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Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't
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By Jeffrey Pfeffer
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Amazon: Link
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#Pg.TC Highlight
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1130First of all, having power is related to living a longer and healthier life. When Michael Marmot examined the mortality from heart disease among British civil servants, he noticed an interesting fact: the lower the rank or civil service grade of the employee, the higher the age-adjusted mortality risk. Of course many things covary with someone’s position in an organizational hierarchy, including the incidence of smoking, dietary habits, and so forth. However, Marmot and his colleagues found that only about a quarter of the observed variation in death rate could be accounted for by rank-related differences in smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, obesity, and physical activity.3 What did matter was power and status—things that provided people greater control over their work environments. Studies consistently showed that the degree of job control, such as decision authority and discretion to use one’s skills, predicted the incidence and mortality risk from coronary artery disease over the next five or more years. In fact, how much job control and status people had accounted for more of the variation in mortality from heart disease than did physiological factors such as obesity and blood pressure.
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2139These findings shouldn’t be that surprising to you. Not being able to control one’s environment produces feelings of helplessness and stress,4 and feeling stressed or “out of control” can harm your health. So being in a position with low power and status is indeed hazardous to your health, and conversely, having power and the control that comes with it prolongs life.
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3143Second, power, and the visibility and stature that accompany power, can produce wealth. When Bill and Hillary Clinton left the White House in 2001, they had little money and faced millions in legal bills. What they did have was celebrity and a vast network of contacts that came from holding positions of substantial power for a long time. In the ensuing eight years, the Clintons earned $109 million, primarily from speaking fees and book deals, as well as through the investment opportunities made available to them because of their past positions.6 Rudy Giuliani, following his tenure as mayor of New York City, became a partner in a security consulting firm, and through that firm and his speaking fees, he too quickly transformed his economic status for the better. Not all power is monetized—neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Mahatma Gandhi traded on their celebrity to attain great wealth—but the potential is always there.
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4168The belief in a just world has two big negative effects on the ability to acquire power. First, it hinders people’s ability to learn from all situations and all people, even those whom they don’t like or respect. I see this all the time in my teaching and work with leaders. One of the first reactions people have to situations or cases about power is whether or not the individual “likes” the person being studied or can identify with the object of study. Who cares? It is important to be able to learn from all sorts of situations and people, not just those you like and approve of, and certainly not just from people you see as similar to yourself. In fact, if you are in a position of modest power and want to attain a position of great power, you need to pay particular attention to those holding the positions you aspire to.
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5198There are literally scores of experiments and field studies that show the just-world effect. Many of the original studies examined the opinions held by participants of people who were randomly chosen by the experimenter to receive an electric shock or some other form of punishment. The research showed that others were more likely to reject the (randomly) punished people and to see them as lacking in social worth—even though the observers knew those punished had received their bad outcomes purely by chance! Moreover, victims of random bad luck got stigmatized: “Children who receive subsidized school lunches are thought to be less able students than those not in the lunch program; ugly college students are believed less capable of piloting a private plane than pretty ones; welfare recipients are often treated as if they are untrustworthy or incapable of managing any aspect of their lives.”
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6209Most books by well-known executives and most lectures and courses about leadership should be stamped CAUTION: THIS MATERIAL CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL SURVIVAL. That’s because leaders touting their own careers as models to be emulated frequently gloss over the power plays they actually used to get to the top. Meanwhile, the teaching on leadership is filled with prescriptions about following an inner compass, being truthful, letting inner feelings show, being modest and self-effacing, not behaving in a bullying or abusive way—in short, prescriptions about how people wish the world and the powerful behaved. There is no doubt that the world would be a much better, more humane place if people were always authentic, modest, truthful, and consistently concerned for the welfare of others instead of pursuing their own aims. But that world doesn’t exist.
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7228Two other factors help ensure that the positive stories persist. Those in power get to write history, to paraphrase an old saw. As we will discover in a later chapter, one of the best ways to acquire and maintain power is to construct a positive image and reputation, in part by coopting others to present you as successful and effective. Second, lots of research shows evidence of a particular manifestation of the just-world effect: if people know that someone or some organization has been successful, they will almost automatically attribute to that individual or company all kinds of positive qualities and behaviors. Although it is far from evident that doing the stuff in the leadership books will make you successful, once you become successful, odds are vastly increased that people will selectively remember and attend to the positive characteristics they believe make good leaders.
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8259There is evidence that the tendency to self-handicap is an individual difference and predicts the extent to which people make excuses about their performance.20 Research shows, not surprisingly, that self-handicapping behavior negatively affects subsequent task performance.21 Therefore, our desire to protect our self-image by placing external impediments in our way so we can attribute any setbacks to things outside our control actually contributes to doing less well.
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9265Self-handicapping and preemptively giving up or not trying are more pervasive than you might think. Having taught material on power for decades, I have come to believe that the biggest single effect I can have is to get people to try to become powerful. That’s because people are afraid of setbacks and the implications for their self-image, so they often don’t do all they can to increase their power.
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10268So get over yourself and get beyond your concerns with self-image or, for that matter, the perception others have of you. Others aren’t worrying or thinking about you that much anyway. They are mostly concerned with themselves.
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11349The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.
