by Emily Chan
“Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines . . . threw the company’s rule book out of the window.”
“Greg Dyke . . . when he was the director general of BBC discovered a mass of bureaucratic rules, often contradictory . . . (the rules) discourage the clever people (or high-quality staff members) on whom the reputation and future success of the BBC depended. Dyke launched an irreverent ‘cut the crap’ program.”12
Let Them Go
Even if you do all four kinds of promoting measures I’ve described and maybe more, staff turnover is still inevitable.
I have had people resign for no other reason but desire for “a new environment to stimulate new learnings.” I can do nothing to retain someone who’s reached that conclusion. It is painful to lose people for reasons like that. I used to get very depressed and have had many sleepless nights from loss of key staff members. But now I have learned to keep it in perspective—the loss is painful and I will do anything I can to retain the good people, but in the end no one is irreplaceable.
HAVE A POWER TRIP
In business, everyone wants power. To have power means you can make things happen: you can make decisions that will be enforced without resistance; you can have access to information that you need to make decisions; you can allocate resources that can affect careers, job satisfaction, and remuneration, and so on.
At HBS, students take classes devoted to the topic of power. As with networking, some people are born with a talent for acquiring and using power. But for someone who (like me) lacks such natural talents, I find two discussion topics particularly useful. The first is an analytical framework to understand the sources of power. This framework can help you think through how to get power, or at least how to navigate within the power structure. The second topic is recommendations on how to start building power beyond the formal power bestowed to you by your position. Even if you run your own company and have all the power, it is important to understand both these topics, if only so you can monitor the development of your subordinates’ power. This is critical to ensure that none of your subordinates is developing an inappropriate power base.
Sources of Power
At HBS, we discussed three major sources of power. The same sources are elaborated in the Harvard Business Essentials book, Power, Influence, and Persuasion.13 The first is formal and can be exerted directly and forcefully. The second and the third are informal and often take the form of influence that is applied more softly.
Positional Power
This is the formal power that comes with having a position and title in the organization. Typically, the power will include managing your subordinates (work assignment, appraisal, and so on), access to certain information, inclusion in certain management meetings, and the authority to make certain decisions and mobilize certain resources.
Personal Power
This is the informal power that comes because of who you are as a person:
Personal traits such as self-confidence, articulateness, charisma, even aggression. These traits increase your chance of getting noticed and listened to.
Expertise such as strategic thinking, industry experience, functional knowledge, technical know-how, government relations, ability to execute, ability to generate business, and close client relationships.
Track record of success and accomplishments.
In particular, expertise that is valued and rare in an organization can give you great power, because your opinions will be sought after and given significant weight. You can be put into leadership or advisory roles beyond your formal position. Expertise is what gives consultants their access to the ears of senior management in key positions.
Relational Power
This is another form of informal power. It comes from your relations with others in the organization. Key sources of relational power include mentorship, coalition, dependencies, and reciprocity.
Mentorship is a source of relational power. Mentors can use their relational power to influence the behavior of their protégés. I still remember many years ago when Mr. A, my mentor and my boss at BCG, asked me to take on an assignment that required stationing at a very remote area for many months. He could have used his positional power and simply told me to go. But instead, he used his relational power and said to me, “Hey Emster (a nickname he made up), will you do it for me, please? I need you there.” Of course, I could not say no.
On the flip side, protégés can also leverage relational power with their mentors. I have often gone to Mr. A to ask him for information that I had no right to get—such as “am I getting a good reputation among the seniors?” I have also gone to Mr. A to get him to use his positional and other powers to help obtain high-profile assignments for me.
Being part of a coalition within the company can give you relational power. As described in Power, Influence, and Persuasion,14 there are two types of coalitions: a natural coalition or a single-issue coalition. The former endure for a long time, and are developed based on shared fundamentals over a range of issues. For example, at my property investment client, the head of strategy had a natural coalition with the head of property management. Both had business school training, made decisions based on data and analysis, and were very execution-oriented. At my consumer electronics client, the marketing team, sales team, and engineering team had a shared interest to push the R&D team for faster, better, and lower-cost products. They also had a shared interest against the finance team, which was always looking for cost-cutting maneuvers. They formed a natural coalition on these issues.
