If you want respect, status, and women’s attraction, mastering social skills alone won’t get you there. Power skills will.

Social skills are for getting along. Power skills are for getting ahead.

At The Power Moves we’ve spent years decoding the science of power and we’ve taught thousands of ambitious men how to get ahead and achieve goals.

In this article, we’ll show you why you need power skills more than social skills.

Intro: Social Skills vs. Power Skills

Social skills and power skills cater to different people, suit different goals, and require different training.

One is not necessarily superior to the other, and which one is superior depends on personality, goals, and context.

Social skills are perfectly adequate for spending time with long-time friends when there is an established foundation of mutual respect.
And power skills are required for achieving outcomes, and for competitive environments when you don’t want to be passed over, or pushed lower.

Social Skills

Typical social skills include:

• Smooth conversations
• Graceful exits
• Making friends and ‘how to keep in touch with them’

Advanced social skills make people think: “He is polished.”
Social skills without power skills make you likable, but they don’t give you status, respect, and influence.

Power Skills

Power skills include:

• Climbing hierarchies
• Being respected
• Influencing decisions
• Making high-value friends, networking
• Getting women’s attraction

Advanced power skills make people think: “Oh, he is high value.” And high-value men consistently get more out of life.
Power skills without social skills can make you come across as ‘rough around the edges’ or brusque, less of a good fit for a family dinner or a good gala.

You Can Have Both

Power and social skills are not mutually exclusive and the best is to have both, and both at high levels.
Advanced social skills to be smooth and charming, and effective power skills to gain respect, status, and attraction.
And of course, the calibration to know when to lean more towards one or the other.

That said, we argue that for agentic men it’s best to prioritize power (keep reading).

You can have both. But prioritize power

The Overlap Between The Two

There is an important overlap that both must cover for advanced outcomes.

For example, despite bonding being more communion, it supports the end goal of both intimacy and long-term, quality relationships.
So good power skills also include bonding and connection.

Similarly, group social dynamics like entering social groups, taking turns and respecting others is covered by social skills, but also support social status and popularity.
So good power skills cover it.

This is why our Power University alumni increased their social skills manyfold, despite Power University focusing more on power.
It’s because students improved their social skills through the power skills.

Also see:

• Should I start with Power University?

But Most Social Skills Training Do Not Include Power

Unfortunately, since they lean more communion, many social skills coaches over-teach communion and under-teach power.
Plus, power skills are often more complex and nuanced, and not everyone has a good grasp of them.

This means that many social skills books and courses, even the advanced ones, may not teach the power that agentic men need to achieve the results they want.
We also argue here that this naive self-help also fails less ambitious men, because everyone needs some knowledge of power and manipulation dynamics for self-defense.

Fortunately, the opposite is not true. For several reasons, power skills tend to better cover social skills.
In part, this is because those who learned or naturally understood power can more easily pick up the simpler and more widespread social skills. And they can, in turn, teach them together with power skills.

The Psychology of Success: Agency vs. Communion

The difference between these two paths is rooted in personality psychology.
Power skills are associated with agency, and social skills are more associated with communion.

Agency and power are associated with masculinity, communion and social skills with femininity

The Communion Pole (Getting Along)

Social skills are for people who prioritize “fitting in” and harmony. This is the feminine pole of socialization. It’s about warmth and connection. While useful for maintaining friendships, it does not build status.

The Agency Pole (Getting Ahead)

Power skills are for men who prioritize goals, progress, and outcomes. It’s more associated with masculinity. It’s about competence, impact, and results.
These are the men who get promoted, lead groups, and attract high-quality women.

The Communion/Agency Clash

You can sometimes most clearly see these different approaches by the reaction people have towards communion or agentic information.

For example, communion types may comment on our power dynamics analysis, ‘why does it even matter’ or ‘why not just be yourself’.
A real-life example:

High-communion: God it must be exhausting to only view relationships as power and subservience. Y’all ever heard of genuinely loving someone, compromises, coming to an understanding?

Conversely, a high-agency man wonders “why would anyone even ask ‘how to keep a conversation going’ if there is no goal”.

In truth, they’re both often better off understanding the other side.
The high communion man in our example could better appreciate that initiating a relationship requires a minimum display of agentic value and leadership, and maintaining a good relationship also requires keeping a minimum level of attraction and respect.

