You do great work. Yet somehow, louder colleagues get promoted ahead of you. It's not your fault. You believed good work would be enough, but you've watched too many aggressive colleagues get ahead to still believe that. And playing their game feels like becoming someone you don't want to be.
If you see yourself as kind and friendly rather than aggressive, and struggle with saying no, you may worry about organizational politics. But you don't have to change who you are to become more persuasive and powerful. You just have to leverage your unique personality to become effective.
If you've taken a negotiations course and want more, welcome to the advanced level. The conversations that shape your career often don't look like negotiations at all. I call these stealth negotiations: influence situations your counterpart may not even notice, and the key skill most negotiation courses never teach.
The Quiet Power Playbook helps kind and quiet leaders like you thrive in these dynamics by using peer-reviewed research. You'll spot opportunities others miss, advocate for yourself without the cringe of self-promotion, and build influence in ways that work with your natural style, not against it.
About Martin
I'm Martin Schweinsberg, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESMT Berlin. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at INSEAD.
My research focuses on negotiation impasses and influence: specifically, the psychological reasons why negotiations fail. I've published in journals including PNAS, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and my work has been covered by The Economist, Harvard Business Review, BBC World, and The Wall Street Journal.
I've been recognized as a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets & Quants.
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