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12351One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that good performance—job accomplishments—is sufficient to acquire power and avoid organizational difficulties. Consequently, people leave too much to chance and fail to effectively manage their careers. If you are going to create a path to power, you need to lose the idea that performance by itself is enough. And once you understand why this is the case, you can even profit from the insight.
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13384A study of federal civil service employees, an excellent setting because of the extensive measures captured in the database, noted that performance ratings were weakly tied to actual productivity and that people with more educational credentials were more likely to be promoted even if they weren’t the best employees.
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14413So great job performance by itself is insufficient and may not even be necessary for getting and holding positions of power. You need to be noticed, influence the dimensions used to measure your accomplishments, and mostly make sure you are effective at managing those in power—which requires the ability to enhance the ego of those above you.
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15417People in power are busy with their own agendas and jobs. Such people, including those higher up in your own organization, probably aren’t paying that much attention to you and what you are doing. You should not assume that your boss knows or notices what you are accomplishing and has perfect information about your activities. Therefore, your first responsibility is to ensure that those at higher levels in your company know what you are accomplishing. And the best way to ensure they know what you are achieving is to tell them.
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16424For you to attain a position of power, those in power have to choose you for a senior role. If you blend into the woodwork, no one will care about you, even if you are doing a great job.
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17431In advertising, one of the most prominent measures of effectiveness is ad recall—not taste, logic, or artistry—simply, do you remember the ad and the product? The same holds true for you and your path to power. That’s because of the importance of what is called “the mere exposure effect.” As originally described by the late social psychologist Robert Zajonc, the effect refers to the fact that people, other things being equal, prefer and choose what is familiar to them—what they have seen or experienced before. Research shows that repeated exposure increases positive affect and reduces negative feelings,12 that people prefer the familiar because this preference reduces uncertainty,13 and that the effect of exposure on liking and decision making is a robust phenomenon that occurs in different cultures and in a variety of different domains of choice.
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18439The simple fact is that people like what they remember—and that includes you! In order for your great performance to be appreciated, it needs to be visible. But beyond visibility, the mere exposure research teaches us that familiarity produces preference. Simply put, in many cases, being memorable equals getting picked.
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19486Many people believe that they know what their bosses care about. But unless they are mind readers, that’s probably a risky assumption. It is much more effective for you to ask those in power, on a regular basis, what aspects of the job they think are the most crucial and how they see what you ought to be doing. Asking for help and advice also creates a relationship with those in power that can be quite useful, and asking for assistance, in a way that still conveys your competence and command of the situation, is an effective way of flattering those with power over you. Having asked what matters to those with power over you, act on what they tell you.
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20493You can almost always tell at least one aspect of your job performance that will be crucial: do you, in how you conduct yourself, what you talk about, and what you accomplish, make those in power feel better about themselves? The surest way to keep your position and to build a power base is to help those with more power enhance their positive feelings about themselves.
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21501A large literature documents the importance of similarity in predicting interpersonal attraction.17 For instance, people are more likely to marry others whose first or last names resemble their own and, in experiments, are more attracted to people whose arbitrary experimental code numbers were similar to the participants’ actual birthdays.
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22519The lesson: worry about the relationship you have with your boss at least as much as you worry about your job performance. If your boss makes a mistake, see if someone else other than you will point it out. And if you do highlight some error or problem, do so in a way that does not in any way implicate the individual’s own self-concept or competence—for instance, by blaming the error on others or on the situation. The last thing you want to do is be known as someone who makes your boss insecure or have a difficult relationship with those in power.
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23524One of the best ways to make those in power feel better about themselves is to flatter them. The research literature shows how effective flattery is as a strategy to gain influence.19 Flattery works because we naturally come to like people who flatter us and make us feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and being likable helps build influence. Flattery also works because it engages the norm of reciprocity—if you compliment someone, that person owes you something in return just as surely as if you had bought the individual dinner or given a gift—because a compliment is a form of gift. And flattery is effective because it is consistent with the self-enhancement motive that exists in most people.
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24543Most people underestimate the effectiveness of flattery and therefore underutilize it. If someone flatters you, you essentially have two ways of reacting. You can think that the person was insincere and trying to butter you up. But believing that causes you to feel negatively about the person whom you perceive as insincere and not even particularly subtle about it. More importantly, thinking that the compliment is just a strategic way of building influence with you also leads to negative self-feelings—what must others think of you to try such a transparent and false method of influence? Alternatively, you can think that the compliments are sincere and that the flatterer is a wonderful judge of people—a perspective that leaves you feeling good about the person for his or her interpersonal perception skill and great about yourself, as the recipient of such a positive judgment delivered by such a credible source. There is simply no question that the desire to believe that flattery is at once sincere and accurate will, in most instances, leave us susceptible to being flattered and, as a consequence, under the influence of the flatterer. So, don’t underestimate—or underutilize—the strategy of flattery.
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25554As she told me, there might be a point at which flattery became ineffective, but she couldn’t find it in her data.
