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

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

boss insecure or have a difficult relationship with those in power.

you, with the power to either promote you or to block your rise up the organization chart. And there are always people above you, regardless of your position. Therefore, your job is to ensure that those influential others have a strong desire to make you successful. That may entail doing a good job. But it may also entail ensuring that those in power notice the good work that you do, remember you, and think well of you because you make them feel good about themselves. It is performance, coupled with political skill, that will help you rise through the ranks. Performance by itself is seldom sufficient, and in some instances, may not even be necessary.

Goldsmith, in his work with high-level executives, who mostly have huge egos, has tried to develop coaching techniques that mitigate the natural human tendency to first avoid and then reject any information about our deficiencies. For instance, instead of giving people feedback about what they have done right and wrong in the past, he focuses on “feedforward,” which emphasizes what people need to do to get ready for the subsequent positions and career challenges they will confront. The 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. I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but just as

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. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem: get advice from others who are more skilled than you and will tell you the truth about yourself. Unfortunately, asking for this sort of help sometimes feels like weakness and people are reluctant to admit what they do not know—that self-enhancement thing again. Ironically, therefore, those who admit ignorance are more likely to improve—in all domains, including understanding power dynamics inside companies—than those who either don’t know their deficiencies or are afraid to admit them to others. As Confucius said, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.” And to be able to improve requires sharing this information with others who can help remedy the lack of knowledge.7

The 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.

After describing each attribute, I will discuss a quality often associated with power but one that I think is, beyond some le...

There are several dimensions to focus. One is specialization in a particular industry or company, providing depth of understanding and a more substantial web of focused relationships.

A second dimension of focus is concentration on a limited set of activities or functional skills.

Dr. Modesto “Mitch” Maidique, a Cuban American who served as the president of Florida International University for 23 years and previously ran two companies and served as a partner in the investment banking firm Hambrecht and Quist, has had a distinguished career in both the profit and nonprofit world. When I asked him what leadership habits he thought made him effective, his response was immediate: making notes about decisions, meetings, and other interactions and reflecting on what he had done well or poorly so that he could improve his skills. There 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.

People 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?

Machiavelli’s advice anticipated research in social psychology about how we perceive others. That research found that the two virtually universal dimensions used to assess people are warmth and competence.13 Here’s the rub: to appear competent, it is helpful to seem a little tough, or even mean. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile studied how participants reacted to excerpts from actual reviews of books. Amabile found that negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and

expert than positive reviewers, even when independent experts judged the negative reviews to be of no higher quality.14 The title of her paper, “Brilliant but Cruel,” says it all. Other research has confirmed her findings: nice people are perceived as warm, but niceness frequently comes across as weakness or even a lack of intelligence.15

Condoleezza Rice is right: people will join your side if you have power and are willing to use it, not just because they are afraid of your hurting them but also because they want to be close to your power and success. There is lots of evidence that people like to be associated with successful institutions and people—to bask in the reflected glory of the powerful.

Research 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.

Standing out helps you get the jobs and power you may seek. Asking for what you need and being less concerned about what others are thinking about you can help in launching your path to power. But acquiring and wielding power requires the resources to reward your friends and punish your enemies, the information and access that can foster your rise in the organization. So let’s explore how to acquire resources, even if you seemingly have nothing.

Being nice to people is effective because people find it difficult to fight with those who are being polite and courteous.

facilitating work-related activities of individuals by voluntarily gaining access to resources and maximizing…advantages.”2 Their study of more than 200 people in Germany developed some scales of networking behaviors that demonstrate what actions are required. These included: 1. Building internal contacts (e.g., “I use company events to make new contacts.”) 2. Maintaining internal contacts (e.g., “I catch up with colleagues from other departments about what they are working on.”) 3. Using internal contacts (e.g., “I use my contacts with colleagues in other departments in order to get confidential advice in business matters.”) 4. Building external contacts (e.g., “I accept invitations to official functions or festivities out of professional interest.”) 5. Maintaining external contacts (e.g., “I ask others to give my regards to business acquaintances outside of our company.”) 6. Using external contacts (e.g., “I exchange professional tips and hints with acquaintances from other organizations.”)3 The networking behaviors they describe entail making some incremental effort to build, maintain, and use social ties with people. The people targeted are not necessarily in your sights if you are focused just on your immediate job and company.

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.7

Andy Grove understood three important principles about acting with power. First, after a while, what started out being an act becomes less so. Over time, you will become more like you are acting—self-assured, confident, and more strongly convinced of the truth of what you are saying. Attitudes follow behavior, as much research attests. Second, the emotions you express, such as confidence or happiness, influence those around you—emotions are contagious.

