Although CEOs hold positions of power, many can feel powerless in certain ways—particularly when it comes to influencing the behaviors and performance of their employees. Yet perhaps they aren’t taking the time to understand what drives and motivates their employees, suggests Harvard Business School Professor Julie Battilana.
The crux of the problem is that CEOs and other leaders often get such a power trip that they lack empathy and humility, which inhibits their ability to understand and respect what their employees value.
Cultivating humility and empathy can provide antidotes to two pernicious effects that power has.
Sharing some of their power with their employees, for example by giving them more autonomy or allowing them to contribute to the decision-making process, can actually lead to better results: higher morale, productivity, and earnings, according to Battilana, author of the new book Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business. Battilana co-wrote the book with Tiziana Casciaro, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
“Cultivating humility and empathy can provide antidotes to two pernicious effects that power has on the psychology of those in power: It makes them overconfident and susceptible to hubris, and it makes them more self-centered and insensitive to others,” Battilana says.
And if a CEO can’t or won’t cultivate humility and empathy? Battilana and Casciaro have an answer for what employees should do: “agitate, innovate, and orchestrate.”
Ordinary people can effect change
After all, people lower down the organizational ladder, who may seem to have little influence, often have far more power than they realize to change their workplaces, personal relationships, and society in general, the authors say. The book explains how power can be shared more evenly among citizens, employees, top executives, and shareholders for the betterment of individuals, organizations, and institutions around the world.
The motive for the book was to debunk fallacies surrounding power and to explain how power really works.
In many ways, the book comes across as a sort of modern update of Machiavelli’s classic political treatise on power, but with plenty of non-Machiavellian twists. Instead of talking about how princes, plutocrats, and government bureaucrats can seize and maintain power, Power, for All is about how ordinary people, working together, can effect change by recognizing and altering “power imbalances” where they live and work, Battilana says.
“The motive for the book was to debunk fallacies surrounding power and to explain how power really works,” says Battilana, who, like Casciaro, has spent a career studying power dynamics within corporations, political institutions, and other organizations.
Power is intoxicating
To bring social science research on power to life, Battilana and Casciaro conducted more than 100 interviews with people from all walks of life—including a Brazilian doctor turned social entrepreneur, a Bangladeshi policeman, an American business consultant trying to create change, and a Polish Holocaust survivor—and included both historical examples and contemporary anecdotes about how people have dealt with and changed power dynamics.
“They struggled in their lives, in part because they didn’t understand the nature of power, but many of them learned along the way,” says Battilana.
Having once been wary of power is no guarantee that you will be immune to abusing it.
Brazilian doctor Vera Cordeiro, for instance, started a nonprofit to help poor mothers and children by not only providing medical care, but also working to rehabilitate people’s homes and provide vocational training for parents. She initially shied away from seeking help from the rich and powerful—people she saw as greedy and corrupt, who drove expensive cars through Rio’s shantytowns. But in an effort to grow her organization and help more people, she eventually began courting private donors, public authorities, and the general public. By 2016, her nonprofit had helped 70,000 people. As her own position of power grew, however, colleagues started accusing her of interrupting them and not allowing them to share their opinions in meetings, and her adult daughter asked why she was so intent on attending award ceremonies.
“Their comments made her pause,” the authors write. “Had she become one of those people who wanted more and more power to advance her own fame and interests?
“Having once been wary of power is no guarantee that you will be immune to abusing it. [It] is another reminder that we are all susceptible to its intoxicating effects. The challenge is finding a balanced relationship that avoids the strictures of dirtiness and the perils of hubris and insensitivity to others.”
Power fallacies
According to the authors, “three pernicious fallacies” surround the topic of power.
People often assume that power is something a person possesses, such as monetary fortunes and personality traits; or that it’s “positional” within organizational structures, meaning that only people like kings, queens, presidents, generals, and CEOs possess it; or that it’s “dirty” and comes through manipulation, coercion, and cruelty.
To understand what power is and how it works, it’s important to define it, says Battilana: “Power is the ability to change others’ behavior, be it through persuasion or coercion.”
But where does this power come from? It derives from controlling access to what others value, such as income, status, achievement, belonging, autonomy, and moral purpose.
Strategies for shifting power
When power is distributed unfairly and needs to be rebalanced to ensure stability, justice, happiness, or increased efficiency, it’s possible to rebalance power between individuals or groups.
People and institutions hold power over others by increasing other people’s dependence on them in one of two ways:
Attraction— making something more attractive in others’ eyes. If a person has something other people really want, that person has power.
Consolidation— decreasing the number of alternatives that allow people to get something they value. A person has little power if their attractive resource can be provided by many others, so consolidating with other providers of the same resource can increase a person’s power. Unions are one instance of this strategy; monopolies are another more extreme example—and can be problematic, the authors note.
To weaken the power that others parties have on them, people need to decrease their dependence in one of two ways:
Withdrawal— decreasing your interest in others’ resources. Sometimes this means simply walking away from a resource of value.
Expansion— increasing the number of alternatives where people can get something they value.
“To increase another’s dependence on you, you can try to increase how much they value a resource you have access to, or you can try to increase your control over this resource by becoming one of its only providers,” the authors write. “Conversely, to decrease your dependence on the other party, you can try to diminish the value you place on the resource to which they have access, or try to decrease their control over it by finding alternative providers of that resource.”
