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.

You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual. — Richard Rorty

â??Loyalty to a dream countryâ?? is the idealism necessary to fully achieve democracy, and yet that loyalty to a dream country is also the ideological fervor behind fascism and nationalism. Unless we live in a world of strict realpolitik, we are destined to tread that fine line between the secular and religious in politics. There is and always has been a transcendent core to politics, the need to feel a part of something larger, and to merge with others in unity of purpose. This drive is part and parcel of the human experience, and wonâ??t go away, no matter how much we secularize our schools, government, and politics. (more…)

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people” — Mohandas Gandhi

Welcome to my blog, A Userâ??s Guide to Power. Why a userâ??s guide? My focus here is on learning how to use power well, and when, why and how itâ??s used poorly. Itâ??s also part of a longer project of writing a book called A Userâ??s Guide to Power^TM.

Why power? Why not call it leadership, influence, or persuasion, as do others when they talk about power? I want to use the word â??powerâ?? just because itâ??s such a dirty word and thorny problem. I want to tackle the problems of power head-on. Friendlier words like influence, persuasion, or leadership make it more manageable, but unpacking those thorny problems of power may help us learn more about its uses and misuses.

This blog will be a more personal, at times psychological approach to the behaviors and skills underlying our use of power. Itâ??s not going to focus on current politics, or even on specific public leaders, though it may occasionally. Itâ??s not about critiquing or benchmarking leadership by example, because my goal is to view leadership and the use of power as an everyday behavior, something for us all to master. This blog is a small attempt to humanize and demystify leadership, to bring it down off the mountain and into the hands of the people. Hopefully, it will be a forum on the trials and tribulations, challenges and success of leaders and leadership. I hope that by investigating the behaviors, mindsets and challenges inherent in using power, we come to appreciate leadership as something we all do and must do.

Thatâ??s why I call it a â??userâ??s guide.â?? Even though power is most associated with office, strength, rank, economics, or whatever, at its root, itâ??s still a set of behaviors. And therefore, using it well is learnable. It means learning and mastering the set of skills and behaviors that comprise it. Not dissimilar from learning to ride a bike. That may be an oversimplification, or naïve, but everything Iâ??ve seen so far in my work lead me to think this is worth a shot.

In the interest of full self disclosure (which is, supposedly, a good use of power), one of my ulterior motives is to talk about democracy. By viewing leadership and the use of power as something for us all to master, I am beating the drum for democracy. Personally, I am fascinated by the psychology of democracy â?? that means, how do people, not just countries, governments, and institutions, become democratic? What are the behaviors that we need to act democratically? And how do we learn them? Democracy, to date, has been more of a mechanism and less of a behavior. Because power is at the heart of democracy – demokratia, â??power of the people,â?? talking about the behaviors underlying power also means talking about the behavior that makes us democratic – governing ourselves and others wisely.

Trying to tackle the problems of power and failure of democracy only in terms of systems, institutions, governments, etc., misses a key leverage point â?? people. Before power is a problem on the outside, itâ??s a profound personal problem for the individual. Our first experience of how we use power is personal and internal. Getting up in the morning, we push ourselves to leave the warm bed, to turn on the shower, answer difficult emails, make breakfast for the kids, go to a job we hate, endure routines we dislike. And we use power everyday to make choices, whether mundane choices between eggs or cereal, or life altering decisions between jobs, partners, or goals. Even if we donâ??t make choices, or refuse to decide, weâ??re using power to resist deciding.

This use of power is not always at our fingertips. It is often used against us. Inner criticism is a form of power. So are resistance and cynicism, procrastination, rebellion, and bad moods. We use power to pursue goals that arenâ??t good for us. We use power to convince ourselves that we donâ??t deserve to live with love in our lives. We use power when we talk ourselves into giving up, or push ourselves to stay with something harmful. Power is at play whenever we put ourselves down, or feel inferior.

While it is often easier to see power â??out there,â?? in our bosses, parents, teachers, and in the institutions and bureaucracies that confound or oppress us, power begins within. How we use power on the outside is a reflection of how we use it on the inside. Whether we feel empowered or not, whether we can push back and influence the world around us in ways we want, depends on our intimate relationship to power.

My next series of posts concern the fog of war, the confusion, lack of awareness and obscured vision that awaits us when we step into a leadership role. I also look forward to being enriched by hearing from those of you in designated leadership positions, what is the human side of leading like? How is it to be in the crosshairs of public opinion? What has helped you most, been the biggest challenge? What have you learned from your failures? Thanks for joining me here.