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26556This chapter has emphasized managing up—both the importance of doing so and some ways of being successful at the task. That’s because your relationship with those in power is critical to your own success. Best-selling author and marketing guru Keith Ferrazzi says that, contrary to what most people think, they are not responsible for their own careers. As he noted, your driving ambition and even your great performance are not going to be sufficient to assure success in a typical hierarchical organization. The people responsible for your success are those above you, with the power to either promote you or to block your rise up the organization chart.
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27601Choreographer Twyla Tharp, the winner of two Emmy Awards and a Tony, in talking about creativity, made a comment that also rings true for developing power and political skill: Obviously, people are born with specific talents…. But I don’t like using genetics as an excuse…. Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work.
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28628The idea is this: when people focus on what they need to get to the next stage of their careers, they are less defensive. This is very clever: focusing on what you need to change to accomplish future personal goals can be much more uplifting than going back and reviewing past setbacks or considering areas of weakness.
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29650Cornell social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning did pathbreaking research about a decade ago showing that people without the requisite knowledge to perform a task successfully also lacked the information and understanding required to know they were deficient, and in what ways.6 For instance, people who scored in the 12th percentile on tests of grammar and logic thought they were in the 62nd percentile. Not only did they overestimate their own performance; they also had difficulty assessing what they had answered correctly and where they had made mistakes, and they could not accurately recognize the relative competence of others.
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30660As Confucius said, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.”
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31672The two fundamental dimensions that distinguish people who rise to great heights and accomplish amazing things are will, the drive to take on big challenges, and skill, the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment. The three personal qualities embodied in will are ambition, energy, and focus. The four skills useful in acquiring power are self-knowledge and a reflective mind-set, confidence and the ability to project self-assurance, the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view, and a capacity to tolerate conflict.
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32678Success requires effort and hard work as well as persistence. To expend that effort, to make necessary sacrifices, requires some driving ambition. The late Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and considered one of the 10 best mayors in American history, did not run for that office until he was 53 years old. “Daley realized early in life that he desired power, and he was willing to wait patiently for the opportunity to exercise it. He spent three decades toiling quietly at the routine jobs of urban machine politics.”
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33686Jill Barad, who rose to become CEO of toy company Mattel, possessed unquenchable ambition. She often wore a bumblebee pin. “The bee is an oddity of nature. It shouldn’t be able to fly, but it does. Every time I see that bee out of the corner of my eye, I am reminded to keep pushing for the impossible.”11
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34703I know of almost no powerful people who do not have boundless energy.
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35726Put some dried grass out in the sun and nothing happens, even on the hottest day. Put the dried grass under a magnifying glass and the grass catches on fire. The sun’s rays, focused, are much more powerful than they are without focus. The same is true for people seeking power.
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36737Melinda has worked for the same credit card company since 2002. She noted that one advantage of staying in one place is that you get to know more people in a single organization, and this deeper knowledge permits you to better exercise power because of the stronger personal relationships you form and your more detailed knowledge of the people you are seeking to influence. Although there is a lot of talk recently about increased career mobility, it remains the case that it is often easier to acquire positions of influence as an insider.
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37751Focus turns out to be surprisingly rare. People are often unwilling or unable to commit themselves to a specific company, industry, or job function. Particularly talented people often have many interests and many opportunities and can’t choose among them. Moreover, they often feel that diversification in their work roles provides some protection against making the wrong choice. That may all be true, but the evidence suggests that you are more likely to acquire power by narrowing your focus and applying your energies, like the sun’s rays, to a limited range of activities in a small number of domains.
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38769There is no learning and personal development without reflection. Andy Hargadon, a business school professor at University of California–Davis, has noted that many people who think they have 20 years of experience really don’t—they just have one year of experience repeated 20 times. Structured reflection takes time. It also requires the discipline to concentrate, make notes, and think about what you are doing. But it is very useful in building a path to power.
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39776With her trainees, Dr. Conley exhibited uncertainty about what to do and asked for their thoughts. But when she walked into the patient’s room, she became a different person. Without denying the seriousness of the situation or glossing over the prognosis, Dr. Conley spoke confidently about what she recommended as a course of treatment. When I later asked her about her changed demeanor, Dr. Conley replied that there is some placebo effect as well as an effect of attitude and spirit on the course of disease; therefore, she did not want the patient to give up or become depressed. Had she expressed self-doubt, the patient might have left to seek treatment elsewhere, from people or facilities less qualified to provide state-of-the-art care.
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40785Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers will associate confident behavior with actually having power. Coming across as confident and knowledgeable helps you build influence.
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41796Showing confidence seems often to be a particular issue for women, who are socialized to be deferential and less assertive. But that behavior causes problems. Research by social psychologist Brenda Major shows that women work longer and harder for the same amount of money, award themselves lower salaries, and have lower career-entry and peak-earnings expectations than men.18 One implication of this research is that because women don’t think they are worth as much, they are disadvantaged in salary negotiations, which is one reason why there are persistent male-female earnings differentials.
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42801The consequences of not being confident and assertive apply to everyone, not just to women, and not just in salary determination. If you aren’t confident about what you deserve and what you want, you will be reluctant to ask or to push, and therefore you will be less successful in obtaining money or influence compared to those who are bolder than you.