Single-issue coalitions develop as parties come together for one goal. Their relational power does not extend beyond that issue. For example, many traditional Hong Kong companies work half the day on Saturdays. I have seen coalitions forming in many such companies to lobby for eliminating Saturdays as a workday. Individuals in the coalition do not have positional or personal power to lobby for the change. But appropriate coalitions can bring the issue to management’s attention. Such a coalition may include many who are adversaries on other issues but are allies on this one.
Having dependents will give you relational power. Dependencies exist when your colleagues depend on you for information, services, assignments, or anything else. At my property investment client, for example, the sales VP, who was also on the Board of Directors, had very limited control over some of her general managers. The VP, for a variety of reasons, stopped focusing on getting involved with many of the tenant negotiation and relationshipbuilding issues. She delegated most of this to her general managers. Over time, the general managers became very powerful because the VP had to depend on them for tenant relations, which was key to the rental business.
Exploiting the Law of Reciprocity can also give you significant relational power. This law was discussed in Chapter 4, in the context of networking. The better you are at giving out favors effectively, the broader and deeper relational power you have. It is like depositing into a bank account that you can draw from when you need a favor in return.
Key Steps to Build Power
The first thing to do is make sure you understand the company. When I first started doing business in Beijing, I asked a powerful mainland Chinese politician for advice on how to start developing powerful government relations in Beijing. I still remember exactly what he said: “As a newcomer to Beijing, don’t do anything. The best is to read all the government news, listen, observe, and ask appropriate questions very discreetly. Meet everybody but choose your friends carefully.”
I’ve found this advice useful—not just in a politically sensitive place like Beijing but in any new business environment. And do not wait until you first join a company; start absorbing information during your job hunt to ensure you are joining a company where you can fit. This effort should not stop until you leave the company as politics is never static.
All sources should be tapped into for as much information as possible: company annual reports, press releases, ex-employees, current employees, whoever and whateve
r you can find. All information is useful, especially anything that helps answer the following questions:
What is the formal power structure? That is, what is the power officially vested in each key position in the organization chart? This is not confidential information and can be found relatively easily.
What is the informal power structure? This could be even more important than the formal structure. What are the key decisions and projects facing the company? Who has the most influence on the decisions and projects? Who has the most personal and relational power? Who has the least? Why? What are the key mentorships, coalitions, and dependencies?
What is the culture of the company? You need to know the norms, values, and ways of getting things done in the company.
Being a trained engineer and basically a straight-arrow nerd, I made plenty of mistakes in my early career because I did not appreciate the importance of understanding corporate culture. A couple of my blunders immediately come to mind:
I was making a presentation to a Dato’ in Malaysia. (Dato’ is a rank that can be compared to the British knighthood.) He was head of the Muslim company I was consulting for. I was in the middle of presenting when the Dato’ asked a question. I answered it politely but ended by saying, “but Dato’, that’s not the point. The point is. . . . ” The whole room of client executives went absolutely quiet and all eyes turned to the Dato’. I later learned that no one in the company, especially a woman, would ever dream of speaking to the Dato’ like that. I was lucky the Dato’, probably seeing that I was a foreigner, decided not to fire me on the spot. But it was a close call. Ever since, I’ve never forgotten to pay attention to company (and country) culture.
I was once seconded to a certain company to act as an in-house strategist. In consulting, one is trained to speak up and actively participate in meetings and in other people’s presentations. silence in meetings is often interpreted as failure to think and contribute enough. Therefore, from day one, I was very vocal in meetings. I quickly observed that everyone else, including the chief executive, was very quiet in meetings. Being an arrogant novice, I thought I was just quicker, smarter, and more articulate than everybody else there. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I got a major warning from my superior at the consulting firm. The feedback from the CEO was: “She does not listen. People are rather turned off by her constant comments and questions during meetings. She seems to have problems fitting in.” Since then, I have learned to watch when not to open my mouth.
