Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [74]
DON’T CAUSE YOURSELF UNNECESSARY PROBLEMS
Conflict arouses strong emotions, including anger, and these strong feelings interfere with our ability to think strategically about what we are really trying to do. You need to continually ask yourself, “What would victory look like? If you had won the battle, what would you want that win to encompass?” People lose sight of what their highest priorities are and get diverted fighting other battles that then cause unnecessary problems.
Laura Esserman was already pushing a large agenda and needed all the support she could get. Even she will now say that appearing at a hearing chaired by a state senator friend of hers to investigate the catastrophic merger, subsequently unwound, between the hospitals at Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco was not the smartest move. As she entered the hearing room, she spotted Mike Bishop, the chancellor of the UCSF campus, who knew who she was and commented on her testifying. The UC hospital merger was not on her critical path to change breast cancer treatment, and testifying against the administration of the place where she worked wouldn’t make her many friends.
Zia Yusuf, the former senior executive in SAP, sometimes exasperated his subordinates because in a meeting when he saw that the decision was going against him and his group, he typically did not dig in his heels and fight. “It is important to live to fight another day,” he says. Because he did not push too hard against his bosses or his peers, Yusuf defused the emotional tone of meetings and by not creating unnecessary enmity, could often get the decisions he wanted, even if it took some time.
Not creating enemies or turmoil when it isn’t necessary requires something I have discussed before—focus. You need to have a clear understanding of where you are going and the critical steps on the way. When you confront opposition on this path, you need to react. But you just waste your time and possibly acquire gratuitous problems if you get involved with any issue or individual that has some connection, regardless of how irrelevant, to you and your agenda.
DON’T TAKE THINGS PERSONALLY—MAKE IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS WORK
When Gary Loveman became chief operating officer of Harrah’s, the casino company, in 1998, many insiders thought they were more qualified for the job and resented his arrival from his position as an associate professor at Harvard Business School who had done some consulting for the company. One of those potentially difficult people was the chief financial officer of the company, a senior executive, older than Gary, who was unhappy with Loveman’s appointment. The CFO position was critically important not just politically but also for accomplishing the organizational improvement that would eventually provide Loveman the CEO position in 2003. Loveman moved quickly to cement his relationship with the CFO. He spent some time with the CFO almost every day, visiting him in his office, kept the CFO informed about what he was doing and why, involved him in decisions and meetings—in short, did everything he could to make the relationship successful. Gary Loveman’s advice: after you reach a certain level, there comes a point in your career where you simply have to make critical relationships work. Your feelings, or for that matter, others’ feeling about you, don’t matter. To be successful, you have to get over resentments, jealousies, anger, or anything else that might get in the way of building a relationship where you can get the resources necessary for you to get the job done.
Zia Yusuf had a strategy for depersonalizing the difficult situations he confronted when he ran SAP’s internal consulting team and sometimes had to recommend restructuring or other decisions that caused some senior people to lose resources and power: focus on the data. He pushed himself