The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond-and what to do about it

by Henry Cloud

Relationship affects our physical and mental functioning throughout life. This invisible power, the power of the other, builds both the hardware and the software that leads to healthy functioning and better performance.

Improve your techniques, your thinking, your strategies and skills. Intensify your discipline. Clarify your goals, your commitment, your communication. There are many other skills, tactics, strategies, competencies, and abilities that you must increase and improve in order to get there. In short, the message is “You can do it! You can get more by getting better.” Learn more, do this, think differently, lead in a different way. You can succeed by being a better you.

Ask many people about their greatest accomplishments and challenges overcome, and you will find one thing in common: there was someone on the other end who made it possible.

This book represents a major shift in the conversation on leadership, growth, and high performance. I want to shift the conversation from a focus only on you (i.e., here is how you can develop yourself) to a recognition that your own performance is either improved or diminished by the other people in your scenario. They hold power. Whereas most leadership advice and most business books focus on how you lead others, how you perform, and how you build your skills and competencies, this book will focus on the people—those others—who affect you and on the power you have as an other for them.

how well you do in life and in business depends not only on what you do and how you do it, your skills and competencies, but also on who is doing it with you or to you.

Probably the shortest phrase that concludes this book

You don’t have a choice about whether or not others have power in your life. They do. But you do have a choice as to what kind of power others are going to have.

Other people play a role at every step. They influence you as much as you influence them. How you manage this power is the difference between winning and losing, between succeeding and failing to thrive. Whom you trust, whom you don’t, what you get from others, and how you deal with them will determine everything. You can’t master people, but you can become a master at choosing and dealing with people.

When you get the power of the other on your side, you can surpass whatever limit you are currently experiencing or will ever experience in the future.

the relationship must be the right kind of relationship, more than just hanging out with pals. The relationship must provide very specific functions and very specific energy; it must deliver very specific constructive experiences and encode very specific information within the brains of those in the relationship. The right kinds of relationships wire us for resilience and success.

The right kind of relationship helped out. It is incomplete to say relationship is sufficient

Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind (New York: Norton, 2012).

The three elements that form the triangle of well-being work together to build, drive, create, and regulate our functioning and performance. What are the three? They are our brain/body (the physical), our relational connections, and our minds, which regulate the energy and information needed to live and perform.

serotonin

This is why you can feel very differently and perform very differently, depending on whom you are with and what is going on in that relationship. Moreover, it is in relationships that our minds are actually built. These relationships affect not only our bodies and brains, but our mind’s abilities as well.

If the relationships are positive, attuned, empathic, caring, supportive, and challenging, then they cause positive development in the brain and increase performance capacities. If they are not quality connections, they either cause nothing to happen when something should be happening, or bad things to be built into us when they shouldn’t be—“bugs,” such as an overreactive brain, distrust, squirrelly thinking, an inability to focus and attend, impulsivity, controlling behavior, sensitivity to failure, and other liabilities that interfere with our performance.

To get to the next level of performance, you certainly do have to think differently, but to think differently, you have to have a different mind, and your brain has to fire differently. To develop these differences in your mind and brain, the equipment in which thoughts and feelings and behaviors are embodied, you need to connect in ways that rewire you.

If you are trying to reach a goal, do you focus only on your strategy, or on whom you are going to engage to help you get there?

In the rest of this book, we will look at the effects of specific kinds of relationships and how they help or hinder us in getting past whatever our current limit might be.

But without a connection to the right network, that little device will never be able to do everything it was designed to do.

Humans are like nodes in a neural network. The brain is powerful not because of single neurons but the connections between them.

Then it got worse. The chairman went on to explain that the CEO was like an island. Even though he would be “out there” making presentations and interacting around the company, no one really felt that they could get close to him. When the board would try to give input, he’d often just shut down and close himself off. His executive team felt that he really wasn’t part of his own team. He didn’t engage with them or seek their input much at all. Then it started to affect his decision making. He moved further afield from the goals the team and the board had set and started pursuing his own private agenda—without any input. He ended up costing the company a lot of time and money to mend fences and get out of shaky deals. It was clear the CEO had to go.