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43806This ability to put yourself in another’s place is also useful for acquiring power. One of the sources of Lyndon Johnson’s success as Senate majority leader was his assiduous attention to the details of his 99 colleagues, knowing which ones wanted a private office, who were the drunks, who were the womanizers, who wanted to go on a particular trip—all the mundane details that permitted him to accurately predict how people would vote and figure out what to give each senator to gain his or her support.
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44831There are lots of books and quite a bit of empirical research on the detrimental effects of workplace bullying—the screaming, ranting, profanity, and carrying on that sometimes occur in workplaces—on both the people who are the targets and the organizations in which they work.20 So why does such behavior persist? Because it is often extremely effective for the perpetrator. Because most people are conflict-averse, they avoid difficult situations and difficult people, frequently acceding to requests or changing their positions rather than paying the emotional price of standing up for themselves and their views. If you can handle difficult conflict-and stress-filled situations effectively, you have an advantage over most people.
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45858The research shows that intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance.25 However, intelligence is often overrated as an attribute that will help people obtain power. That’s because intelligence seldom accounts for much more than 20 percent of the variation in work performance in any event, and the relationship between performance and attaining power is equally weak.
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46867Many studies of the predictors of career success, focusing on both the general population and specific subpopulations such as business school graduates, have found that mental aptitude correlates somewhat with grades in school but has virtually no ability to explain who rises to the top. That’s because academic performance is a weak predictor of career success measures such as income.27 To take just one recent example, Justice Sonia Sotomayor scored poorly on the scholastic aptitude tests that measure general academic ability and was admitted to Princeton on the basis of affirmative action. Nonetheless, she graduated from Princeton with academic honors and then reached the highest levels of the law, finally being appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.28 The inability of measures of intelligence to account for much variation in who gets ahead has led to the idea of multiple intelligences and efforts to develop indicators of constructs such as emotional intelligence that might be more useful in accounting for various career success measures.
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47877Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than everyone else. Consequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking. Being recognized as exceptionally smart can cause overconfidence and even arrogance, which, as we will see in more detail later, can lead to the loss of power. And smart people may think that because of their great intelligence they can afford to be less sensitive to others’ needs and feelings. Many of the people who seem to me to have the most difficulty putting themselves in the other’s place are people who are so smart they can’t understand why the others don’t get it. Lastly, intelligence can be intimidating. And although intimidation can work for a while, it is not a strategy that brings much enduring loyalty.
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48896WHERE YOU begin your career affects your rate of progress as well as how far you go. At two University of California campuses, the speed with which professors moved up a civil service–type salary ladder reflected the power of their academic department—those in more powerful departments moved up the salary scale more quickly.1 A study of 338 managers who began their career in a 3,500-employee public utility found that the power of the unit where people began their careers affected the rate of salary growth, with people starting in more powerful units moving up more rapidly.2 That study also found that managers who began their careers in higher-powered departments, such as operations, distribution, and customer service, were more likely to remain in high-power units as they changed jobs.
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49923So if you want to move up quickly, go to underexploited niches where you can develop leverage with less resistance and build a power base in activities that are going to be more important in the near future than they are today.
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501001The Whiz Kids and the finance function at Ford illustrate one source of departmental power—unit cohesion. At Ford’s finance function, there were socialization rituals—running the overhead projector at meetings, preparing briefing books, gathering articles and information—that served the same function as training in the military for the company’s young, up-and-coming executives: imparting some specific skills and knowledge but more importantly building common bonds of communication and trust that come through shared experiences. Speaking with one voice, being able to act together in a coordinated fashion, is an important source of departmental power and effectiveness.9 That’s why the military evaluates leaders in part on the cohesion of their units and why coaches of team sports work so hard to build unity of action and purpose.
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511152Not many people would have the audacity to ask to speak with the head of the firm where they were being hired, and even fewer would ask that individual to have dinner with them once a year. They would be afraid of being turned down, of seeming arrogant or audacious, of creating waves, and plus, that’s not how things are done in the typical recruiting scenario. In chapter 3 we saw that it’s important to know where you want to go—the department you want to be in and the path to power you see for yourself. It’s even more important to be able to get what you want.
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521158People often don’t ask for what they want and are afraid of standing out too much because they worry that others may resent or dislike their behavior, seeing them as self-promoting. You need to get over the idea that you need to be liked by everybody and that likability is important in creating a path to power, and you need to be willing to put yourself forward. If you don’t, who will?
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531190Asking for help is something people often avoid. First of all, it’s inconsistent with the American emphasis on self-reliance. Second, people are afraid of rejection because of what getting turned down might do to their self-esteem. Third, requests for help are based on their likelihood of being granted: why ask for something like a meeting or dinner once a year if you are certain the answer is going to be no? The problem is that people underestimate the chances of others offering help. That’s because those contemplating making a request of another tend to focus on the costs others will incur complying with their request, and don’t emphasize sufficiently the costs of saying no.
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541200Business school professor Frank Flynn and a former doctoral student, Vanessa Lake, studied how much people underestimate others’ compliance with requests for assistance in a series of studies that illustrate how uncomfortable asking for help can be. In one study, participants were asked to estimate how many strangers they would need to approach in order to get 5 people to fill out a short questionnaire. The average estimate was about 20 people. When the participants actually tried to get people to fill out the short questionnaire, they only needed to approach about 10 people on average to get 5 to comply with the request. Asking for some small help from strangers was apparently so uncomfortable that about one in five of the study participants did not complete the task. This dropout rate is much higher than typical in experiments where almost everyone finishes once they agree to participate.
