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Becoming a “likeable badass” for career success

Professor Alison Fragale

Professor Alison Fragale has long studied power and influence in organizations, and taught courses on effective leadership and negotiation skills to undergraduates, graduate students and executives at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

In recent years, she has honed her work to explore the tension for women to achieve status and thereby gain power, influence effectively and spark change.

She developed a passion to help women show up as equal parts warm and assertive and has written “Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve.”

“Likeable badass is my catchy phrase for talking about my research,” says Fragale. “My research is about status, which is about how you’re respected and valued. Our status comes from people believing we are two things – caring and capable.”

Likeable Badass Alison Fragale

As Fragale gives talks and has discussions with groups at home – including the Carolina Women in Business conference and a virtual meeting hosted by 100 Women – and across the U.S., she wants to help women rise personally and professionally. While many use the term badass to describe a rebel and someone who does not care what others think, Fragale flips the meaning by using it to refer to those who gain social clout. She is educating people on why the perception of who they are is vital to their success.

“Status is a fundamental human need,” says Fragale. “It’s something all human beings want, and life is better with it than without it. Lacking respect is just as damaging as living a life without friends. If we want people, especially women, to live their best lives, then they cannot continue to feel like they don’t have respect in the rooms that they walk into.”

Certainly, she has used her own advice to manage her own status over the years.

In her book, Fragale stresses the importance of building relationships and connecting with people on their terms. Her first encounters with UNC Kenan-Flagler in 2004 are a demonstration of how to connect with others.

She was staying at the Carolina Inn while prepping for the job interview that eventually landed her a role at as a member of the organizational behavior faculty. She remembers seeing T-shirts all over campus that read “In Roy we trust!”

Fragale had only been to North Carolina once before: to go to Furnitureland South in Highpoint for the discounts. This time around, Fragale wanted to learn as much as she could. She called her husband and asked about the T-shirts because she didn’t know what they meant. He was dismayed by her ignorance.

“I learned that Roy Williams was the basketball coach,” says Fragale. “My husband said, ‘Alison, you cannot go into your interview asking questions like ‘Who is Roy?’ You will never get the job!’”

In the end, Fragale went into her job interview knowing all about Roy and fell in love with the School.

“It was a very tight community,” says Fragale. “That’s held up over the years.”

Before Fragale earned her PhD at Stanford and started her academic career, she worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company Inc. in Chicago. She advised numerous companies in the automotive and financial services industries on corporate strategy and change management.

Over the years, her students especially valued her negotiations course.

“I think the students like it because it’s a life skill that has widespread applicability, and everyone who comes to the class always wants to be better than they are, no matter how good they are already,” says Fragale.

Winning friends and influencing people

Her time in the classroom at UNC Kenan-Flagler inspired her to write her book.

“In my classes the majority of the students would be men,” says Fragale. “But it would always be the women who would come to the podium after class and ask questions because they were struggling with things that their male colleagues weren’t. I was the safe space for them to talk about challenges they were having because I looked like them.”

She lays out a plan for building social capital. Three practical tips that Fragale highlights are self-promotion, promotion by others and asking for promotion.

Women are reluctant to speak of their accomplishments because of societal norms. Fragale recognizes the awkwardness and anxiety that self-promotion can create, and she provides ways to do it comfortably. For example, she shares advice on how women can write their out-of-office messages to show a bit of personality, while also describing their accomplishments.

Professor Alison Fragale

“Our status comes from people believing we are two things – caring and capable,” says Fragale. 

She also offers people actionable tips on ways to behave so that others promote them without even asking. There are plenty of examples in the book, but it comes down to being there for people when they need help. Fragale describes leveraging talents that many might dismiss as valuable.

Her third highlighted advice is teaching people how to ask someone else to promote them. This is more challenging. There’s more risk and the potential for rejection, which Fragale acknowledges in the book. With relationship building, however, women should feel more comfortable, says Fragale.

“It can be very doable if you’re talking to somebody who already values you,” she adds.

Empowering women

Fragale’s research is meant to help people understand how to remove the bias that women continue to face.

“The more status we put into the hands of women, the less likely people’s brains are to see women as having low status,” says Fragale.

She is unsure whether she will write another book, but she is enjoying meeting with groups of women she never would have known had she not shared her research outside of academia.

“I know I won’t be able to eliminate all challenges including gender-biased challenges for my” daughter or her generation,” she says. “My hope though is that at least she’ll get to tackle new challenges rather than face the same ones that her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother faced.

“This ‘likeable-or-competent-but-not-both’ conversation has gone on for too long, and we need to move onto other problems. As we give those who come after us tools and strategies to control their fate in a biased world, we participate in changing the conversation.”

1.16.2025