How do you feel about powerful people?  Are you powerful yourself, or do you wish you were?  What do you expect from powerful people?

When I ask speakers and executives how they want to be perceived, hardly anyone ever says, “powerful.”  They often say “strong, expert, confident,” but hardly ever “powerful.”  We perceive power to be morally ambiguous, especially in the last decade or so, and so perhaps we are reluctant to assign the term to ourselves.

And yet powerful people get attention, invitations to speak and lead, and rewards, both financial and status-driven.

The research shows that one of the ways powerful people signal their power (and therefore one of the ways that we recognize it) is through minor rule-breaking.  For example, powerful people might arrive late to a meeting, put their feet on the table, and their hands behind their head.  All of these are body language signs of power.  We might not like these signals, or we might think that they are rude or gauche, but we also perceive them as powerful.

More subtly, powerful people take up more space, smile less, prolong their eye contact more, touch other people more, interrupt others more, and speak more loudly.  And we’re likely to attribute power to these and other such small variations in body language.  And so there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy at work.  We see people who indulge in these behaviors as more powerful, and thus bestow power on them by our more deferential treatment of them.

As executives rise up through the ranks, they may indulge in further rule-breaking, even raising the ante on their own behavior.  The old adage that “Power corrupts,” seems to be at play here.  As people become more powerful, they feel entitled to break more rules, and that in turn signals their assumption of more power.  Until the point at which they may break one too many rules and commit an offense that gets them thrown out of office.

Powerful people that escape this trap may be smart enough to draw the line at the feet on the table or never making coffee again.

Thinking as a speaker, or an executive, wishing to succeed in a competitive environment, are there strategic displays of rule-breaking power that one can imagine undertaking?  Are there minor transgressions that signal power without offending or crossing some line?

Please don’t start showing up late for meetings and speeches in order to demonstrate your power – that just inconveniences everyone else and sours the mood.  American presidents are notorious for running late – I recall waiting 45 minutes or an hour for President Clinton to give a speech at a conference I was attending – but that doesn’t mean that showing up late will make you appear presidential.  They have real crises to deal with on a daily basis, as well as security concerns, that make it difficult to keep to schedule.  But that’s a job condition, not a virtue of power.

Speakers (and executives in the public eye) are uniquely positioned to think about minor rule-breaking in creative ways that signal power without annoying people or appearing rude.  Think about all the implicit rules that govern public speaking.  Let’s say you are a speaker at a conference that has a norm of slides accompanying every speech.  You can look more powerful by being the one speaker who doesn’t use slides.  (No one except the meeting planners and A/V people will be bothered by this.)

Or let’s imagine that you are expected to stand behind one of those Lucite podiums.  Leaving the podium and walking bravely into the audience signals power, and in some very good ways that will help you connect with that audience.  Even dressing in a set of clothes that are appropriate for you but that run counter to the way that most of the audience is dressed can signal power, as long as you don’t show up in a tank top and cutoff jeans.

What creative ways can you think of to bend the implicit rules and stand out as a powerful, interesting speaker or executive?