The Two Orientations: From Beginner to Advanced

Power skills can be seen as more advanced since they deliver more sought-after results.
However, the orientation towards agency or communion has more to do with personality psychology than with levels of sophistication.

And any man can lean more towards communion or agency, independently of their level of skills.

For example:

• A communion-focused beginner asks: “How do I keep a conversation going?”
• An agentic beginner asks: “How do I get my classmates to respect me?” or “How do I get this girl to like me?”

Advanced communion may instead want to learn how to better support a sad friend, while an advanced agentic man may wonder how to best navigate the boardroom power struggle.

Why Common Social Skills Advice Can Cost You Power

Good social skills teachers are perfectly competent to teach socialization, holding conversations, and making friends.

But if you’re an agentic man, likability without respect, harmony without status, and good conversations without attraction are not exactly your best outcomes.

Worse yet, some social skills advice can even actively disempower you.

For example, a popular social skills teacher advises texting a friend: “I thought of you.”
That is perfect for her personality, her friends, and the type of relationships she enjoys (notice she’s a woman).
But if you’re an agentic man, my agentic knee-jerk reaction: “Who the f*ck does that?”
I’d think the sender of that text is ‘nice’, but I also instantly see him as a low-power, too-nice guy. I may even worry if he’ll get clingy or if we’re both heterosexual.
It’s not about being harsh — it’s how an agentic mind works.

And since most people at the top are high agency, high-communion advice can undermine your progress socially, and professionally.

Successful Dating Is Power-First

Women are, on average, higher communion than men. But it doesn’t mean they want high communion guys.

Sure, many women appreciate a high communion guy during the relationship, which is why we also encourage learning that side. It’s a great plus. But the strongest requirement is power.

Women may be more communal themselves, but they want agentic, high-power men.

Communion Requires Power

Many men who first stumble on The Power Moves tend to believe that friendship or love stands in contrast to power.
But it couldn’t be further from the truth because not only do the two go hand-in-hand, but both friendships and love rest power.

Already from inception, people have limited time and bandwidth and they want to select whoever gives them the best returns.
So becoming friends or lovers with someone is also a competition. To first establish that bond, you have to ‘win’ that competition by being valuable enough to form an association.

This is also a point made in Blau’s seminal text Exchange and Power in Social Life:

although men may want to associate together exclusively for the sake of sociable fellowship and have no interest in deriving any extrinsic advantage from their social relations, they must prove themselves attractive to each other by demonstrating qualities that make them preferable to other possible associates, qualities that must be comparable and that consequently are, in a relative sense, extrinsic.

Hence, don’t fall for that naive, too-nice-guy dichotomy. Or, worse, don’t fall for that manipulative virtue-signaling that ‘love’ doesn’t require power or value.

Ambitious Men Better Start With Power

Ambitious men are often better off starting with power dynamics because they provide the fastest and largest returns, while also covering a good chunk of foundational social skills.

🙋‍♂️Lucio’s Take: My agency-first approach delivered the life I wanted

Lucio:
I’m a good example of how power-first can work for some men.

I’m just okay at conversations, not great. And I don’t even socialize much.
But I am much stronger at power-related outcomes, and that’s allowed me to live the life I want.

I can:

• Join new groups and reliably gain status
• Come across as a valuable friend
• Get consistent results with women

And as I improved my power intelligence and skills, my friendships and relationships also substantially improved.

Starting power-first also benefits from the ‘from hardest to easier’ effect.
To make a comparison: power dynamics first is like mastering a race car to also cover city driving.

• The two aren’t the exact same
• But if you learn racing first, you learn faster, achieve goals faster, and slow city driving feels easy

Power is car racing. Social skills are city driving.

Too Nice Guys Better Start With Power

Too nice guys are often not lacking social skills, but power.

Even more so for men than for women, power is a crucial element for a happy, successful, and even healthy life.

The truth is that to enjoy communion, you must first learn power.
All good relationships start with at least some display of power. This is especially true in dating and relationships, where sexual market value, leadership, and positive dominance are crucial to even start a relationship.

Next Steps

If you’re more interested in outcomes, then you can consider Power University, the only dedicated program on power, masculine agency, and achieving goals: