Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [52]
CREATE A STRONG STRUCTURAL POSITION
Power and influence come not just from the extensiveness of your network and the status of its members, but also from your structural position within that network. Centrality matters. Research shows that centrality within both advice and friendship networks produces many benefits, including access to information, positive performance ratings, and higher pay.10 One study at a newspaper publishing company found that “being in a position to control communications within the department is particularly important to being promoted.”11 These results contradict the idea from human capital economics that it is only individual human capital—education, years of experience, and intelligence—that matters for people’s careers, as well as the commonly held belief that job performance determines career outcomes. Network position matters a great deal for your influence and career trajectory.
If virtually all information and communication flows through you, you will have more power. One source of your power will be your control over the flow of information, and another is that people attribute power to individuals who are central. You can assess your centrality by asking what proportion of others in your work, for instance, nominate you as someone they go to for advice or help with their own work. Another way of assessing centrality is to ask what proportion of all communication links flow through you.
If you are sensitive to the importance of centrality, you can do things and make choices that increase your structural centrality. When Henry Kissinger became President Nixon’s national security adviser, he made sure that communication about foreign policy issues flowed only through him. He appointed a staff of young, talented, nonpartisan foreign policy analysts to work with him. This move gave Kissinger a good image with the press because it appeared that he was just interested in obtaining talent. But because the Nixon loyalists were uncomfortable interacting with people so different from themselves, and the staffers were estranged from the Nixon people, Kissinger was at the center of the flow of information between the NSC staff and the White House.12
One way of building centrality is through physical location. A person I know took a job at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm as an analyst, a low-level position. When he started at the company, he had two options as to where to locate his desk: a large cubicle in the corner that was quiet but outside of the flow of traffic, or a small workstation outside the named partner’s office, which had no walls and no privacy. Almost by chance he chose the location outside the partner’s office. Because of his location, he knew what was going on in the firm and interacted with the numerous people coming by to see the partners. As he noted, “Within just a few months of starting, at the weekly Monday morning all-hands meeting, nearly every question began to be pointed in my direction. The net of it was that I was the first analyst in the firm’s history to be invited for a position after graduation.”
Centrality provides power within a network, but it is also important to have power through connections across diverse networks. Most people tend to associate with those similar to themselves—a tendency called homophily. Consequently, groups that might gain from interacting with other groups don’t do so, because group members are