This article is part of an ongoing series on behavioural psychology, exploring personality, scarcity, social dynamics and the ways our environments shape behaviour.

What abundance looks like when power does not need to be asserted

I met a young woman recently who had only been working behind a bar for a relatively short time, but the owner had already started giving her responsibility for running shifts.

It was not difficult to see why. She was bright, warm and unusually socially perceptive. She seemed to know what was happening in the room without appearing to monitor it, and people responded to her without her having to make very much effort to make them respond. She could take control of something without making the interaction feel as though somebody had just taken control.

What struck me most was how little superiority was involved. She did not seem particularly interested in demonstrating that she was cleverer than the people around her, even though she plainly was clever. She was not constantly checking where she sat in the hierarchy, or using every decision as an opportunity to establish it. She could direct people without diminishing them, and somehow that gave her more authority rather than less.

I have spent quite a lot of time recently thinking about the opposite behaviour.

Scarcity seems to produce a very particular relationship with power. If there is not enough status, attention, control or recognition to go around then your position has to be defended, and other people become competitors almost by definition. You notice who knows what, who gets the credit, who gets listened to, who controls access to information, who gets invited into which conversation. Tiny interactions become evidence about where everybody sits.

Power starts requiring maintenance.

The young woman behind the bar seemed to be doing almost none of that, yet people were giving her authority anyway.

That is what interested me.

Social gravity

I noticed something related a few days later on a ferry between Dover and Dunkirk.

I had access to one of the premium lounges but, as usual, got bored sitting in it and went wandering around the ship. It was busy and after a while I became aware of a slightly strange pattern. People seemed to register me as I moved through the space.

I don’t mean everybody was staring at me or dramatically clearing a path. It was subtler than that. People would look up as I approached, shift slightly, make room, occasionally turn as I passed. It happened often enough that I started wondering whether I was imagining it.

There are plenty of mundane explanations. I was fairly well dressed and wearing headphones, so perhaps I simply looked as though I knew where I was going. I am also a reasonably big bloke, which presumably changes how strangers respond to me physically whether either of us is particularly conscious of it.

I don’t know exactly what they were reading. I am not even sure they were all reading the same thing.

The moment that made me pay more attention happened at a coffee machine. A man in front of me was complaining that the coffee was cold and behaving quite unpleasantly towards the member of staff dealing with him. Then he noticed me standing behind him.

I did not say anything, and I wasn’t trying to intervene.

His behaviour changed anyway. Not dramatically, and certainly not enough for me to construct some heroic story in which my silent presence restored civility to the English Channel, but he softened. The temperature of the interaction dropped.

That was when the phrase social gravity occurred to me.

Some people seem able to exert influence on an environment without visibly pushing against it. Other people orient around them slightly. Behaviour adjusts. Space appears. They are noticed without constantly insisting on being noticed.

I am wary of turning that into some mystical quality that certain people possess and others don’t. There are too many variables involved, and my observations on a ferry hardly constitute a controlled experiment. But the contrast with scarcity feels useful because scarcity power usually has to make itself visible.

It has to announce itself.

Abundance may work differently.

When status stops being the point

I think we often confuse authority with dominance because dominance is easier to see.

The person talking loudest in the meeting looks powerful. The person guarding information looks important because everybody has to go through them. The manager who insists on approving everything is visibly in control. Somebody who constantly corrects other people can appear knowledgeable simply because they are continuously demonstrating knowledge.

Those are all easy signals to read.

The opposite is harder to measure because much of it consists of things somebody does not need to do. They do not need to interrupt because people already make room for them. They do not need to hoard information because giving it away does not threaten their usefulness. They can acknowledge somebody else’s contribution without calculating whether that acknowledgement leaves less credit for themselves. They can change their mind without experiencing the change as some kind of defeat.

That does not make them passive. If anything, the young woman behind the bar was effective precisely because she was paying attention to what was happening around her rather than constantly checking what it meant for her own position. Her attention was available for the work and for the people in front of her.

That feels like abundance to me.

Not optimism, and not niceness. Certainly not some belief that the universe will magically provide whatever you need. More simply, it is the assumption that somebody else’s value does not automatically reduce yours.

Once that assumption is present, the social environment gets much larger. Somebody who knows something you do not becomes useful rather than threatening. Another person’s success can increase the value of the thing you are both part of. Credit becomes something you can distribute rather than protect. Collaboration stops being a disguised negotiation over territory.

This connects to something I have noticed repeatedly in creative and entrepreneurial environments. The people who are best at finding new opportunities are often not staring particularly hard at the thing everybody else is staring at. They are looking around.

Scarcity narrows attention because the resource you already know about becomes disproportionately important. If there is one Mars bar and you are hungry, the Mars bar becomes the entire problem. You protect it, divide it, negotiate over it and work out who deserves which bit.

Abundance asks whether there is a shop around the corner.

That sounds almost stupidly simple, but organisations miss it constantly. We become extraordinarily sophisticated at allocating known resources while failing to notice that somebody could create a new one.

Perhaps people do something similar socially. If status feels scarce, you spend a lot of energy managing your position in the hierarchy. If it matters less, some of that attention becomes available for the room itself: what is happening, who needs something, what is interesting, where the opportunity is, which two people ought to meet.

And perhaps that outward attention is part of what other people respond to.

Power without diminishment

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the strongest form of authority may partly emerge from not needing authority quite so badly.

Somebody who desperately needs to be perceived as powerful creates work for everyone around them. Their status has to be maintained, their interpretation has to win, their contribution has to be visible. Other people’s behaviour gets pulled into the maintenance of their identity, even when everybody ostensibly has something more useful to be doing.

Someone who feels secure enough not to require that maintenance can spend the same energy elsewhere.

They also become cheaper to interact with. You can bring them information without worrying about who owns it. You can disagree without automatically entering a status contest. You can succeed without creating a threat. There is simply more room in the relationship.

Maybe that is some of what I was noticing behind the bar, and possibly some of what people were responding to on the ferry. I cannot know from the outside, and claiming that strangers moving aside for me proves I have achieved some magnificent state of psychological abundance would rather undermine the argument.

But I do think there is something worth noticing here.

We spend a great deal of time looking at how insecure people acquire and defend power because those behaviours are conspicuous and often destructive. Perhaps we spend less time noticing the people who seem to acquire influence without chasing it, partly because there is less drama involved.

They are not necessarily more powerful because they dominate the room.

Sometimes they are more powerful because they leave room for everybody else.

That takes me back to where this series started. In Hiding in Plain Sight I was trying to understand what happens when somebody’s need for control distorts the environment around them. Five pieces later, the opposite seems just as revealing: authority that does not need to distort anything at all. If you want to read the sequence from the beginning, start there.