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551215One reason why asking works is that we are flattered to be asked for advice or help—few things are more self-affirming and ego-enhancing than to have others, particularly talented others, seek our aid. When Barack Obama arrived in the U.S. Senate, he built relationships by asking for help. He asked about one-third of the senators for advice and forged mentoring relationships with Tom Daschle, the party’s former Senate leader who had just lost his reelection bid, as well as with Ted Kennedy and Republican senator Richard Lugar. As an article about Obama in the New York Times noted, “His role as a good student earned him the affection of some fellow lawmakers.”5 If you make your request as flattering as possible, compliance is even more likely.
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561234Gupta’s strategy for getting these people’s help was simple: determine who he wanted to be involved in the project and then ask them in a way that enhanced their feelings of self-esteem. Of course, once some prominent people agreed, those who were approached later were flattered to be asked to join such a distinguished group.
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571244Gupta had cleverly noted that he was a fellow entrepreneur and an IIT engineer—albeit one with much less success than the people he was approaching. This strategy works because research shows that people are more likely to accede to requests from others with whom they share even the most casual of connections. Participants in an experiment who believed that they shared a birthday with another person were almost twice as likely to agree to a request to read an eight-page English essay by that person and provide a one-page critique the following day. In a second study, people who believed they shared the same first name as the requester donated twice as much money when asked to give to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
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581272Many people believe that they can stand out and be bold once they become successful and earn the right to do things differently. But once you are successful and powerful, you don’t need to stand out or worry about the competition. It’s early in your career when you are seeking initial positions that differentiating yourself from the competition is most important.
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591275When Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Prize–winning secretary of state and national security adviser, joined the Harvard undergraduate class of 1950 as a sophomore in 1947, he was surrounded by talented peers. As Walter Isaacson described in his biography, Kissinger sought the sponsorship of William Elliott, a pillar of the Government Department. On the basis of his grades, Kissinger was entitled to have a senior faculty member as his tutor, but Elliott brushed him off as he did many others, giving him 25 books to read and telling him not to return until he had completed a difficult essay assignment. Kissinger read the books, completed the essay, and got Elliott to take him under his wing. Elliott’s sponsorship proved important in his academic career. Later, Kissinger wrote an undergraduate honors thesis of some 383 pages, resulting in a rule that specified that, in the future, no undergraduate thesis could be more than 100 pages and informally known as the “Kissinger rule.”
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601301In advertising, the concept of standing out to become memorable is called “brand recall,” which is an important measure of advertising effectiveness. What works for products can work for you too—you need to be interesting and memorable and able to stand out in ways that cause others to want to know you and get close to you.
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611308In every war in the last 200 years conducted between unequally matched opponents, the stronger party won about 72 percent of the time. However, when the underdogs understood their weakness and used a different strategy to minimize its effects, they won some 64 percent of the time, cutting the dominant party’s likelihood of victory in half. As Gladwell noted, “When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win.”11 So, if you have all the power you want or need, by all means not only follow the rules but encourage everyone else to do so too. But if you are still traversing your path to power, take all this conventional wisdom and “rule-following” stuff with a big grain of salt.
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621345What this research implies is that people’s support for you will depend as much on whether or not you seem to be “winning” as on your charm or ability.
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631346When writer Gary Weiss profiled Timothy Geithner, who was then the up-and-coming president of the New York Federal Reserve, “some of the nation’s most prominent figures in government and finance—former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, as well as John Thain, then CEO of Merrill Lynch, and former New York Fed chief Gerald Corrigan—were only too happy to share fond anecdotes about this youthful public official.” But things changed in the fall of 2008, when Geithner became Obama’s secretary of the Treasury and ran into trouble as the financial meltdown unfolded: “When I approached them [these same prominent figures] again for this article, to get a word of defense of their beleaguered friend, the reaction was far different.”
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641366Research shows that attitudes follow behavior—that if we act in a certain way, over time our attitudes follow. For example, if we act friendly toward an adversary whose help we need, we will come to feel more friendly as well. There are many theoretical mechanisms that account for this effect. One holds that people infer their own attitudes from their behavior—or as Michigan professor Karl Weick put it, “I know what I think when I see what I say.” Another is Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, which argues that people seek to avoid inconsistency, and one way of accomplishing that is to adjust their attitudes to be consistent with their behaviors.20 What this implies is that if we interact with powerful people because we need them to do some task or to help us in our career, over time we will come to like them more or at least forgive their rough edges. And in choosing who we will associate with, usefulness to our career and job loom as important criteria.
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651424Resources are great because once you have them, maintaining power becomes a self-reinforcing process. CEOs of larger companies with more resources can afford to hire high-priced compensation consultants who, big surprise, recommend pay policies that favor the CEOs who hired them. People with money or with control over organizational money get appointed to various for-profit and nonprofit boards where they are in contact with others who have business and investment ideas and social and political influence.
