cool new restaurant view. I came, I came across. You might like this. The second I do that, I stand out in your brain in a positive way that I did something that was kind to you and I brought interesting, useful information into your life. It doesn't have to always be about the nature of the business as well. So I would start looking for those opportunities. And when you're looking for them, you know, broadly, and you're doing this with your, let's say you're in business school and you're doing this with your classmates and you're just saying like each of these classmates is a person who might at some point in my life, like I might want to rely on or call on there, be part of my network.

00:47:33 - Alison Fragale
How can I come with a. Back to your idea of servant leadership. How can I come with a mentality of trying to make people's. People's lives better, strategically volunteering for things. So someone then asks you, hey, will you help me out with something? Well, you can't say yes to everything. You do have to protect your own time and your own energy. But you know what? Like this request that you're making of me. You're probably going to be an important person in my life. If I think about my ambitions, I should say yes. Or this request you're making of me will actually help me meet more people who might also help me grow my network and be important. So I'll say yes. So starting to think longer term about how could I be giving to people saying yes to something they ask of you, making what I call a small deposit. Introductions are a really good small deposit way of saying if I can introduce you to someone else in my network that has value to you, all of a sudden I've brought something of value into your life.

00:48:33 - Alison Fragale
So that's where I would encourage people to start and just say, how can I use the things I'm good at to make someone else's life better? And if you go around throughout your day asking yourself that question, you're going to find lots and lots and lots of opportunities to just do small things that help you stand out in a positive way. They're fun for you to do. They don't take a lot of time. And over time those things really add up.

00:48:58 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's really in persuasion they would call that reciprocity. Right. I think it was the Carnegie. The Carnegie, you know how to win an influence and that kind of thing. So yeah, the more you can kind of like build up this goodwill, paying it forward and it's kind of magical. Like that's like all I do is pay it forward and it always comes back times 10 and it's really weird. Like, it doesn't seem logically it would do that, but. But it always works. It's like the strangest thing. It's like karma. There's something I'm not like a big believer in, like that karma, kismet and all that stuff, but it's so predictably powerful coming back that there's something to it.

00:49:34 - Alison Fragale
There is, but here's the difference. This is the science of it. So, like a tip. An unsophisticated founder might show up cold in a relationship that they could have nurtured over years, but they never did. And now they say, hey, I want something for you. Like, let's say I want you to invest. And now I do know that I have to engage in reciprocity. If you invest, I will give you, okay, what maybe I'm going to give you like really great deal terms. And so that's my reciprocity. You give me something first and then back. What I'm going to give you is favorable deal terms. That's reciprocity. But what people don't always realize is the other version is way more powerful for way less effort, which is, I'm going to give you a little something now with no expectation of return. But it's little. I make an introduction, I give you some information, right? I, you know, I do something like that, and if you never pay me back, I don't care. It wasn't that hard. But guess what? In your brain, a debt has been incurred. Someone did something nice for you and you want to even the score. You want to reciprocate. So now you're looking for opportunities to do something for the other person. And so that's where the idea you can, like, call it karma or kismet. When you make the first move and deposit into someone else's account, they are going to want to make it even. And that's why it comes back to us, is because we're drawn toward reciprocity. The less sophisticated, more expensive way to do it is to show up and say, okay, you first do something nice for me and I promise I'll really pay you back. It can work as well, but that's why the other one is so powerful and it feels good, right? You like doing nice things for people. You, as long as it's not too burdensome, you like living that way. And so that's where I talk about authentic and strategic are not opposites. To do. To pay it forward for people is both authentic, it's enjoyable, and you start to realize I don't exactly know how or when, but I do know that the sum total of all this goodness is going to come back to me tenfold. And so I know it's very strategic.

00:51:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I often get people that move here to the Triangle from other areas and they, they're always surprised by our startup ecosystem. They're like, everyone's so nice and willing to help me. And I, I think for whatever reason, I don't know if it's because we're Southern or I, I don't know what it is, but something about the culture of our, our startup community here versus like the extreme is Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is very transaction. Like I'm an, you know, I'm an angel investor. I'll go have a coffee with you. But I'm, you know, I really want to talk about terms first. I want a quarter point to be an advisor. Like, it's very super transactional and mercenary. Whereas we're more, you know, missionary here. Like, we, we get the bigger picture of we want to build this up and have a more open kind of a system. What do you think makes a system do that? Like, is that, where does that come from? Or is it just like a phase? Like eventually if we're bigger, it will go away.

