Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [1]
Anne was graduating with an offer from a major consulting firm. She told her team about the offer, thus letting them know she had much higher paid options so they would appreciate her and realize that she could make a credible threat to quit. She also intentionally let the engineers try to do things that she knew how to do proficiently—such as making presentations and doing financial projections—so they could see these tasks weren’t as easy as they thought. Anne used her accounting and business expertise to review the articles of incorporation for the new company and the funding documents for its financing. Meanwhile, she gathered lots of external information and, being more social than the engineers, built a strong external network in the industry they were set to target. Her outside contacts helped the team get funding after the summer was over and the initial seed grant had run out.
Anne had more than business skills—she was also politically savvy and tough. When classes were over and the team was setting up the company, there was one other competitor for the CEO position. Anne told her colleagues she wouldn’t join the company if he was named CEO. To show she was serious and to gain further leverage, she had her colleagues meet with other MBAs who might be possible replacements for her. Because she had spent lots of time working with the team, eating lots of pizza and bad Mexican food, the group felt much more comfortable with Anne. In the end she became co-CEO and found funding for the product at a hedge fund. Although there is no guarantee the business or product will be successful, Anne achieved her goal of becoming the leader of a promising high-tech start-up less than a year after graduating from business school, overcoming some significant initial resistance and deficits in her background along the way.
In contrast to Anne, you may have lots of job-relevant talent and interpersonal skills but nevertheless wind up in a position with little power, because you are unwilling or unable to play the power game. Beth graduated from a very high status undergraduate institution and an equally prestigious business school about 20 years ago. When I caught up with her she had just left the nonprofit she was working for after a new executive director took over. The new boss was a friend of several of the nonprofit’s board members and had once worked with Beth. He saw her competence as a threat and was willing to pay her a decent severance to get her out of the way.
Beth has experienced a “nonlinear” career after her MBA, punctuated by several spells of unemployment as well as some periods of great job satisfaction. She has yet to attain a stable leadership position in her chosen field, even though she has held senior jobs in government—on Capitol Hill and in the White House. The issue, as she explained it to me, was her unwillingness to play organizational politics, or at least to do so with the consistent focus and energy and maybe even the relentlessness evidenced in Anne’s story. “Jeffrey, it’s a tough world out there,” Beth said. “People take credit for the work of others. People mostly look out for their own careers, often at the expense of the place where they work. The self-promoters get rewarded. Nobody told me that my coworkers would come to the office each day with a driving agenda to protect and then expand their turf. I guess I haven’t been willing to be mean enough or calculating enough or to sacrifice things I believed in order to be successful, at least as success is often measured.”
Systematic empirical research confirms what these two contrasting stories, as well as common sense and everyday experience, suggest: being politically savvy and seeking power are related to career success and even to managerial performance. For instance, one study