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661451I had lunch with a very senior managing partner at a venture capital firm as she was stepping down from the firm to spend more time with her family following a long and successful career in that company. She commented that once she announced her retirement, not only did her colleagues behave differently toward her, no longer inviting her to meetings and seeking her advice as often, but her time was less in demand by colleagues in the high-technology and venture capital communities more generally. Her wisdom and experience hadn’t changed—the only difference was her soon-to-be-diminished control over investment resources and positions in the venture capital firm. The loss of personal importance and power that occurs when you leave a position with substantial resource control is why, as Jeffrey Sonnenfeld documented in his book The Hero’s Farewell, many CEOs who have enjoyed a lot of fawning attention because of their position have great trouble stepping down from that role.
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671460“But,” you may say, “I’m just starting out,” or “I’m mired in some midlevel job,” or “I’m involved in a serious competition for promotion to a position of more influence. If I had control over lots of jobs and budget, I wouldn’t need to read about how to get power—I would already have it!” True enough. But there are numerous examples of people who have made something out of almost nothing. They understood that building a power base is a process of accumulating leverage and resource control little by little over time. It’s important to be able to see or even create opportunities that others may miss—and even more important to have the patience and persistence to follow through on those opportunities.
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681471A resource is anything people want or need—money, a job, information, social support and friendship, help in doing their job. There are always opportunities to provide these things to others whose support you want. Helping people out in almost any fashion engages the norm of reciprocity—the powerful, almost universal behavioral principle that favors must be repaid. But people do not precisely calculate how much value they have received from another and therefore what they owe in return. Instead, helping others generates a more generalized obligation to return the favor, and as a consequence, doing even small things can produce a comparatively large payoff.
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691478One of the most amazing things about Willie Brown’s rise to power in the California Assembly was that he originally got the job because of the support of numerous conservative Republican legislators who were elected after a tax-cutting initiative and swept into power with President Ronald Reagan. Brown received this support even though he was best known for promoting legislation to relax the penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana and decriminalizing homosexual activity. The source of the bond: when conservative Republican legislators got together for lunch, they talked about how Brown, at the time the chairman of a powerful committee, treated them fairly, gave them a chance to speak, listened to their points, and occasionally even agreed with them.5 Being nice to people is effective because people find it difficult to fight with those who are being polite and courteous.
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701573In 1971 Klaus Schwab was a 32-year-old Swiss university graduate with doctoral degrees in economics and engineering. He might have followed the conventional academic route of doing research and publishing as a career strategy. Instead, he saw an opportunity to organize a meeting, the European Business Forum, made up of European business leaders concerned with the growing American economic success. Out of that modest beginning came the World Economic Forum, an organization with a staff of more than 100 running meetings all over the world, with Schwab at the head. Its budget is over $100 million per year, his wife and son are on the board and involved in the foundation, and because of his leadership of the forum, Schwab has received six honorary doctoral degrees and a number of lucrative positions on corporate boards of directors.8 Although journalists, academics, and nonprofit leaders get in free, companies pay dearly—membership in the World Economic Forum costs $39,000, and there is a charge of $20,000 to attend the large annual meeting in Davos, where there are panel discussions by prominent people from the worlds of government, business, and the arts as well as lots of private meetings and dinners. Schwab recognized that global business and political leaders needed a forum to exchange ideas and do business in one convenient place, the media needed access to these people, and everyone needed ideas about the changing economy and social issues. As a former managing director of the WEF commented, “Contacts ultimately mean contracts.”
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711585Power accrues to people who control resources that others cannot access.
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721587The World Economic Forum is a great venue bringing influential people together, but they don’t want or need many such places or meetings because they have limited time. Once Karen started her summits, or Ivan began his public–sector, public-policy lectures at the consulting firm, there was no need for others to do so and almost no possibility that a competing effort would get much traction. So, doing what these examples illustrate often works if you are first off the mark. And taking initiative to create resources by finding speakers, organizing meetings, making connections, and creating venues where people can readily meet others, learn interesting things, and do business brings appreciation for your efforts, even as you create the resources to help you on your path to power.
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731615Two German professors, Hans-Georg Wolff and Klaus Moser, offer a good definition of networking: “Behaviors that are aimed at building, maintaining, and using informal relationships that possess the (potential) benefit of facilitating work-related activities of individuals by voluntarily gaining access to resources and maximizing…advantages.”
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741661Thus, the study by the German academics Wolff and Moser is particularly informative because of its longitudinal design. They measured networking behavior in October 2001 and then did follow-up surveys late in 2002 and 2003 with more than 200 employees in Germany. Their measures of career success were total compensation and a career satisfaction scale. Networking affected career satisfaction, concurrent salary, and salary growth over time, with the two most important networking behaviors being “maintaining external contacts” and “building internal contacts.”
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751672We have previously discussed at least one mechanism that makes networking important for career success—salience. You can’t select what you can’t remember, and that includes professional advisers, candidates for leadership positions, or job applicants. The effect of mere exposure on preference and choice is important and well demonstrated. Networking brings you into contact with more people and keeps you in contact with them, thereby increasing the chances that when they need advice, want to find an investment partner, or are thinking of a candidate for some position, they will remember you. Thus, effective networking creates a virtuous cycle. Networking makes you more visible; this visibility increases your power and status; and your heightened power and status then make building and maintaining social contacts easier.
