Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Success began with preparation.

intentionally let the engineers try to do things that she knew how to do proficiently—such as making presentations and doing financial projections—so they could see these tasks weren’t as easy as they thought.

The issue, as she explained it to me, was her unwillingness to play organizational politics, or at least to do so with the consistent focus and energy and maybe even the relentlessness evidenced in Anne’s story.

haven’t been willing to be mean enough or calculating enough or to sacrifice things I believed in order to be successful, at least as success is often measured.”

being politically savvy and seeking power are related to career success and even to managerial performance. For

Gerald Ferris of Florida State University and colleagues have developed an eighteen-item political skills inventory.

look this up an try it out

You can compete and even triumph in organizations of all types, large and small, public or private sector, if you understand the principles of power and are willing to use them.

power is part of leadership and is necessary to get things done—whether

To be effective in figuring out your path to power and to actually use what you learn, you must first get past three major obstacles. The first two are the belief that the world is a just place and the hand-me-down formulas on leadership that largely reflect this misguided belief. The third obstacle is yourself.

it hinders people’s ability to learn from all situations and all people, even those whom they don’t like or respect.

damn. i know I've done this...

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.

this belief that the world is a just place anesthetizes people to the need to be proactive in building a power base.

This latter effect creates the frequently observed phenomenon of “blaming the victim,” in which people find things that justify the bad events that happen to targets of crimes or corporate misfortunes.

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.

Most CEOs are not the level 5 leaders described by Jim Collins in Good to Great as helping to take companies up the performance curve—individuals who are “self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy,” who get the best out of employees by not soaking up all the limelight and making all the decisions.15 The rarity of such leaders may be why so few organizations go from good to great. And even Collins begins his story when these paragons were already in the CEO position—the road to the top may require different behavior than being successful once you have arrived.

People distort reality.

What you should trust is the social science research that provides help on how to acquire power, hold on to it, and use it. And you should trust your own experience: Watch those around you who are succeeding, those who are failing, and those who are just treading water. Figure out what’s different about them and what they are doing differently. That’s a great way to build your diagnostic skill—something useful in becoming an organizational survivor.

Similarly, if someone doesn’t actively seek a powerful position, the fact that he or she doesn’t obtain it will not signal some personal shortcoming or failure but instead a conscious choice.

Beth’s apparent unwillingness to “play the power game” protects her from the self-esteem consequences of possibly failing in that effort.

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. Keep this idea about self-handicapping in mind as you read this book—you will be more open-minded about the content and also more likely to actually try some of the things you learn.

The absence of practice or efforts to achieve influence may help you maintain a good view of yourself, but it won’t help you get to the top.

There is only one way to become more effective in building power and using influence: practice.

it’s not just in the public sector where there is a weak link between job performance and career outcomes. The world of business offers numerous cases,

A marketing executive in India asked her CEO to formally recommend her for a list of “high potential leaders” in the organization, which would be accompanied by getting paid more than 30 percent higher than peers at the same level and becoming eligible for assignments more likely to advance her career. This request came just after she had been instrumental in turning around a distressed brand, had been nominated for an internal marketing award, and after she won an external advertising award at the Indian equivalent of the Cannes film festival. Her request was refused, past outstanding performance notwithstanding.

Really sounds lkkeshe should take her tlents somewhers fhat will vlue her skills and maks fhe dippydoo ru the day and shortsightedness

The 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.

Well that's just goddam bleak. Is there no place for morals and principles?

The data shows that performance doesn’t matter that much for what happens to most people in most organizations.

sadly mny kbservatikns over a decade bring this to life for me

commitment—once someone has made a positive or negative judgment about a potential job candidate, that judgment colors subsequent performance appraisals.

this research means is that job performance matters less for your evaluation than your supervisor’s commitment to and relationship with you.

A 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.9

And while Phil’s boss was quite willing to expand Phil’s scope of responsibility for IT implementation in his division, he was completely unwilling to do anything that would bring Phil to the attention of others and thereby risk losing him.

am i somehow foolish for never engaging in this sort of behavior?

Turnover in senior executive ranks was affected by CEO turnover, particularly when an outsider came in. That’s because CEOs like to put loyalists in senior positions—regardless of what past incumbents have accomplished.

true in pklitics as welk as business

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.

importance of standing out contradicts much conventional wisdom.

I've always termed it "stand out don't stick out"

people like what they remember—and that includes you!

No one is going to perform equally well on all the dimensions of their work. What you can do is consistently emphasize those aspects on which you do well.

a board member who provided data showing Chris’s company was losing market share to competitors. But Chris had defined performance criteria in a way that made him look good.

One of the reasons that performance matters less than people expect is that performance has many dimensions.

what matters to your boss may not be the same things that you think are important.

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.

Having asked what matters to those with power over you, act on what they tell you.

The 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.

this is really distastefuul. i have a hard enough ime getting honest feedback from my folks.

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.

First, you must come to believe that personal change is possible;

Second, you need to see yourself and your strengths and weaknesses as objectively as possible.

third, you need to understand the most important qualities for building a power base so you can focus your inevitably limited time and attention on developing those.

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.

he focuses on “feedforward,” which emphasizes what people need to do to get ready for the subsequent positions and career challenges they will confront.

when people focus on what they need to get to the next stage of their careers, they are less defensive.

Even if you are willing to do the emotionally tough work of being clinically objective about your strengths and weaknesses, you may not have the requisite expertise to know how or what to improve. Simply put, knowing what you’re doing wrong requires already having some level of knowledge and skill—and if you had the knowledge and skill to recognize your mistakes, you probably wouldn’t be making them in the first place!

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.