How not to be a ceo: don't network

1. Disconnected, No Connection 2. The Bad Connection 3. The Pseudo-Good Connection 4. True Connection

The strength of a connection between the neurons affect how useful the network is.

Disconnection lacks something, in one direction or the other—either in the giving or the receiving. Truly connected people do both. They are emotionally present and able to give and to receive.

Under disconnected leaders, decision making tends to be done in isolation, either solely by the leaders or in organizational silos that they build or foster.

This model of “closed system” leadership does exactly what all closed systems do: it gets worse over time.

Adapt to environmental changes, feed forward learning

For whatever reasons, life has taught you that you have to do things on your own. In very practical ways, you do not allow yourself to need anyone. And although you care about others and give to them, you are disconnected from your own needs. You are giving—sometimes a lot—but you are not taking much in. It’s easy for you to help others but difficult for you to allow them to help you, especially emotionally.

Worse than that, leadership roles can drive someone into Corner One. How many times have we heard that it’s lonely at the top? Many leaders do feel alone, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and the best leaders create conditions that help them avoid being pulled into Corner One. Certainly some aspects of leadership require making tough decisions, being the one who owns it, the place where the buck stops. But leadership isn’t supposed to be lonely or isolated. When it is, something is wrong, and it can be fixed.

Corner Number One, the corner of disconnection, does not mean that you might not be a people person. Nor does it necessarily mean that you don’t have people in your life or that you might not be helping a lot of others. Lots of people in Corner One seem to be people persons, constantly helping others. It does mean that it’s all coming from you. You might be giving to others and having a lot of others around you, but you are not connecting to them so that anyone is there for you, in the deepest ways that you need them. This is a recipe for burnout and diminished or limited performance at best, and failing or derailing at worst.

Do you want to know how you’re doing if you’re in Corner Number One? Here are the signs to look out for: Clinical: Increased stress; lower energy levels, concentration, and motivation; problems sleeping; lowered libido; increased fear and anxiety; increased levels of suspicion, distrust, and resentment; loss of hope and purpose. Relational: Not feeling as connected to others as you once did—even at home and in your personal life, more isolation, detachment from those you care most about, conflicts with those you’re close to, shortness of temper, lack of patience, anger, or just not wanting to be involved or around others. Loss of interest in relationship, in being with people. Disappointment with relationship itself, and a feeling of just being cut off. Performance: Not getting the results you need and feeling as if it all depends upon you to do so; not being able to get “on top of it all,” procrastination, disorganization, lack of clarity about goals, feeling bogged down by tasks someone else should be doing, diminished focus.

Corner Number Two, the Bad Connection, is not necessarily a connection with a bad or abusive person, although it may be. Instead, it is a connection, preoccupation, or pull toward a person who has the effect of making you feel bad or “not good enough” in some way. Inferior. Defective perhaps. As though something is wrong with you. Somehow this person or persons have come to have the power in your life of making you feel bad.

they have the power to make you feel bad.

What happens then? Your leadership, energy, well-being, focus, and passion get diverted and diminished. You start playing defense, trying to catch up. You try to get back to even, to a place where the other person will feel good about you again and you can feel good about yourself, so you spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about being good enough in that person’s eyes.

You become more concerned with gaining someone’s approval than with the performance itself. Simply stated, when that is happening, you have become less of you.

It doesn’t even take a boss or another person to drive you into Corner Two; you end up there all by yourself. You can even do it in your car driving alone! That happens when your primary connection is with an internal judge who has lived inside your head for a long time—perhaps someone from your formative years or a significant other from your past. The message implanted by that person becomes the one your chip seems to always connect to, getting a response that leaves you feeling not good enough, playing defense. By comparing yourself to some unrealistic, nonexistent standard, you’re always failing.

Team members, especially executive team members, lose respect with this kind of leader and eventually lose heart. Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with team members who’ve expressed these sentiments about their leader. “I wish he would just stop wanting people to like him, and just take charge. It seems like a few other people around here have somehow usurped his authority, or at least his influence. They have more power than he does . . . even though he has the leadership position. We need him to step up and lead.”

Many people think their way up the ladder of success is to flatter their leaders. While this is a death trap for both, for the leader it is often a drug with an extra-strong appeal, and an extra-strong diminishing effect: it actually makes the leader dependent on the people he or she is leading.

