Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [82]
COST 2: THE LOSS OF AUTONOMY
James March, a very distinguished organizational scholar and political scientist, once remarked that you could have power or autonomy, but not both. How right he was. When I asked a former colleague what changed when he became a business school dean, his reply was that he lost control over his schedule. Whereas once he could exercise, take time to think and reflect, and do things that interested him, now there were many people and constituencies wanting to see him. Like many senior leaders, his “office” scheduled his time, and unless he got to them and blocked time for himself before they scheduled every minute, there would be no free time or even time whose allocation he controlled so he could move his agenda forward.
At first, in a powerful role, all the demands for your attention are flattering—after all, it’s great that so many people want to see you. Therefore people who have recently been promoted tend to be overwhelmed by the time demands of their more powerful job. Not wanting to refuse requests by groups and individuals whose support they may need and whose attention they value, powerful people can easily find themselves overscheduled and working too many hours, something that drains their energy and leaves them unable to cope with the unexpected challenges of their job. After a while, most of the CEOs and other senior leaders I know block out time for themselves and the activities that they want to do. But all of them talk about the loss of control over how they spend their time as one of the big costs of being in a position of power.
COST 3: THE TIME AND EFFORT REQUIRED
Building and maintaining power requires time and effort, there are no two ways about it. Time spent on your quest for power and status is time that you cannot spend on other things, such as hobbies or personal relationships and families. The quest for power often exacts a high toll on people’s personal lives, and although everyone bears some costs, the price seems to be particularly severe for women.
Frances Conley was one of the first female neurosurgeons and, at the time of her retirement, chief of staff for the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, an associate dean at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, and an accomplished researcher whose work had helped start a biotechnology company. Conley’s life in academic medicine, described in her autobiography, was demanding.10 Her husband, Phil, a Harvard MBA, left the corporate world and did investment management for them and for others, playing the role of supportive spouse, doing much of the cooking, and taking care of the house. Phil occasionally resented the fact that, for his wife, patients and work came first. As for having children, Conley wrote, “by the time of my tenure review in 1982, Phil and I had decided…that we would not have children. Having children never seemed to fit into our lives—I was always a student, an intern, a resident, or a faculty person, driven to succeed.”11
Things aren’t that different today. An up-and-coming, high-potential, 41-year-old female executive at a large shoe company told me in 2009 that of the top 100 or so women at her company, there were very, very few in traditional marriages with children. Some of the senior women were single, like her; some were married with no children. Speaking of her own situation, she said she had no real personal life: she had moved numerous times for her career,