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.

I’m starting to prepare my workshop on the Gold Coast of Australia in December. This year’s workshop is called The Leadership Lab. It focuses on the inner development of the leader, something I’m very interested in.  I’m fascinated by what is not included in leadership development. Conventional leadership training  usually focuses on 1) so-called soft (yet hard to master) skills such as communication, coaching, team work, 2) technical skills such as strategy, financial management, negotiation,  innovation, leading change, and 3) power, influence, and understanding one’s own leadership styles.

What’s missing though, is learning how to use your skills under pressure. The moment is not the classroom. If you don’t practice under stress, you can’t perform under stress. It’s that simple. Cops understand this, the military understands this, athletes understand this. But leadership training doesn’t always understand this. You cannot access your tools under stress unless you have trained to access your tools under stress. Arny Mindell focuses on this aspect of facilitation in what he calls “the second training.”  (more…)

My friend, Ioan Mitrea, who founded his company, Sellerengine, sent me this terrific post on the challenges of leadership: What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. The author, Ben Horowitz, is writing about being a CEO of your own company. But his words ring true for stepping up into any leadership position:

The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. No training as a manager, general manager or any other job actually prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills that you don’t have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO.

Read the full post here.

I just got back from the Bay Area, where I coached a team from a major outdoor apparel and equipment company. This small, dynamic team is under a lot of pressure perform: they are tasked with introducing a new line of products and enter into a new market. And they don’t just want to hit their targets but exceed them. By and large they’re doing great, but they know they’re keeping an unsustainable pace: answering emails at midnight, staying in the office past 7 pm or getting in before 7 am to have uninterrupted time, and for everyone, precious time with friends, partners, kids, working out falling by the wayside.

For many high achievers, the personal cost of such a workload is more easily tolerated than its cost to teamwork. The overwhelming amount of email, the constant interruptions, integrating new team members, the rush to deadlines, rapidly changing directives, uncertainty about roles and responsibilities, create massive amounts of rework and really affect team work.

This is the place where people start to talk about Work Life Balance. The term often launches a narrative of macro-solutions: flexible work hours, onsite daycare, more staff, time off, etc. But the pressures of the job are only partly to blame for work overload. How we do work is often a co-culprit to problem of work overload.

(more…)

There’s been an explosion of reality TV contests –  the Next Big Whatever Star. While the chance to become a celebrity lures contestants, I think it’s the grueling rite of passage that lures viewers. Last month we had exams at the Process Work Institute, which were fairly intense 3 day affairs, with 5 different exams per student. It’s interesting that in the adult education field that I’m in, exams are controversial and their value suspect. And yet, there’s this fascination in watching these demanding and punishing contests.

Over the 20+ years we have been training people in Process-oriented psychology and group facilitation, we have gone back and forth between pass/fail exams in some form and a non-pass/fail system of using gates or benchmarks to pass through one phase to another. It seems every couple of years or so, we debate getting rid of exams. They’re an arcane gate-keeping system that does little to foster or measure real growth in knowledge, skills and ability. And yet we come back to them in some form or other. I think, beyond the test of skills and abilities, they offer an opportunity par excellence to stretch beyond oneself, and for that reason, they are hard to abolish. (more…)

Last month, I spoke about the problem of transfer and ‘expert syndrome’ -over extending one’s sense of expertise to the point of enacting the expert role in fields in which one is not qualified. The deeper problem is one of self-reflection, really seeing who you are: on one hand, not confusing yourself with your role of expert, and on the other hand, understanding that you are, at the end of the day, just a role.

Barack Obama, for whatever reason, has got a grasp of this person-and-role truth. In a Newsweek interview with Daren Briscoe, Obama says:

I had become a symbol for the next thing. So some of it was undeserved, but what it told me was that people really were looking for something different. I joked with my team, and it wasn’t entirely a joke, it’s something I still think about – that the country was looking for a Barack Obama. Now, I’m not sure that I am Barack Obama, right? But they were looking for an idea like that.

Today both the idea and the man took office amid great pomp, circumstance and celebration. I’m curious, as I’m sure many of us are, how Obama will handle the role of POTUS, and the office, with its tendency to isolate, inflate and distort. Hanging onto his Blackberry is one problem; hanging onto this sense that he is, after all a role, and not just a person, is another. I look forward to the next four years and watching this unfold.