BE AWARE OF YOUR AUDIENCE Gary 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. You are on stage more than you think, and

DISPLAY ANGER INSTEAD OF SADNESS OR REMORSE Barack 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.”

What works for Emanuel may work even better for you: you may not have a job with a lot of power; Emanuel does, and people know it. Sometimes you will work with peers and colleagues of about equal rank whom you want to influence. Sometimes your actual power will be ambiguous. In such situations, displaying anger is useful.

Research shows that people who express anger are seen “as dominant, strong, competent, and smart,” although they are also, of course, seen as less nice and warm.12

speech on terrorism, in one instance acting as if he were angry and in the other as if he were sad. Study participants were more likely to say they would vote for the politician in the angry rather than the sad posture. They also thought the angry person would be a better political leader.

In a study Tiedens conducted at a software company, people rated their coworkers on how frequently these individuals exhibited a variety of emotions. People rated coworkers who expressed more anger as better potential role models—people from whom they could learn. In yet another study reported in the same paper, participants assigned a higher-status position and a higher salary to a job candidate who described himself as angry. He was perceived as more competent when expressing anger rather than sadness.14

At the moment, the question of gender differences in the effectiveness of expressing anger remains open. But if you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence. Self-deprecating comments and humor work only if you have already established your competence. As the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said, “Don’t be so humble; you’re not that great.”19

There 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.

One source of power in every interaction is interruption. Those with power interrupt, those with less power get interrupted. In conversation, interrupting others, although not polite, can indicate power and be an effective power move, something noted by scholars in a field called conversation analysis. Men interrupt others more frequently than women, and doctors seldom listen to their patients for very long without interrupting. In each instance, patterns of conversation reinforce differences in power and status derived from other sources such as general social expectations and expert authority.

1. Use us-versus-them references. “It is widely known that the need to resist an external threat, whether real or imagined, has always been an extremely effective rallying cry when it comes to strengthening group solidarity.”27 When United Airlines entered the California market in 1994, Herb Kelleher, then CEO of Southwest Airlines, sent his employees a video describing United as a “war machine” aimed to strike at Southwest and imploring his people to stick together to provide great customer service all over the system. Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple Computer, focused first on IBM as the enemy—for instance, in Apple’s famous “1984” commercial—and later on Microsoft as he used a common threat to energize Apple’s

your care, or would you like to leave those decisions to you and your doctor? The use of contrast as a rhetorical device relies in part on the “us versus them” construct, but it also invites explicit comparison that is structured to be favorable to the ideas advocated by the speaker. 5. Avoid using a script or notes. If you speak without aids, the implication is that you have a mastery of the subject and are spontaneous. In addition, not using notes or a script permits the speaker to maintain eye contact with the audience. Jack Valenti of the MPAA testified often before Congress. He commented that many of those testifying used notes. He didn’t, as he wanted the language to be vibrant and spontaneous and to illustrate his mastery of the issues. As he put it, “If you can’t speak five minutes without a note in front of you, about a subject you know cold, you’re not working at your job.”30 The use of PowerPoint presentations is effective in executing this strategy, as the presumption is that the presentation is there for the audience rather than the speaker.

To Atkinson’s list of speaking tips I would add one important suggestion: use humor to the extent possible and appropriate. As the novelist Salman Rushdie noted on a radio program, “If you make people laugh, you can tell them anything.”31 Humor is disarming and also helps create a bond between you and your audience through a shared joke.

The fundamental principles for building the sort of reputation that will get you a high-power position are straightforward: make a good impression early, carefully delineate the elements of the image you want to create, use the media to help build your visibility and burnish your image, have others sing your praises so you can surmount the self-promotion dilemma, and strategically put out enough negative but not fatally damaging information about yourself that the people who hire and support you fully understand any weaknesses and make the choice anyway. The key to your success is in executing each of these steps well.

likability is not essential for obtaining power, there is no point in putting others off if there is a way to avoid it.

As school leader Rudy Crew has said, “Conflict is just an opportunity for another person’s education,” for exploring why people think the way they do, and for sharing perspectives so the parties to the conflict can learn about and from each other. Particularly in a leadership position, it is irresponsible to avoid people with whom you have disagreements and to duck difficult situations. There are, of course, better and worse ways to engage in conflict. Here are some ideas to make you more successful in surmounting opposition.

capital experience. Now an executive vice president at a large international research and consulting firm, Steve’s success in landing a great position derives in no small measure from his never appearing as if there had been any career reversal.

