It’s one thing to have your policies criticized. To be condemned by your political opponents. To be second guessed by pundits. But it’s another to have pornographic or racist cartoons and bumper stickers, as well as fabricated stories about you circulating freely in the media and on the internet.

That’s what both the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, and President Barack Obama are putting up with. In Gillard’s case, even though Australians are used to a bare-knuckle style of Parliamentary debate, the vulgar, misogynist attack on Gillard goes way beyond even the most salacious rant. And the racist attacks on Obama, as well as challenges to his nationality, education, and religion are far out of line from simple political disagreement.

Both Gillard and Obama are firsts. They broke through a glass ceiling, And in both cases, right after their election, their countries basked in a post-election glow that quickly dissipated in the wake of reactionary and vicious attacks.

Can they defend themselves? (more…)

Penn State must be breathing a sigh of relief now that the media horde is busy with the Olympics. My mind, however, is still with the sexual abuse scandal and fallout. Obviously, my pet interest is power, and this incident contains so many lessons on the use and misuse of power that it will stand as a case study on power for years to come. (more…)

Question:

Which of the follow define power and which define magic?

1. The ability to influence the course of events

2. Having great influence or control over others

3. Ability to act or produce or effect

Answer: All of them.

Magic and power are closely related. They are having the ability to influence the world around us, but they do it through different means. Or do they?

Power is not only the ability to control and influence, but to not be influenced. Like magic, power also can make us invisible. How does it do that? Deborah Gruenfeld, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and one of the top researchers in the field of power, calls this power’s “disinhibiting effect.” Her research shows that power grants us immunity from social pressures and norms to which others are prone. Like Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak, when we have power, we become invisible: we’re protected from peer pressure, social norms, and others’ opinions that would otherwise constrain us. (more…)

Yesterday a special tribunal in the Hague convicted Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, of crimes against humanity. It was an historic ruling, the first ruler of a country ever to be convicted. Taylor was found guilty of aiding and abetting the Revolutionary United Front rebels in Sierra Leone, and for supporting the atrocities of that civil war: using children as soldiers, mass rape, abducting girls and women as sex slaves, and forcing children to fight after killing their parents and fellow villagers. Yet the court yesterday convicted him only of aiding and abetting the RUF, but not for the civil war he committed against his own country, or for the atrocities and crimes he committed against his own people as ruler. Which raises many questions:

• Is it still justice if it’s unevenly applied?
• Is it still justice if other warlords and criminals are still at large, with no one clamoring for their indictment?
• What about the countries on the UN Security Council, whose countries perpetuate human rights abuses but whose rulers are virtually immune from ever being indicted for their abuses?

If laws aren’t perfect, what is their use?  (more…)

Last week the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest and largest Islamist organization, a group that has been banned, off and on in Egypt since 1948, won 47 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament.

Which leads me to ponder a question that has always intrigued me: how does a political party, or an individual for that matter, make the transition in identity (and action) from a radical activist position, outside the mainstream, to the head of government?

Major political transitions are seldom considered to be psychological as well as political events, but how could they not be? The citizens of the former east bloc countries didn’t just wake up one morning with a democratic understanding, attitude and behavior. Growing up in a totalitarian regime results in a state of mind, a set of behaviors that doesn’t shift when government does. Being a member of a banned, radical extremist group to suddenly being the party in the seat of power is a profound shift in identity. Looking at history, the track record for making this transition is not good. Many radical parties entered through revolution and proceeded to jail, torture, ‘re-educate’ or assassinate opponents.

It takes people years to grow into their sense of power, to grow from a young adult dependent on others to being the one responsible for others. Companies grapple with this all the time. Someone is promoted from front line or factory floor into a management position but doesn’t or can’t fill those leadership shoes: they see their new staff still as colleagues, and react competitively with the people they are meant to develop. And this is true everywhere, not just in the business world: parents struggle with this, often failing to recognize their higher rank and resorting to yelling, screaming, even violence when provoked by their children. Teachers who feel insecure or who need their egos stroked are every student’s nightmare. (more…)

How and when does power become abusive? I’ve explored this topic here frequently, and while I don’t think power is inherently abusive or corrupting, without education and training on how to use it, abuse of power does and will happen. Hence the title of this blog.

One thing often overlooked in leadership training (which I believe should focus more on power and how to use it well) is that we do not enter positions of power as blank slates, but come into positions of power with our personal story of power. We grew up in a context of power relations, and how we enact the role of the leader is influenced by a social identity forged in part by power relations. Preparing for a position of power should start with an inventory of what one has already experienced about power.