Soft power, a term coined by Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, Jr., is widely taken as the next natural step in leadership. Soft power is the ability to lead and influence using tools of appeal: relationship, collaboration, inspiration, engagement, communication, and emotional appeal. In the November 2008 issue of HBR, Nye points to an interesting paradox about soft power women:

The United States makes it particularly difficult for women to use smart (soft) power in public life, in part because of the macho myths that dominate American culture and in part because of the climate of fear that followed September 11. Look at this year’s Democratic presidential primaries.  A woman seeking public office still has to play against the gender stereotype that women are soft. So Hillary Clinton spent a good deal of her campaign proving that she was tough and experienced. That meant that Obama was able to be the candidate who could use soft power. He could appeal to people with a message of hope, a new beginning, a new future.

To be sure, Obama was also criticized for not being tough enough. (more…)

The following post begins to explore the question of abuse of power, or failures of power. In my earlier post I asked, can we learn how to use power well, like we learn how to ride a bike, or does power really have some corrupting influence? Which, if any, features related to high rank alters behavior or even personality?

A lot has already been written about the now fading scandal concerning former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. In the heat of the discussion, the question reverberating through the blogosphere was, “What was he thinking?” The easy answer of course, is: he wasn’t. Thinking, as in carefully weighing pros and cons, considering consequences, cost-benefits, and all that, nope, that probably wasn’t done, or at least, done thoroughly. It couldn’t have been a very cogent thought process that led him to pay $80,000 over the course of several years for dates (sessions? appointments?) with high priced prostitutes.

My inquiry here isn’t about sex or prostitution. It’s about risk and the private lives of public figures. What possible thought or non-thought processes allow the Eliot Spitzers, Mark Foleys and Bill Clintons of the world to risk their careers in such high stakes pursuits? Or, in some secret recess of their mind, do they want to get caught, to torpedo a career they don’t, albeit subliminally, want? In his Newsweek.com article, Notes on a scandal, Howard Fineman, writes:

Spitzer is a type I have seen before: a candidate who needs to rocket at warp speed because he does not dare stop to consider whether he really wants to be living the political career he is living. Spitzer, it turns out, hated some or all of what he was, what he wanted to be, or what he had become. Why else would he knowingly risk destroying his life’s career?

One wonders, how many people, at the top, or near to it, find themselves in a life no longer their own? Surrounded by people they don’t like or don’t trust, doing a job they don’t like, or responsible to a public they scorn? Is it much different from anyone of us stuck in a job or role we don’t like? We manage to tolerate it by engaging in things that take the edge off, some illicit, others less so: drinking, hanging with buddies, hobbies, having affairs or visiting prostitutes, etc.

But for a leader in a public position, it’s a different story. We imbue the role of leader with heroic stature, we don’t want to know about the private doubts, fallibilities, and lack of perfection. We don’t want to see ourselves up there, some poor schlub bumbling and stumbling, we want to see heroes.

It’s a love/hate relationship we have with the human side of leadership. On the one hand, we love a personable, folksy, emotionally accessible person, the “Gipper,” the fatherly or motherly figure we can relate to. Yet on the other hand, we demand strength, infallibility, and heroism. And we are surprised to discover our leaders have human desires and needs, just like the rest of us.

This pressure to be perfect we put on the role of leader creates a schism between the public self and the private self. The public self is the hero, the private self remains inaccessible, hidden from public view. And so a gulf begins to widen between the public role and the private self widens, eventually morphing into a compartmentalized existence, a split personality of sorts. Over time, even the leader starts to believe in his or her public self, believing that what’s performed on stage is the real self. Likewise, the private self, the needs, emotions, self-doubt, and desires that are kept out of the picture become so secret that it is easy to believe they don’t exist, that others can’t see them. Because I don’t see this part of myself, others can’t either. But our secrets compel us. Our hidden selves are most dangerous; they become autonomous and push us to do things, even reckless things, in order to be gratified and indulged.

This is a problem for public figures and for all of us in jobs where the role demands a one-sided expression of the personality. And positions of power and leadership are typical of this. In so-called normal life, the boundaries between parts of ourselves are probably meant to be thin, almost permeable. It’s messy this way, but robust and secure. It’s what we call conscience. My professional self is there to remind me when I am at the office party, hey, you have to be at work on Monday with these people, watch yourself. Or, my parental self is never too distant, even if I’m holiday, or out for dinner, the parental antenna is on alert, just in case the phone rings.

But in roles where the stress, expectations and demands are super high, the boundaries thicken, sometimes necessarily so. Walls go up to protect and buffer the one self from the others. Police officers or soldiers for instance, frequently report that they cannot share their experiences with their close friends and loved ones. They come home, sit in front of the TV, or drink, and numb themselves out. They do not, and cannot transition easily between public and private selves because the experiences they have in their public selves are beyond what most people want to hear about.