Corners One and Two are downers, but Corner Three lets the good times roll. It’s fun. High energy. Electric at times. The person or leader who is experiencing Corner Three is on an endorphin high.

The feeling that their leader doesn’t want to hear any bad news doesn’t wear well. The leader—or the spouse, for that matter—who doesn’t want to hear any criticism or disagreement with his or her ideas loses respect after a while. The connection runs shallow, and the shielded one looks out of touch, shallow, and self-centered.

In the simplest terms, a real connection is one in which you can be your whole self, the real, authentic you, a relationship to which you can bring your heart, mind, soul, and passion. Both parties to the relationship are wholly present, known, understood, and mutually invested. What each truly thinks, feels, believes, fears, and needs can be shared safely. On the best teams, in business or in war, this is what happens. And in the best lives. No matter where you are or what obstacles you might be facing, you need your connections in order to win. They help you figure out where you are, where you need to go, where the real enemies are; they give you the reinforcements you need to win. That’s what it means when someone “has your back.”

This is what it means to have a real connection

The true self is who you really are, and the false self is the mask that we put on to protect ourselves.

Be yourself at all times.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair once told me that one of the most difficult aspects of leadership was “the face.” When I asked him what that meant, he said Bill Clinton had told him that each and every day, no matter what you are going through and how bad it is, the leader has to put on “the face”—the face of hope, strength, optimism. People are looking to the leader, he said, for all of those things, and you have to deliver confidence, no matter where you may be on the inside. The public face of leadership goes with the territory. And he’s right. People need to see hope and strong determination in the faces of their leaders. Fine . . . as long as you know it’s something you’re putting on for a moment because your people need it. It also has to be real. You have to truly believe in what you are saying and must in no way be lying. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have other feelings as well—feelings like fear, discouragement, or frustration that are tucked away behind the face in that moment. The question for the leader is this: Where can you go without the mask?

need a safe place to nurse their wounds, to be restored, and to let down their guard and be real. Too many leaders think that these two faces of leadership are incompatible, but as we have seen, the search for connection never ends. Everyone needs a buddy; we all need to be able to express our needs and know that they will be heard and met, that we will be relieved.

This is like alcohol anonymous

Nothing in his plan, I observed, suggested how he would be receiving any help for his needs or meeting them in any way. The entire plan was about expressing strength and nothing about building strength. It was as if a car runs out of gas, and the remedy is for the car to give itself some “self-gas” and drive better.

real encouragement comes when you are feeling discouraged, weak, or down, and need help from someone else. In the absence of that, Liam had gone looking for comfort and connection in all the wrong places, in the arms of a lot of women.

The truth is that you are who you are, highly successful in that arena, because the power of other people has helped you get there. But in those areas, it was a lot easier for you to show vulnerability. No one expects a first-year resident to know how to do a heart transplant. It was easier for you to ask for help. And I’m positive that your patients are glad you’re not a ‘self-made surgeon.’ You learned from the best. Now you just have to figure out how to do that same thing in the rest of your life, and not be a ‘self-made human.’”

I was going to have to find recovery in a different mode of thinking that required me to face my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and reach outside for help.”

When your struggles are no longer a secret, a problem that only you are addressing, you can find solutions and support through others’ words of encouragement.

Corner Four is a place where people have true connection, where they can be authentic—not copied, not false or imitation, as Webster’s defines authentic. When you can find a place to be authentic, you gain access to the resources that have been wanting. Finally, the fuel and fulfillment can get to the need.

“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.”

Henry Ford had Thomas Edison. Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs. Bill Gates had Warren Buffet and Ed Roberts. Jack Nicklaus had Jack Grout. Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson. Bill Hewlett and David Packard had Frederick Terman. Sheryl Sandberg had Larry Summers.

There is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. Every great leader has opened up to someone who could meet a need, whatever that might have been. The range of human needs is broad, but the way to meet those needs is very narrow: it involves humbly and honestly embracing the need and reaching out to the “power of the other.” There is no other way.

the leaders who accomplish the most, thrive the most, overcome the most are not afraid to say they need help.