Situations are often ambiguous. Did you resign or were you fired? Was your previous job experience successful or not? One of the ways others are going to ascertain how things turned out is by how you present yourself. Are you upbeat? Do you project power and success or the reverse? This is why developing the ability to act in ways that you may not feel at the moment, described in chapter 7, is such an important skill. You want to convey that everything is fine and under your control, even under dire circumstances. People want to associate with winners. At the very moment when you have suffered a reversal in fortune and most need help, the best way to attract that help is to act as if you are going to triumph in the end. This advice does not mean that you should not tell people what happened and enlist their aid. It does mean you need to show enough strength and resilience that your potential allies will not believe their efforts to help you will be wasted.

decrease performance on tasks that entail new learning or involve novel or difficult activities. What tasks people have mastered varies depending on the person. But generally, simple repetitive motions such as those involved in assembly-line work benefit from the social facilitation effect, while tasks entailing complex intellectual work, such as analyzing complex and multifaceted information to make a decision, are harmed. The negative effect of observers on performance that is not completely routinized through repeated practice is why actors and other performers do so much rehearsing before they have to appear in public.

your downfall, but they won’t be forthcoming about what they are doing. Some people will be trying to curry favor with you by telling you what they think you want to hear so you will like them and help them advance. And some people will be doing both. Gary Loveman, the former Harvard Business School professor who is now the CEO of Harrah’s Entertainment, commented that the higher you rise in an organization, the more people are going to tell you that you are right. This leads to an absence of critical thought and makes it difficult for senior leaders to get the truth—a problem both for the company and its leaders, as you can’t address problems if you don’t know about them. Loveman tried to overcome this problem by regularly and publicly admitting the mistakes he made so that others would be encouraged to admit where they had messed up too. He also placed a lot of emphasis on the process by which decisions got made—particularly, the use of data and analytics—and almost no emphasis on who was making the decision. Gary was conscious of the tendency for people in power to become deeply self-righteous and believe their own hype. This problem is difficult to overcome as it plays into our natural tendency to want to think highly of ourselves, but Loveman tried to overcome this tendency by seeking the opinions of outsiders with no stake in Harrah’s and by encouraging open debate and critical self-reflection within the company. Loveman’s success at Harrah’s and his position as a le...

from coup attempts. But no one in a position of power is completely immune from palace revolts. Patricia Seeman, a Swiss executive coach and adviser to numerous high-ranking executives, particularly in the financial services industry, told me that in the typical senior management team, all the people reporting to the CEO believe they could hold the CEO position, many think they could do better than the incumbent, and most direct reports aspire to their boss’s job. Some people are going to be willing to take their turn and hope that they will be chosen when the incumbent steps down, but others will be more proactive in their efforts to move up. Therefore, for CEOs to survive in their jobs, they need to be able to discern who is undermining them and be tough enough to remove those people before they themselves lose the power struggle. What’s true for CEOs is also true for other senior-level executives with ambitious subordinates. Ross Johnson, formerly CEO of Nabisco, is justly famous for his role in the first huge leveraged buyout, the RJR Nabisco transaction described so well in the book Barbarians at the Gate.14 But where Johnson really excelled was maneuvering himself into CEO jobs and eliminating rivals who naively trusted him. When Johnson engineered the merger of Standard Brands, where he was CEO, into Nabisco, the huge cookie and cracker manufacturer, he was ostensibly in the number two role and faced numerous internal Nabisco rivals. One was Dick Owens, Nabisco’s ch...

the title of executive vice president and appointed to the board of directors. “Whatever Owens wanted, Johnson got him. He approved a steady stream of Owens’s requests for new aides…. In Johnson’s warm embrace, Owens’s financial fiefdom grew greatly.” That is, until Johnson went to the CEO and told him that Owens had built too large and too centralized a financial empire. Owens was then replaced for a time by Johnson himself.15 Next, Johnson gracefully pushed the CEO aside, doing it with flattery and kindness. Johnson had Nabisco endow a chair in accounting at Pace University in the name of the CEO, Robert Schaeberle. He ensured that the board named the new Nabisco research center building after the CEO. Soon, Johnson was the CEO of Nabisco. As Johnson’s allies realized, “a man who had his name on a building…might as well be dead.”16 When you are in power, you should probably trust no single person in your organization too much, unless you are certain of t...

