Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE POWERFUL? WHERE DOES THEIR POWER COME FROM?
Whether you are an individual contributor, a professional, a supervisor, a
midlevel manager, a senior executive, or the CEO, you must develop
enough power to be persuasive, to gain the agreement or cooperation of
others, and to stimulate action. Otherwise, you could not do your job. One
of the undeniable facts of life is that people who lack power exert very little
influence on others. Those who are powerful and use their power effectively
are the people who have impact. They get things done. They make a
difference. In the world at large, some people or groups amass the power
necessary to influence social trends, change minds, shape history, and create
or destroy great things, including social movements and nations. In the
business world, the most powerful people use their power to lead and
motivate others, build high-performing teams, manage projects, drive new
initiatives, develop new business and new enterprises, harness the creative
energies of groups, and guide organizations toward the successful
accomplishment of their mission. If you want to make a difference, you must
develop some strong sources of power.
It would be tempting to assume that all leaders need is the power
vested in them by virtue of their position, that the formal authority inherent
in their management role is sufficient. However, a quick look around
any organization will show that some leaders and managers are much more
influential than their peers—just as Bill Gates had more impact as CEO of
Microsoft than most CEOs have in their industries. Some leaders are more
credible, more visible, and more highly respected. Some, like Gates, Warren
Buffett, and Richard Branson, have influence far outside their organizations.
On a more modest scale, some midlevel managers have the CEO's
ear and are considered rising stars. Others are less influential, despite their
positions and the formal authority they have by virtue of their roles. Moreover,
leading principally through the power and authority of a position is
passe? today. As One-Minute Manager author Ken Blanchard has noted, ''In
the past a leader was a boss. Today's leaders must be partners with their
people. They no longer can lead solely based on positional power.''
Some leaders are inspirational and motivating, capable of leading large
groups of people in new directions. Others struggle to build a following
and are never able to lead as capably in real life as they do in their dreams.
We could attribute the difference between more effective and less effective
leaders to differences in their skills, or situational differences, or just plain
luck. But this misses an important point. Today, effective leadership and
management is a function of influence, not command and control, and
influence is a function of power. It's as simple as this: The more powerful
you are, the more influence you can have on others, and the more influential
you are, the more impact you are likely to have in your organization
and beyond. The formal authority vested in a management role is one
source of power, but it is not the only source. Moreover, it's not the most
powerful source.
What makes a manager, leader, or executive powerful? For that matter,
what makes anyone powerful? How do leaders build their power bases?
How do they use them? And what can cause their power bases to be
diminished? These are important questions not only in business but in
everyday life. Since the dawn of humanity, people have been obsessed
with power, which is understandable, given the enormous impact power has
had in our collective history, our organizations, and our daily lives. Great
works of literature have explored power, among them The Iliad, Lord of the
Flies, Animal Farm, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and All the King's Men. The
corrupting effect of power was one of Shakespeare's principal themes (e.g.,
Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, and especially
Macbeth). And power has been an abiding concern of many psychologists
(Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and David McClelland),
philosophers (Niccolo` Machiavelli, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Karl Marx, Steven Lukes, and Alvin Toffler), and business authors (Mary
Parker Follett, Lillian Gilbreth, Robert Greenleaf, Douglas McGregor, John
Kotter, Gary Yukl, Warren Bennis, Robert P. Vecchio, and Peter Drucker).
The aim of this book is not to recount all that has been written about
power, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the extraordinary
amount of thought many insightful people have given to the topic. It has
been the subject of endless fascination, debate, and discussion through
the ages. Perhaps only love, death, and God have captivated the human
imagination as much as power.
In the modern era, and on a much more practical level, a number of
researchers have explored the role of power in organizations, particularly
in business. In a now-classic exploration of personal and organizational
power, social psychologists John R. P. French Jr. and Bertram Raven
published an essay in 1959 called ''The Bases of Social Power.''1 They
identified five sources of power (reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, and
expert) and later added a sixth (information). Since then, numerous other
researchers have explored these sources of power, as well as power's effects,
and identified additional sources of power that French and Raven did not.
The model of power and influence presented in this book is derived from
an extensive review of contemporary research on personal power and
organizational power and on the twenty years of original research I conducted
at Lore International Institute. My aims were to formulate a comprehensive
model of power and influence that could describe any act of leadership
or influence in any domain, and to describe that model in terms that people
in business and other walks of life could use to improve their ethical
use of power and understand and defend themselves against unethical uses
of power. This book focuses on power—what it is, where it comes from,
how it's built, and how it is used to lead and influence others. In a companion
book, I will be discussing ethical and unethical forms of leadership
through influence.
In my model of power and influence, there are five sources of power
that stem from your position and participation in an organization: role
power; resource power; information power; network power; and reputation
power. Additionally, there are five sources of power that stem from your
personal assets: knowledge power; expressiveness power; attraction power;
character power; and history power, which derives from your history or
familiarity with the people you are trying to lead or influence. Finally, there
is one meta-source of power, will, which is related to the popular concept
of willpower. I refer to ''will'' as a meta-source of power because it can
have a substantial magnifying effect on all the other power sources.
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