Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [13]
Many people believe that they know what their bosses care about. But unless they are mind readers, that’s probably a risky assumption. It is much more effective for you to ask those in power, on a regular basis, what aspects of the job they think are the most crucial and how they see what you ought to be doing. Asking for help and advice also creates a relationship with those in power that can be quite useful, and asking for assistance, in a way that still conveys your competence and command of the situation, is an effective way of flattering those with power over you. Having asked what matters to those with power over you, act on what they tell you.
MAKE OTHERS FEEL BETTER ABOUT THEMSELVES
You can almost always tell at least one aspect of your job performance that will be crucial: do you, in how you conduct yourself, what you talk about, and what you accomplish, make those in power feel better about themselves? The surest way to keep your position and to build a power base is to help those with more power enhance their positive feelings about themselves.
Most people, not just those who are somewhat insecure, like to feel good about themselves. They are motivated to self-enhance—to seek out positive information and avoid negative feedback—even though, objectively, people may learn more from mistakes and learning what they have done wrong. People overestimate their abilities and accomplishments—a phenomenon called the above average effect—with way more than half of surveyed respondents reporting they are above average on positive attributes such as intelligence, sense of humor, driving ability, appearance, negotiating ability—pretty much anything and everything.16 And because people like themselves, people prefer others who are similar, because what is more self-enhancing than to choose someone who reminds you of—you! A large literature documents the importance of similarity in predicting interpersonal attraction.17 For instance, people are more likely to marry others whose first or last names resemble their own and, in experiments, are more attracted to people whose arbitrary experimental code numbers were similar to the participants’ actual birthdays. And because people like those who are similar to them, they also favor their own groups and disfavor competitive groups—an effect called ingroup bias and outgroup derogation18—and also prefer people from their own social categories, for instance, of similar race and socioeconomic background.
One sure way to make your boss feel worse is to criticize that individual, and this criticism is going to be particularly sensitive if it concerns an issue that the boss feels is important and where there is some inherent insecurity. A talented manager working at a large credit card organization in the valuation and decision infrastructure group—a department that creates predictive models of customer payment as well as modeling customer acquisition and retention—was seeking accreditation as a credit officer. The chief credit officer in the company was a big fan of hers. But then “Melinda” talked to him when she was angry about one of his subordinates’ bad behavior at a meeting. She told the chief credit officer that his subordinate’s bad behavior reflected on his own leadership style, which sometimes entailed screaming at people himself. Because leadership was one of his areas of personal insecurity, he reacted badly to the criticism. He then held up Melinda’s accreditation for a while—just to show her who was boss and in a form of revenge.
“Brent” was a reporter for the Associated Press, covering stories all over the world, literally putting his life on the line to be where the news was happening. Even though