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…)

OK last post about Steve Jobs, I promise. But something else in Steve Jobs’ biography struck me. Even after Apple became the dominant player in the market, Jobs continued to see himself, and his company, as the underdog, having to defend itself against the dominant players. It was as if everything in his world was still Microsoft and he, and his company, were the rebels. He carried this with him, even when it ceased to be true.

In one of his last battles before his death, Jobs fought to keep apps off of the iPad that he deemed in any way pornographic, obscene, or defamatory. He was very serious about it, and in fact, banned some political ads that were too raunchy, a gay travel guide that showed too much skin, and some mainstream German newspapers that had topless photos. (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.

Some good articles came across my desk this morning, dealing with some of the issues I’ve been writing about of late: cognitive errors or thinking fallacies, overestimating the power of government, and learning how to learn.

In the New York Times yesterday, David Brooks talks about overestimating one’s ability to solve complex, messy problems, and suggests focusing on discrete, rather than systemic good.

And another great article in the New York Times by Paul Tough whom I’ve  written about before. Tough wrote Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, about  Canada and his work with the Harlem Children’s Zone. This article focuses on teaching children how to learn, not how to succeed, and the fine art of  learning from failure.

Enjoy.

In the movie Bulworth, Warren Beatty plays Senator Jay Billington Bulworth a “suicidally disillusioned liberal politician who puts a contract out on himself and takes the opportunity to be bluntly honest with his voters.” It’s a great movie. And an even greater premise – that a politician doesn’t take on the problems of his constituents, but puts them back onthe people as problems of their own making.

It’s the primary season and next year is an election year, and I’m already dreading the prospect of sitting through two more years of hearing that our problems are the fault of Big Government. Doesn’t anyone else see that as a contradiction? Am I alone in thinking this creates the very problem people are criticizing,  making government responsible for the problems of big government? (more…)

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…)

Tomorrow the first module of the Inner Activist program launches. This program, several years in the making, is the brainchild of Brad Jarvis, whose own journey of development led him to create a personal development program to help change makers, social entrepreneurs, leaders and activists be radically more effective in their life-serving work.

I was recruited by Brad, and two others on the founding team – Ian Curtin and Frank Quimby, to consult with them on the development of the program. It was a daunting task of bringing together 6 different personal growth and adult education modules into one unified program. It’s been a great privilege working with the Inner Activist team – 21 amazing educators, social innovators, facilitators and trainers. In honor of this big moment, I’m posting something one my colleagues on the team, Natasha Aruliah, wrote for the Inner Activist blog, on the ‘hierarchy of oppressions,’ and the development of conscious use of power.

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.

Martin Luther King, Jr., on the eve of his assassination, eerily voiced a premonition of his death:

I’ve been to the mountain top!… He’s allowed me to go up the mountain! and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight… that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything…. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King, like Moses, never gets a chance to see the promised land. It’s both a truth and a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for leadership: There really is no leader beyond our own yearnings and dreams. While we  hope to rest in the illusion that there exists someone wiser, greater, or more powerful who can lead us, our fate is to become the wise woman or man we crave.

Is it even possible to  elect a leader, or a government that lives up to our ideals? Or, are our ideals ours to become? John Dewey predicted this when he said that, contrary to popular thought, the work of democracy was not to achieve common good and harmony, but was the work of individual self-realization. This is, as James Baldwin said, the real work of achieving our country.