Power and Office-Politics II: The Young and The Powerful
My four-year-old stayed home from ‘school’ the other day with a cold. The next day the other kids’ parents asked me if he was feeling better. I guess his ‘friends’ told their parents he had been sick. Remember, these are four-year-olds we are talking about. I have this image of the other kids standing around, not knowing what to do because my son wasn’t there. He was born with a very powerful personality…which may have something to do with my receding hair-line.
People with powerful personalities also work in your organizations. It’s called charisma. They have different power sources than the powerful in my last post. Their power stems from who they are, not their perch on the organizational chart.
But I don’t want to knock the organizational chart too much. It can be a great resource for you. It is an excellent place to start if, before dipping your toe into the political arena, you want to get a grip on the power terrain of your organization. The chart reveals three sources of power: legitimate, reward, and coercive.
But the naïve get themselves into political hot-water when they stop with the organizational chart. There are three more sources of power.
-
Expert power – Valued knowledge or information gives people power over those who need this information to do their jobs well. Knowledge is power. Maybe the knowledge is expertise. But it doesn’t have to be. Managers, for example, may have knowledge that their subordinates lack simply because they happened to be in a meeting, or received an email, with information that was withheld from the general public.
- Referent power. This is charisma—the power my four-year-old seems to have been born with. These people are able to obtain compliance simply because people like them. The power of charisma should not be underestimated. Neither should the power of kindness.
French and Raven proposed these sources of power about 50 years ago. And they are still an excellent way to map power at work. Now I’ll add another power source.
- Network power. You work with people who are connected. We all understand networking. And most of us know we should do more of it. There is enormous power in a thriving network.
Though there are many ways to look at it, you can fit most power sources into one of those six buckets. In the next post I’ll give you a tool for mapping these power sources to better understand where you stand in the political arena at work.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
