Lanna Hill: If you want to climb the corporate ladder, strike a power pose

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about leadership, influence and power and the varying ways we either demand it or don’t.

Some of my most formative professional lessons were during my twenties, learning the hidden language of the corporate world.

As one of the youngest sales team members for one of Australasia’s largest fast-moving consumer goods companies, I was acutely aware of how much I had to learn to be taken seriously, considered as leadership material, and start climbing the corporate ladder.

One of the biggest lessons I learned, and am still learning, is how to claim power. While power often gets a bad rap, knowing how to tap into it as a leader is crucial, whether that leadership is more formal or informal.

A great example of this is the art — and science — of navigating a boardroom table.

As much as it seems a little ridiculous in 2024, where we sit in a meeting makes a difference in how others perceive us.

It also impacts our ability to connect and communicate, verbally and non-verbally, with others in the room. In fact, body language is considered one of the most critical leadership traits in a 2022 survey published in the Harvard Business Review.

The traits we perceive as the most important have also changed significantly over the last decade, with authenticity, the “new normal” style of dress, inclusiveness and curation of an online image being some of the newer traits.

Some people walk into a room and appear to intuitively take up space, engage in a meaningful and memorable way with others, and convey gravitas. Others of us are still learning how.

But in my experience, one of the most important things we can do is take ownership of what and how we communicate to others, intentionally and unintentionally.

Things like posture, tone of voice and eye contact make an enormous difference in how credible or authoritative people perceive you to be.

And these things make a difference when we’re aiming to adjust how others perceive us, whether that be for the first big promotion or job in your twenties, aspiring to lift your profile through speaking or media, or looking to make a jump into board work or even running your own business.

The second most popular TED talk of all time by social psychologist Amy Cuddy examined how expressions of power could change not only how others perceived us but also how we felt about ourselves.

While there’s been some conjecture about Cuddy’s research, there’s no conjecture on the impact and power of body language.

Studies have shown that first impressions are made in less than seven seconds, and our nonverbal communication and posture particularly have four times the impact on that first impression than what you say.

In an age where so much of the communication we do in business is online rather than in person, it’s arguably becoming a lot harder to hone these skills, especially for our digital natives, Gen Z.

The good news is, though, that all of these things can be learnt — while the ideals of leadership hopefully change for the better, around us.

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker and founder of Leverage Media