Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [43]
Do Small but Important Tasks
People appreciate help with doing some aspect of their job, and they particularly appreciate assistance with tasks that they find boring or mundane—precisely the kinds of tasks great for beginning to build a power base. When Frank Stanton, later to become president of CBS and a major figure in the broadcasting industry, arrived at the company in October 1935 as a 27-year-old PhD from Ohio State University, he joined a research department of two people. Although he didn’t have control over many resources, he didn’t have a lot of competition, either. Seven years later, Stanton was named a vice president of CBS in charge of a research department that had grown to 100 people; he was also in charge of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, building construction, operations and maintenance, and overseeing the seven company-owned radio stations.6
Sally Bedell Smith described Stanton’s rise to power in her book on William Paley and CBS. His strategy? Making himself indispensable by working as hard as he could to find as much information as possible about any and every topic of possible interest to senior CBS management—such as who listened to various radio programs and why, who owned buildings where CBS wanted office space, demographic information on various media markets, essentially any data that might be useful. In many instances, these data were sitting around at CBS waiting to be compiled or came through surveys that anyone could have done—but no one had bothered to compile the data, do the survey, or check public records to see who owned a particular building that CBS might want to buy or lease for one of its radio stations. And Stanton was not above using artifice to impress his superiors. He noted, “Every time management would ask me a question, if I didn’t know it, I would fake it to a certain extent, and then run like hell down the back stairs and get the World Almanac…. At that time I had more information than I think most agencies had on Madison Avenue, because I kept this thing on my desk.”7
Taking on small tasks can provide you with power because people are often lazy or uninterested in seemingly small, unimportant activities. Therefore, if you take the initiative to do a relatively minor task and do it extremely well, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to challenge you for the opportunity. Meanwhile, these apparently minor tasks can become important sources of power.
Michael was graduating from business school in a year and had already taken a job with a hedge fund. The arrangement was that he would work full-time over the summer, be in touch with the firm during the last year of his studies, and then go to work full-time upon graduation. Michael was one of six people who worked at the hedge fund that summer, and he had a big disadvantage compared to the other five: they had completed their degrees and would be staying on when the summer ended. Michael saw the managing partner’s attention naturally shift to the new full-time employees. Once back in school, he decided to nevertheless try and build a power base at the fund. First, he visited the office regularly, informally meeting people. This helped him overcome the “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon and use the mere exposure effect to his advantage. Then he took charge of recruiting junior analysts. In professional service firms, recruiting analysts—junior people who will probably return to school in a couple of years to get another degree and who do much of the grunt work—is mostly viewed as a necessary evil. The hiring process takes time and thus diverts people from their “real” jobs—and the people hired are going to be just cycling through the firm anyway.
When Michael got a “broadcast to everyone” e-mail from the head of the firm about organizing a day of interviews for finalists for the analyst positions, he immediately responded that since he was in school,