As a coach and trainer, one thing I constantly see is that we seldom outgrow the power identity we grew up with. Not only that, our earliest identity of power  asserts itself under threat or stress. Growing up smaller than the other kids, and being picked on in school, growing up poor or disadvantaged, following an older brother or sister who did better in school, or being the only Jew in the town, all of these experiences are like unresolved wounds or complexes that stay with us, and influence our self-esteem, relations with others, and more generally, how we perform in our roles. We lead with and from our wounds.

And wounding can come from both a deficit and an excess of power, and the complicated mix of both. There is no doubt, as research confirms, low status is wounding. Lack of access to resources, systemic oppression, low self-esteem, internalized lowered expectations and stereotyping influences health, opportunity, success, well-being, happiness, etc. But we are also wounded psychologically by exclusivity, unearned privilege, entitlement, and the “price of the ticket,” fitting into an elite club whose membership is the cost of our authenticity.

But our early experiences with power can also be affirming and enabling. We are empowered through the connection with our lineage, a knowledge of ancestors, connection with the community or with a spiritual belief. We can also transform our earliest suffering into self-esteem and empowerment by awareness of having endured or survived hardship.

Yet unless we develop awareness of these initial experiences, and our unresolved wounds, the temptation to use the power of the role to soothe our pain is too great. Like an addict using a substance to flee a miserable state of mind, power becomes an artificial boost, a ‘substance’ to soothe and alleviate an internal sense of low status. But this isn’t an immutable fate. It can be worked on with focus and self-awareness. I’m looking forward to exploring this and more on the intersection of the person and the role in the Leadership Lab in a couple of weeks.

Power is not a singular attribute but a tricky intersection between the power of the person and the power of the role. I’ve written elsewhere about this tricky problem of the fit between the power of the person and the power of the role, the interaction of power and status.

Poor use of power most often stems from a dissonance between the personal power of the one in the role and the power of the role itself.

Now a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows how this dynamic happens in a research study. The implications of this are vast and useful for everything from ethics in corporate governance to bullying in schools.

What makes it even trickier is that status is not static; it fluctuates depending on many factors. Under threat and attack, our status can go down. In fact, under threat, when triggered, it’s common to regress to the place where we have been hurt or wounded, because that is where we learned to defend ourselves. This is why power needs to come with a User’s Guide: We regress to our place of lowest status, and from there, reach for our biggest rank to defend ourselves.

Black History Month is over, and we’re now into Women’s History month. Forgotten history, unrecorded stories, marginalized peoples, all need their own month to remind us and encourage us about our past and future. If that’s the rationale, then we also need a Personal History Month to remind us of our own hidden histories and how they still live in our every mood and moment. When it comes to personal development, psychology is guilty of eclipsing the impact of history, except for our childhood and family of origin stories. We don’t consider enough that who we are is a habit of history. We carry with us the vestiges of our ancestors, and much of our personality, behavior, beliefs and habits, for both good and bad, are the legacy of those who came before. (more…)

I recently heard an interview on my local public radio with a young woman on her struggle to learn the violin. She wrote a blog piece about it called The Virtue of Being Bad and concludes that being bad at something and persevering nonetheless is a virtue.

But here’s another reason why being bad is good. In looking at the corrupting influence of power, the culprit appears to the self-reinforcing nature of power. Power gives us the means to surround ourselves with people and places that reflect our rank back to us. And, as I write in The Expert Syndrome and the Problem of Transfer, it’s easy to transfer our sense of mastery in one domain to all domains, thinking we are truly invincible:

The sense of power we have gained is comfortable and fortifying; the energy we have invested in getting to this place of expertise is too much to just walk away from. This rank and expertise is reinforced daily, by every person who relates to us in that role. Every encounter adds to the identity. And it becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism; the more comfortable we are in that role, the more we surround ourselves with people who relate to us in that role.

Our rank allows us to surround ourselves with people, places, contexts, roles, that reinforce our rank. The more we stay within the context in which our rank is ratified, the greater the danger of identifying only with our rank, beginning to believe in our infallibility.

Is there a solution? No. But there are things we can do in leadership positions to mitigate this tendency. One of them: be a beginner at something. Be bad at something. Put yourself in positions of uncertainty. Remember your beginner’s mind. Above all, leave the “office,” literally step outside that context in which your rank is reinforced. For some people, having children is that humbling experience. For others, it might just be learning the violin. Every position of power is upheld by its context. And while it won’t solve all the problems of abuse of power, learning who we are outside that reinforcing context should be a requirement of ourselves and others in leadership.

Bob Sutton, in his blog post 12 Things Good Bosses Believe, emphasizes how the power of a role inevitably creates blind spots. Number 1 on his list:

I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for me

And he concludes with Number 12:

Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

I like how he says it and shows it so bluntly: power corrupts.

But it is not the power of the role alone. It is the fit between the power of the person and the power of the role. Think of it like clothing. The role or position is a piece of clothing, but the body who wears it has a lot to do with how it fits, to stretch an analogy just a bit. (more…)