The ups and downs of diamonds
Power is not fixed in stone, the authors say, and the rise and fall of the South African De Beers diamond empire over a period of decades serves as an example of the shifting nature of power.
In 1938, as the Great Depression was beginning to lift, but war was imminent, many families were struggling, and only 10 percent of engagement rings sold in the United States included diamonds. De Beers hired an ad agency that used movie stars and socialites for its campaign to associate diamonds with eternal love and marriage. That’s when the iconic tag line “A diamond is forever” was coined.
Less than three years later, diamond sales had increased by 55 percent—and by 1990, 80 percent of engagement rings had diamonds. It had successfully increased customers’ attraction to its product. De Beers also used a consolidation strategy by creating a Central Selling Organization with exclusive contracts with diamond sellers, and also developed a club for the world’s premier diamond buyers, such as Tiffany & Co., allowing the company to control 80 percent of the world’s diamond supplies in the 1980s.
As the rise and fall of De Beers exemplifies, while a diamond may be forever, power is not.
But in recent years, competition from other diamond sellers has increased, providing customers with many more alternatives to DeBeers, plus many consumers have rejected diamonds, withdrawing from the market. Some analysts have calculated that sales growth in the diamond industry dropped by as much as 60 percent between 2019 and 2020, lessening the power of De Beers and other diamond suppliers.
“As the rise and fall of De Beers exemplifies, while a diamond may be forever, power is not,” the authors write. “This is true for organizations as much as it is for every one of us. Even those who are so powerful that we view them as power personified do not own power.”
Collective action is key
The authors warn that too much power imbalance can be harmful to everyone, including those in positions of power. “If the balance of power is out of whack, it can lead to heightened tension and problems,” Battilana says. “It can become a crisis of inequities and can lead to political and social confrontation.”
What’s the key to changing power structures then? Collective action, Battilana stresses: “There is always something you and others can do to make changes. Effecting change alone can be hard, especially in the face of big challenges that affect an entire social or political system, but by banding together and sustaining collective action, we can influence people’s beliefs and behaviors.”
So, the power that we cannot build by ourselves, we can build by joining forces with others.
“The truth is that we all, collectively, have a say and a responsibility in shaping tomorrow’s distribution of power,” the authors conclude in the book. “Not only because together we can join forces to agitate, innovate, and orchestrate change, but also because how power will be distributed ultimately comes down to what we all choose to value and how we decide to regulate control over those valued resources. These collective choices will protect and enhance our freedoms and rights or endanger them.”
About the Author
Jay Fitzgerald is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: iStockphoto/Apisit Suwannaka]
Book Excerpt: Power, for All
Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Philosophers have been debating what constitutes a just distribution of power for millennia, and many people are tempted to think that the philosopher’s study is precisely where the topic belongs. In fact, the opposite is true: The distribution of power affects each and every one of us personally. There are always things we can do to change the distribution of power in a given situation. As we have shown you, it comes down to the fundamentals of power: If you can figure out what the other party needs and wants, and find ways to give them access to these valued resources, you can change the balance of power. How we choose to use this knowledge, in our families, at our workplaces and in society, is up to us, as individuals and collectively.
What It Takes To Build Power
Before you can build your own power, you need to understand who currently holds it, and why. Assessing these dynamics so that you can map them with ever more accuracy is always within your reach. We can all observe the environment we’re seeking to influence; and knowing that everyone harbors a deep need for safety and self-esteem, you can gain insight into how the people around you are satisfying these needs in different but predictable ways: through the material accumulation of riches and status, or through psychological feelings of achievement, of being loved and belonging, of autonomy of choice, and of moral character. You can also solicit the observations of others: asking questions of your network to better understand what is valued in your environment, and then expanding your network to include people who can give you a different perspective as well as access to the people who control those valued resources.
Once your power map is as clear as possible, you’re ready to decide which of the four strategies for shifting the balance of power you will choose: attraction, offering resources the other party values; withdrawal, decreasing your interest in what the other party has to offer; consolidation, reducing the other party’s alternatives to you; and expansion, increasing your alternatives to the other party.
You are also in charge of your own relationship with power. The steps you need to take to map power and the strategies you can use to rebalance it are the same, whether you intend to use power to pursue evil ends or just purposes. Power itself is not dirty; the potential to misuse it lies within all of us, depending on what we want power for, and how we acquire and use it. You decide whether to embark on a developmental journey toward empathy and humility; whether to equip yourself to put to good use—and not abuse—the power you gain through your mastery of the fundamentals of power and power mapping.
Through the work and life experiences you expose yourself to, the books you read, the media you consume, the practice of self reflection, you can see the world as a web of interdependencies, such that our power is someone else’s dependence, and our actions have consequences beyond our immediate environment. We are in it together, and none of us forever. This knowledge gives you bulletproof criteria to assess who deserves to be entrusted with power: not those who give you the illusion of safety and self-esteem by projecting an air of strength, but those who have shown empathy and humility, along with competence and commitment to pursue a higher purpose. These are your criteria to apply if you choose.
And the power you cannot build by yourself, you can build through collective action. The truth is that we all, collectively, have a say and a responsibility in shaping tomorrow’s distribution of power. Not only because we can join forces to agitate, innovate, and orchestrate change, but also because how power will be distributed ultimately comes down to what we all choose to value and how we decide to regulate control over those valued resources. These collective choices will protect and enhance our freedoms and rights or endanger them.
Copyright © 2021 by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.