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761713Ignacio, an Argentinean who graduated from a prestigious U.S. business school, did what many such graduates do—he went to work for the office of a large, high-status management consulting company back in his home country. But he did one thing that distinguished him from many of his colleagues in the firm or, for that matter, in the country: in June 2007, he set up an “MBA en USA” network and website in Argentina with the goal of increasing the number of Argentinean applicants and students in top U.S. schools—the institutions that supply guaranteed financing for those admitted to the program. In two years, he has recruited almost 400 members, with a 10-person board of directors; made presentations in three universities; and become the reference person for Argentineans pursuing U.S. business education opportunities. When he began this network, it consisted of one person, himself. Because he had neither great credentials nor high status, he involved others with high status, including those from his consulting firm and alumni of leading U.S. business schools living and working in Argentina, in his presentations and efforts. The results: Ignacio has become known in his office as a great speaker who is good at coaching others; he has substantially enhanced his visibility and built many more connections not just in Argentina but with the leading consulting firms in the United States; and he is at the center of an expanding network of companies, universities, students, and alumni. Not bad, for a very part-time and inexpensive initiative.
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771731Another barrier that seems to stand in the way of networking is that people naturally fall into habits, and one habit is interacting with the same set of people all the time. You get comfortable with them, you come to trust them, and it is easier and more pleasant to interact with people you already know than to build relationships with strangers. So go out of your way to meet new people. Katie works at an executive recruiting company. Executive recruiting assignments come, in part, from the human resources department. To build a network of HR managers and to meet more people to help her in her job, Katie organized short seminars in which participants would read and listen to and then discuss ideas from thought leaders in managing people. Her very first meeting was a big success, with lots of participants, a lively discussion, and the creation of an ongoing forum that will be very useful for Katie in her current job and in building relationships useful to her future career. Once again, not that much work. All that was required was some initiative and being willing to reach out to strangers—to get out of one’s comfort zone.
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781742Granovetter found that social ties were important in the job-finding process and the more one used social ties, as contrasted with less personal mechanisms such as formal applications, the better the job the individual found. He also found that the process used to fill jobs differed by job type: managerial jobs were more likely to be found through personal contacts rather than through more formal means such as responding to newspaper advertisements or making a formal application, whereas lower-level or even well-paid but technical jobs tended to rely on more formal means of hiring. What was surprising was the type of social ties that mattered in the job-finding process: weak ties.8 Strong ties are typically with family, friends, and close associates at work and involve frequent interaction. Weak ties are with casual acquaintances, people you hardly know and with whom you have fairly infrequent interactions.
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791766Joel Podolny, a sociologist who was former dean of the business school at Yale and currently heads Apple University, asked an interesting question about investment banks: because high-status investment banks have cost advantages deriving from their status (as just one example, they can raise money at lower cost than lower-status and presumably riskier banks), why don’t they dominate the market for both equity and debt securities, over time taking away most of the business from their lower-status competitors? His answer, from an empirical study of the investment banking industry, is that higher-status banks are constrained from “moving down” and capturing more of the market because in doing so, they would have to associate with lower-status securities issuers and, as a result, lose at least some of their status advantage.9
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801773One way to acquire status is to start an organization that is so compelling in its mission that high-status people join the project and you build both status and a network of important relationships. That’s what Philippe did in Mexico. Mexico is a highly stratified society and many of the people who do manual and unskilled labor have little education. Because of these educational deficits, people cannot get better jobs and are consigned to a life of poverty. Philippe started a foundation to educate unskilled workers, mostly in the construction industry, which is a large employer of unskilled and semiskilled labor. The social importance of such an activity attracted the most prestigious professor from his engineering school and a board that consisted of some of the top social entrepreneurs in Mexico. Because the foundation’s work focused mostly on construction workers, Philippe got access to the best people in the real estate industry, and these social contacts have opened numerous real estate career opportunities as well as built a large and influential network of people from both the private sector and the government. As Philippe explained, he was both doing good and doing well.
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811809One way of building centrality is through physical location. A person I know took a job at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm as an analyst, a low-level position. When he started at the company, he had two options as to where to locate his desk: a large cubicle in the corner that was quiet but outside of the flow of traffic, or a small workstation outside the named partner’s office, which had no walls and no privacy. Almost by chance he chose the location outside the partner’s office. Because of his location, he knew what was going on in the firm and interacted with the numerous people coming by to see the partners. As he noted, “Within just a few months of starting, at the weekly Monday morning all-hands meeting, nearly every question began to be pointed in my direction. The net of it was that I was the first analyst in the firm’s history to be invited for a position after graduation.”
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821817Consequently, groups that might gain from interacting with other groups don’t do so, because group members are more comfortable associating with the people in their own group. This natural tendency to associate with those close to us creates an opportunity for profiting by building brokerage relations—or, to use the terminology of University of Chicago business school professor Ronald Burt, by bridging the structural holes that exist between noninteracting groups.13 The fundamental idea is deceptively simple: by connecting units that are tightly linked internally but socially isolated from each other, the person doing the connecting can profit by being the intermediary who facilitates interactions between the two groups.