Overconfidence and insensitivity lead to losing power, as people become so full of themselves that they fail to attend to the needs of those whose enmity can cause them problems. Conversely, not letting power go to your head and acting as if you were all-powerful can help you maintain your position. Safra Catz came to Oracle in 1999 with an undefined role; today she is president of the large software company. Oracle has regularly gone through high-profile senior leaders, including one former president, Ray Lane, and Marc Benioff, who left a senior vice president position to found Salesforce.com. The company seems to particularly reject senior executives whose profiles get too big. Catz avoids publicity and anything that might upstage Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison. And although she is rich and powerful—a profile in Fortune listed her as one of the most powerful women executives in the United States—she has always known her place. As Adam Lashinsky’s profile of Catz noted: Initially, she didn’t even have an office, working instead at a round table near Ellison’s…. A senior executive from the

Oracle unit that sells to the federal government arranged a meeting with Catz to figure out what she did. “I’m here to help Larry,” Catz said, according to an attendee.10

were there at the beginning of their careers and take on a trophy companion. They will leave behind associates who can remind them of the time when they did not have so much power. To the extent that you can resist such tendencies and the behavioral changes that come with power, you are more likely to keep your influence.

MISPLACED OR TOO MUCH TRUST When you are powerful and successful, you are overconfident and less observant—and one specific manifestation of such tendencies is to trust what others tell you and rely on their assurances. As you become less vigilant and paranoid about others’ intentions, they have the opportunity to take you out of your position of power. When NationsBank, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Bank of America, headquartered in San Francisco, merged in 1998, it was to be a merger of equals with shared governance between the managements of the two institutions. David Coulter, the Carnegie-Mellon business school–trained Bank of America CEO, had entered the merger thinking it was great for both companies. Approaching the transaction as an intellectual challenge to increase shareholder value and improve the organization, Coulter believed the assurances about shared power and did not see the power play unfolding. He trusted the promises provided by Hugh McColl, the CEO of NationsBank, about Coulter’s significant

role in the merged institution. David Demarest, director of White House communications under the first President Bush, was vice president and director of corporate communications at BankAmerica Corporation at the time of the merger. He related what happened: It was really an amazing phenomenon. I went to a media roundtable with the Charlotte Observer, with David and Hugh in which Hugh almost got teary-eyed talking about how great David Coulter was and how he [Hugh] might just retire a little early because he sees the value of this guy. And it was really quite a performance. And within weeks, many of the commitments about how things were going to be—“we’re just going to pick the best person for each slot”—started to unravel. At this point, the rumor has it he [Coulter] checked with some legal counsel as to whether we could unravel the deal. And when that got around, that’s when Hugh said, “Enough of this” and then you could see the press stories that were coming out from Charlotte about, “Wow, there’s this screw up in the old Bank of America and we didn’t know that this program was so poorly funded,” and you could see the building of the case for why they were going to get rid of Coulter. David Coulter trusted what Hugh McColl, a man who kept an allegedly live hand grenade

People give up their power in other ways, too. They don’t behave strategically toward people with power over them, such as their boss, and instead let their true feelings show. As a very skilled news reporter told me, he expressed his resentment toward his distant bosses who mostly spent their time managing up and did not provide the support to the news-gathering field operations that he and his colleagues wanted. But as a result, he was just perceived negatively and had even less influence. As he so nicely put it, “Either you

deal with your boss, or you leave for a different company. In a small, tightly connected industry, sometimes even leaving isn’t a very good option. There is no other solution than to work with the cards you are dealt.” It may feel good to blow off steam, tell people off, and express your real inner feelings. But if the targets of your behavior are those with power, your good feelings will be quite temporary as the consequences of your actions unfold.

People sometimes give away their power by defining situations as outside of their control, thereby playing the victim role. Being a victim may help you bond with fellow victims as you commiserate about the difficulties you face, and it may excuse you from doing anything about the situation, but it won’t get you much power or approval inside companies. Melinda described interviewing two people for a job and asking each, “Among your peers, you have some you work with better than others. What’s the difference?” One candidate answered that the people he works well with are easy to work with and the ones he was challenged by were moody and hard to work with. As Melinda explained, “That candidate gave away all his power by defining the problem externally and as something he couldn’t influence. When we tell ourselves that our problems are caused by others, we spend time on why we can’t be successful. When instead we fo...

situations. People give away their power by not trying. If you don’t try, you can’t fail—which protects your self-esteem. But not trying guarantees failure to win the competition for power and status. Sometimes people don’t want to “play the game,” or think they won’t be good at it, or can’t see themselves following the strategies of successful, more political individuals. I am convinced that we are frequently our own biggest barriers to having as much power as we would like simply because we don’t make sufficient effort to build ourselves up. When we stop thinking of ourselves as powerless victims and cease eschewing doing the things that will bring influence, our chances of success increase dramatically. As...