When power comes into play, the walls between public and private self are fortified by the trappings of the job itself – unlisted numbers, personal assistants, wood paneling and leather furniture, a limo and driver, private jets, mobile devices, and layers and layers of intermediaries that protect them from contact with their everyday self. There’s a scene in the romantic comedy, The American President, where the President wants to get flowers for his girlfriend. But for the life of him, he can’t get past those walls. He picks up the phone, but discovers he can only reach the White House switchboard. He doesn’t have a car he can drive himself. He can’t leave the White House without the Secret Service. Once, he finally manages to get an outside line, the florist shop assistant hangs up on him when he says. “I’m the President,” certain it’s a hoax.

But if we see leaders as heroes, we should remember that heroes and gods are meant, in the words of Whitman, to contain multitudes. Our superheroes all have alter-egos for whom we cheer just as loudly as for their amazing feats of strength. We love Peter Parker as much as we love Spiderman. It makes our superheroes even better, that there’s a flip side to them, that there is someone we can relate to, someone who fumbles in conversation, who wears glasses and pocket protectors and is picked on by the school bullies. Even the Greek gods reflected this paradox. They were venerated for their superhuman abilities and strengths, while at the same time driven by jealousy, vengeance, and insatiable appetites. They were saviors and villains, all without contradiction.

But in our modern version of heroes, in our leaders, we don’t tolerate that dualism. So leaders become estranged from their alter ego, from friends, family, and most of all from themselves. The walls that protect the private self from the public one create a loneliness that can’t be assuaged. We can’t be our self, our full self in public, with needs and desires. But in private, we indulge them. We cannot seek solace in public, where we will be shamed, but in private, with strangers, with people who are paid to listen, paid to care, paid to be nonpartisan. And as Charlie Sheen says, paid to leave afterwards.

In Primary Colors, Senator Jack Stanton, (a thinly disguised Bill Clinton) is sitting in a donut shop, at what seems to be 1 am. He’s the only customer, sitting in that cold florescent light of the shop. The camera pans out wide angle, and we see the empty streets, the loneliness of the city, of the hour, and of the man, as he in turn soothes and is soothed by the guy behind the counter. And you sense, this is what he’s craving, and perhaps what brought him to politics in the first place, the desire to connect with people, the ultimate bringing together of the real self and the public role.

Iâ??m offering a series called Women in Leadership beginning this June. It was something I had in mind for a while, but what prompted me to do it now was an article I read called the portability study. The portability study sought to find out how well star performers did when hired away by competitors. The study found something surprising and something unexpected: the starâ??s performance plunged, and did the market value of the new company. But one group maintained their performance: women.

Looking for explanations, the researchers found that because women built their careers more on external networks and relationships with clients outside their companies, their external networks and outside contacts made them more portable. By contrast, men tended to have stronger internal networks and relationships and thus, when transferring to another firm, were at a marked disadvantage. Their success was in part due to their relationships within their firms. Womenâ??s ability to develop strong external networks is certainly not a gender trait, but a learned survival skill. Not breaking in easily to the â??old boy networks,â?? women were forced to turn to relationships outside their teams or firms for support.

The study excited me, because it underlined something which is all too often missing from discussions about diversity in the workplace. Groups on the margins have knowledge, skills and abilities developed through the very challenges of their marginality. These marginal knowledges are critical for the health of the center. In fashion and entertainment, it is well know that trends begin on the margins. And in studies on creativity and innovation, lateral thinking, peripheral vision, cross-disciplinary thinking are critical ingredients for innovations and breakthrough ideas. In other words, the margins are a locus of change, innovation and development. There, out of necessity, new knowledge is crafted, new perspectives are developed, survival skills crafted.

This isnâ??t new, but this way of thinking about marginality is often lacking when diversity in the workplace is discussed. The perspective that women or people of color are the problem, and need legal or political intervention, misses the knowledge and skills marginalized groups bring to the table. Put another way, itâ??s not the margins that are the problem, itâ??s the center. Without the valuable information and perspective from groups outside the center, the center withers. The underuse of talent and knowledge from marginalized groups has a profound impact on the bottom line, and also on the cultural bottom line.

So, the question is, and what I will explore in my Women in Leadership groups is not, how can we develop the skills and knowledge required to compete successfully in the center, but how can we become aware of, develop, and use the specialized skills and knowledge we have gained from our experiences to not only succeed in leadership positions, but to become the innovators and transformers the center needs?