Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [80]
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The Price of Power
IT WAS the late Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman who famously said, “There is no free lunch.” Nothing comes without cost, and that is certainly true of power. As you chart your course and make decisions about what you will and will not do to acquire power, consider carefully what you are striving for and if you really want it. People who seek and attain power often pay some price for the quest, for holding on to their positions, and confronting the difficult but inevitable transitions out of powerful roles. This chapter considers some of the costs incurred by those who successfully pursue a path to power.
COST 1: VISIBILITY AND PUBLIC SCRUTINY
In January 2005, two employees of a large U.S. manufacturing company, one of whom was divorced and one who was still married, began having a consensual affair. There was never any evidence of sexual harassment or unwanted advances—it was a case of mutual attraction. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of such incidents each year, most of which have little or no consequence for the professional careers of the people involved and few of which gain any public attention. But not in this case, because the man involved was Harry Stonecipher, the CEO of Boeing, and the woman was a Boeing vice president. The Boeing board of directors asked for, and got, Stonecipher’s resignation when the affair was brought to its attention by an internal whistle-blower.1 An important lesson: if you are going to misbehave in any way, do so before you achieve a high-level position that makes you the object of constant attention by peers, subordinates, superiors, and the media.
It’s not just the big things that draw scrutiny when you are in power. Rudy Crew, when he ran the Miami-Dade County school district, faced public commentary on the fact that he drove a Mercedes. One reporter found it important to write that in a self-serve restaurant, he failed to bus his dishes when he had finished eating. As these examples illustrate, holding a position of power means that more than your job performance is being carefully watched—although that happens, too. Every aspect of your life, including how you dress, where you live, how you spend your time, who you choose to spend time with, what your children do, what you drive, how you act in completely non-job-related domains, will draw scrutiny. As A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former president of Yale University, noted, “Not that I’ve been treated unfairly, but you go from being a private person to suddenly reading descriptions of your face, your clothes, the way your hands look.”2 Organizational behavior scholars Robert Sutton and Charles Galunic note that the public scrutiny experienced by organizational leaders entails persistent attention, close performance monitoring, interruptions, and relentless questions about what is going on. They argue that such scrutiny has many negative consequences for both the leaders and the organizations they lead.3
All this scrutiny makes doing your job more difficult. If you ever played a musical instrument, I’m sure you remember your first recital. If you are like most people, playing while others watch is a different and more demanding experience than playing under the gaze of your music teacher or parents or, better yet, alone. A recital is a lot more stressful. That stress leads people to forget their notes—or their lines if they are on stage—and perform a lot worse than when they perform without an audience.
Social psychologists have a term for this widespread and well-studied phenomenon—it is called the “social facilitation effect.”4 When you are in the presence of other people, even if they aren’t watching you, you are more motivated and on edge. That’s fine, up to a point. The relationship between motivation and performance is curvilinear—positive up to some level as effort increases but then negative as increased