Sunday's NYTimes had an excellent reminder on where to look for the power in organizations. As the writer, Daniel Sorid, an MBA student at Columbia reminded us, the basic way of viewing power was laid out by the social psychologists, Raven and French.
I learned years ago that in the American culture "power" is essentially a dirty word, the equivalent of four-letter expletives. Yet the truth is that until a person learns to identify, manage and develop power on his/her own, the world will remain pretty small. Formal power or what's called "vested power," the kind that shows up organizational charts doesn't always work--maybe, rarely works--with peers or superiors. Our American culture has made this a pretty flat world and few pay much attention to hierarchy other than lipservice.
Informal power can be much more effective. Furthermore,it's the only recourse for 95% of the workforce. In the article, Sorid identifies several types of informal power.
Sometimes personal characteristics give a person power, especially when those characteristics are valued by the organizational culture. In the Upper Midwest, for example, you don't tout your wealth, your abilities or your connections. Humility is the watchword. Years ago I worked with an IT director in Minneapolis who had been acquired from a St. Louis company. The IT director's problem? According to the Minneapolis culture he was a frustrating braggart. He talked about how much he'd paid for his car and his new home. The people with power in Minneapolis worked on a reputation as humble, caring individuals, and those who manifested those characteristics and were technically competent had a leg up on the rest of the population. When your personality harmonizes with the culture, you're setting yourself up for opportunity if you can match the personality characteristics with competency.
Control over resources often grants an individual significant power. This can be as insignificant as the withholding of a signature on an expense form, control over meeting agendas, access to senior execs or even information about how to use a certain piece of software. Ever noticed how a manufacturing slowdown gives power to a few people with the right problem-solving skills? When a company makes significant IT changes, the people with the right knowledge-base automatically have the controls. Pay attention to who's yelled for whenever certain kinds of breakdowns take place. Those few people are collecting IOUs that they can cash in sometime in the future.
Finally, effective power brokers build a broad base of alliances throughout the organization. They don't get caught up in the "birds of a feather syndrome" by making colleagues of like-minded people. They go cross-disciplinary, and build relationships with others who have power, often ignoring whether or not they happen to like that person.
I've saved two issues for future blogs. How do you counter entrenched power in an organization and how do you pay off your indebtedness? The use of power works like banking. You can't withdraw, unless you make deposits.
For those who like to bone up on the best stuff, here are two resources:
Jeff Pfeffer, Managing with Power and Robert Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice
Here's a related post: Who Should Be in My Network?