00:52:29 - Alison Fragale
I mean, I don't know if it's the Southern culture piece of it, but I can actually speak to this directly because my husband, so my husband and I meet when we were both at Stanford. He's getting his mba, we move. He's in finance. We moved to the Bay Area and we moved to the Triangle. He works in the Triangle, and then he founded his company in the Triangle. So we're doing this. He founds this company in the Triangle. He does all his angel investing in the Triangle. But what I would tell you is this, this when we, when he came from the Bay Area, he felt, he felt very isolated because it was very clear that there was a community in the Triangle that he was just an outsider and wasn't part of. And, and so as he was trying to actually navigate, by the time he, he started his company, he, we had lived in Chapel Hill about seven years, but he had used those seven years having to really work to develop deep relationships that he could use to found his company in a way that I think he had a very Bay Area mentality when we moved here, which was like, if the, if the, you know, if the idea is good and the deal terms are favorable, people will want to be part of it. And realizing it was a much more relationship Based just culture and community. And a lot of people knew everyone else, right. And so now, like the same idea that you had to invest in those relationships. I think part of that is size, for sure. Size of the community. When the Bay Area gets so big you can't possibly keep track of everyone and everyone's so transient, then I think it starts to have a different feel. But it surprised him, and he felt like it was a disadvantage until he did. What he does quite well is he's really good at investing in relationships. He's really good at meeting people. He's really good at building his network. He spent a lot of years doing that with a general, vague notion that someday he might want to start his own thing, even though he didn't know what his own thing was. And then fast forward seven years of investing in that community, he was able to do it. But I think when he showed up, even job searching, when he showed up, job searching, like, hey, I'm here. I have an MBA from Stanford. I used to work in finance. People are like, I don't care. And he found that he had to really build those relationships. So I don't know. I don't exactly know why. Maybe it's size. But I do know having lived in the Bay Area and having lived in the Triangle and be married to a founder from the Triangle, I can feel the difference for sure. And I think what it speaks to is everyone needs to build a relationships. But certainly in, in. In this community, it's really critical.

00:54:55 - Scot Wingo
You know, I've. I've seen a lot of female founders are kind of. They pitch soft, so they're like, very kind of, like, timid when they pitch. Like, what's a. Any, like, quick hits on how to lean into that and be a better picture of your idea, like in a VC pitch kind of thing.

00:55:10 - Alison Fragale
Okay. You're considered the expert on yourself. So this is whether you're talking about your personal qualities or your company. If you can't talk about it in a compelling way that says, this is a great idea, no one else is going to believe it. That said, the other piece, that's. That's the badass piece. But the likable piece is not just, am I likable? Do you like me? But also, can I talk about this in terms of the good that it does for something beyond me? It's not just, this is my idea, because this is going to make me a billion dollars. That when we use a language of, this is like, how we serve these people who need us. Like, if I Have, you know, if it's a, if it's something that's related to medical or pharma. Right. That this is how we improve patient care. Right. This is how I improve access to education. When we use those language that we are beyond ourself, that's where we build that warmth and likability. So there's a phenomenon in psychology that's just like the interpersonal circumplex. It's called compensatory impression management. When I want you to see me as really nice, I back away from showing up as really capable and assertive. When I want you to see me as assertive, I back away from being nice. And the reality, the reality is you don't have to do that. You're not backing away from the, from showing the capability and the assertiveness and the quality of the idea. What you're adding to it is the narrative of how this great thing is beneficial to people beyond yourself. Right. Whether it, maybe it's I build, I. This will enable me to employ a tremendous amount of people in the region. Whatever it is, the benefits beyond the self can be all kinds of things. But when you have that mentality of I am going to pitch this hard and equally in this, I am going to convince you this is good for people other than me. That's going to be your really strong pitch. Not to soften it and be like, you know, maybe it's a good idea. No, you're the expert on yourself. So the second you start downplaying it, you know, reducing it, etc, that's what people are going to see. So we got to lean into that and lean into the benefit to others.

00:57:10 - Scot Wingo
Awesome. I really appreciate you answering that one. I'm going to go research compensatory compression management.

00:57:16 - Alison Fragale
Give me something impression, not compression. It's not like yes impression, compensatory impression. You can immediately forget that I ever said that. But the phenomenon is really important. Do not back away from something to be something else. Lean into both of them at the same time. Right. I am, this is a great idea and I am a very other oriented person. Cool.

00:57:35 - Scot Wingo
We'll have to get you back on. I think I can go a whole another hour. I've learned a ton, but I'm gonna go research some of this stuff and thank you very much. I really appreciate it. This was awesome.

00:57:42 - Alison Fragale
You are amazing. It is my pleasure.

00:57:49 - Scot Wingo
For more tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener time substack@tweener.substack.com for more tweener content. Check out tweenertimes.com thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle. Tweener Talks.