June 24, 2024

145: UNC Professor Alison Fragale | Helping Women Navigate Power & Status Dynamics

14 minutes

Alison Fragale is an award-winning professor at the University of North Carolina, where she teaches courses on leadership and negotiation.

Alison has consulted with numerous organizations, including ExxonMobil, Bayer CropScience, and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among others. And her research has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and The Financial Times. Before entering academia, Alison worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Alison earned her PhD in organizational behavior from Stanford and her BA in mathematics and economics from Dartmouth, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

In this episode we discuss the following:

Though Alison didn’t explicitly set out to conduct research to help women, she realized that it was often the women who were sticking around after class asking for help from someone who looked like them.

Status and power are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct. Status is respect. Power is resource control. So, it's possible to have one and not have the other.

Women, more so than men, end up in positions of power without the commensurate status. The alternative, status without power, is much easier to navigate. People think of you as warm, giving, and capable. But people who have power without status are often treated poorly, which can lead to instability and exit.

Alison’s most common recommendation for women who ask for help navigating power and status dynamics is to start sooner advocating for themselves. Otherwise, they may find themselves in situations where people have already concluded that they’re not the valuable person in the room.

Follow Alison:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonfragale/

Website: https://alisonfragale.com/about/

Book: https://amzn.to/3XuH6Wj

Follow Me:

X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/

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By Nate Meikle

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