One of the challenges in leading a successful team is establishing leadership role, especially when starting out with a new group of individuals. More often than not, it is the extroverted confident individual that tends to win the vote of a group based almost entirely on personality. However, there a way of being seen as a leader and it’s called priming.
Priming works by first getting you into a state of mind before meeting with your new team. Research has been done showing that when subjects were primed in a happy or powerful state of mind, their willingness to take action and their perceived state of power in the group were much higher. In the study, subjects where divided into three groups. One group were given the task of writing about their happy experiences, experiences with being in power or leader roles, or about their ambitions. Another group were challenged with the opposite task; writing about negative experiences or frustrations in the work space. A third neutral group where asked to write about their life or some menial tasks. Then one person from each group were placed into a team and asked to do a simple project. After the project was finished, each member of the team were asked to rate each other on who was the leader. Overwhelminingly, the votes came in favour of the people that where positively primed (Galinsky and Kilduff 2013).
Galinsky and Kilduff’s research presents a powerful tool if you desire to be better your leadership preception. It shows that you may not necessarily need to have the personality, the looks, or the higher status to be perceived as the leader but rather just be in the right mindset. A similar study, done by that of Cuddy (her TED talk on “Power Posing” went viral) also showed that when individuals did primed themselves through particular body poses, such as standing with hands on hips, they felt like they were in a more powerful and as a consequence had greater confidence and were perceived to be more competent. Although Cuddy’s study was evaluated on the premise of an interview decision, the implication is the same as that of Galinsky and Kilduff; that priming your mind before social interaction works.
There are numerous application of these findings in graduate school. Often times we are faced with daunting presentations, high stake interviews, or troublesome collaborative work. Next time, by thinking of positive things such as that great PCR gel you ran last week or that undergrad summer student you helped to mentor, it might make a committee presentation less stressful and allow for you to take the lead in your thesis and not be entirely swayed, or intimidated, by professors. At the very least its worth a try.
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Rooted. 