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831839People sometimes believe that if they are connected to someone else who occupies a good brokerage position, they can achieve almost as much benefit. However, Ron Burt found that this intuition was not accurate. People even one step removed from the person doing the brokerage enjoyed virtually no benefit.14 To return to the Japanese electric utility example, while Kenji enjoys many benefits from his network position, someone who is connected to Kenji profits very little. You have to do the network “work” yourself if you want to accrue the benefits.
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841876But Oliver North knew how to act and speak with power. These abilities would produce an amazing effect on his reputation and his subsequent career. North defended himself and his actions by appealing to a higher purpose—protecting American interests, saving American lives, protecting important U.S. intelligence secrets, following the orders of his superiors, and doing what he was told to do as a good Marine lieutenant colonel—in short, being a good soldier. North wore his ribbon-decorated uniform to the hearings, even though he was seldom if ever in uniform at his job at the NSC. He took responsibility for what he did, saying that he was “not embarrassed” about his actions or about appearing to explain them. And he asserted that he had controlled what had occurred, frequently using phrases such as “I told” and “I caused.” This phrasing demonstrated that he was not running away from what he had done. Observers watching people who don’t deny or run away from their actions naturally presume that the perpetrators don’t feel guilty or ashamed, so maybe no one should be too upset. This phrasing also communicated power, that North was in charge rather than a “victim” of circumstance.
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851928Although the research literature shows the interview is not a reliable or valid selection mechanism, it is almost universally used. And the impressions people make as they talk to others matter for their likelihood of getting a job offer or a promotion. It may not seem right that we are judged on our “appearance,” on how we present ourselves and our ideas. But the world isn’t always a just place. To come across effectively, we need to master how to convey power. We need to act, and speak, with power.
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861944Peter Ueberroth, Time magazine’s man of the year for his success running the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and former commissioner of major-league baseball, has a favorite maxim: Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken.6 Words to live by. If you are going to take power, you need to project confidence, as the case of Oliver North and the Walmart job candidates illustrate. You need to project assurance even if—or maybe particularly if—you aren’t sure what you’re doing.
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871948Andy Grove, a cofounder and former CEO and chairman of the semiconductor company Intel, has appropriate modesty about his (or anyone’s) ability to forecast the technological future. In reply to a question at a Silicon Valley forum about how to lead if you aren’t sure where you or your company is going, Grove replied: Well, part of it is self-discipline and part of it is deception. And the deception becomes reality. Deception in the sense that you pump yourself up and put a better face on things than you start off feeling. But after a while, if you act confident, you become more confident. So the deception becomes less of a deception.
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881972Gary Loveman, CEO of the casino company Harrah’s Entertainment, understands that because many employees may see him only once in a year, he needs to be “on” when he is in front of them. Even in momentary interactions, Loveman must convey that employees work in a company led by caring, engaged people they can trust. Even if he is tired or feeling ill, in public appearances Loveman radiates energy and competitive intensity—and this competitive vitality has helped make Harrah’s successful.
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891990Barack Obama’s chief of staff, former Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel, is known for his temper. In his New Yorker portrait of Emanuel, Ryan Lizza observes: Emanuel seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents…but never quite losing himself in the midst of battle…. Greenberg [an old friend] argues that Emanuel’s antics have been integral to his success. “Understand that the caricature and the mythology have always been helpful,” Greenberg said. “Sending the [dead] fish to the pollster that he thought had failed sent a message about how public he can be about his displeasure, and showed that he’s willing to step beyond the normal bounds, that he’s willing to be outrageous and he doesn’t suffer fools.”
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902007In another series of experimental studies, Tiedens showed that people actually conferred more status on people who expressed anger rather than sadness. One study had participants watch two video clips from former president Clinton’s testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In one clip he appeared angry, and in the other he hung his head and averted his gaze, typical for someone expressing guilt and remorse. People who viewed the anger clip were significantly more pro-Clinton in their attitudes. They believed it showed he was a person in power compared to those who saw him acting sad.
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912044There is evidence that taller people earn more and are more likely to occupy high power positions.20 There is also ample evidence that physical attractiveness results in higher earnings.21 You don’t need to wear lifts in your shoes or get plastic surgery to act on these findings. You can do a lot with what you have. You can dress up, an act that conveys power and status—to look like you belong in the position to which you aspire. You can do things with your hair, the style of the clothes you wear, and colors to enhance your appearance. Get professional help in enhancing the influence you convey by how you look.
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922050When Bill English, actor, director, and cofounder of the San Francisco Playhouse, teaches people how to “act with power,” he often critiques their posture. When people are nervous or uncomfortable, they often shrink in on themselves, caving in their chest, folding their arms around them, going into what are essentially defensive postures. Bad idea if you want to project power. Everyone can stand up straight rather than slouching, and can thrust their chest and pelvis forward rather than curling in on themselves. Moving forward and toward someone is a gesture that connotes power, as does standing closer to others, while turning your back or retreating signals the opposite.
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932055Gestures can also connote power and decisiveness, or their opposite. Moving your hands in a circle or waving your arms diminishes how powerful you appear. Gestures should be short and forceful, not long and circular. Looking people directly in the eye connotes not only power but also honesty and directness, while looking down is a signal of diffidence. Looking away causes others to think you are dissembling.