So What?
Developing a strategy to gain power has a lot of similarities to developing a strategy for a start-up. The company is your market. You need to decide your principles, values, vision, long-term strategy, and short-term tactics. These are some of the key questions to think through:
Does anything you know about the company power structure and culture conflict with your values or personality? If so, this may not be the right company for you.
What is the future you want in the company and outside? What formal and informal power will you need to achieve your long-term goals? For example, if you see your consulting job as the stepping-stone to finding an industry job with one of your clients, you need to gain power so as to be assigned to work with clients you might want to work for in the future.
What is your job now? What formal and informal power you will need to excel and learn in your job? For example, if you are in marketing, you may need field data and insights from the sales team for your marketing plan. Hence, you will need to develop informal power over people in sales.
Based on your answers to these questions, you can start developing your road map—what power you need and how to attain it:
Positional power. This kind of power is the most difficult to change, but it is not impossible. Examples I have seen: additional formal power bestowed for special projects, organizational restructuring, personnel changes, and new strategy.
Personal power. This may be the easiest as many sources of personal power are skills you can choose to acquire for yourself.
Relational power. Developing relational power involves third parties. This kind of power has two main categories:
Key relationships. Naturally, focus should be on building key relationships with the people you have identified as critical to your power base. You will want to put most of your effort into creating the dependencies, extending favors, and building coalitions.
Non-key relationships. You should not ignore people with no immediate value for your power base. Unless it would run into conflicts with key relationships or require a lot of effort, it is worth extending appropriate and easy-to-afford favors even when it is to a colleague of no apparent value to your power base.
The plan should also be one that you are comfortable in executing. Do you have the personality, capability, and determination necessary for the plan? If not, are you going to adapt yourself? Or are you going to find another company that is a better fit?
Play Your Chess
Executing the plan to attain power and then using the power is like the game of chess.
As my chess teacher always says, “You cannot become a chess champion without learning to envision the game many moves ahead.” Lack of time or discipline often makes people focus too much on the present instead of thinking about future moves by others. In addition, the chess metaphor is also useful as a reminder to look at it all as a game. This can make it more interesting and easier to accept when failures (inevitably) occur.
Guard Your Reputation
Power, especially personal and relational, can be further enhanced if you develop a strong reputation based on winning traits, relationships, or track record. A strong, positive reputation can significantly increase your personal power. In the cynical but insightful book The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene and Joost Elffers explain: “so much depends on reputation—guard it with your life. . . . Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win. . . . Reputation is the cornerstone of power. . . . Your reputation inevitably precedes you, and if it inspires respect, a lot of your work is done for you.”15
There are two ways to get a reputation: passively or actively. Passive development is the style generally used at HBS. Different people got a reputation over time: “he is really smart,” “she really knows finance,” “he always puts his foot in his mouth,” and so on. Reputation mostly develops naturally as people interact with each other in and out of class.
Active reputation building is not taught in any HBS course, and I have not noticed anyone feeling a need to try this at HBS. But in their book, Greene and Elffers suggest you can also actively build your reputation by
Establishing a reputation on one outstanding quality that sets you apart and gets people to notice and talk about you.
Making your reputation known. But this has to be done subtly and with care. Overdoing it can be perceived as “bragging,” “tooting your own horn,” arrogant, self-centered, or egotistic.
I have seen active reputation building outside HBS, and when I notice it, it makes me more skeptical and careful about the person. For example, a few years ago, almost overnight, two unknowns became recognized by all of Hong Kong as “the richest couple in Shanghai.” By combining charity donations and appearances, high-profile real estate purchases, press conferences on their businesses, and frequent sightings with socialites in Hong Kong, and befriending socialites who then introduced them to the rich and the famous, the pair built a reputation that allowed them to attract business deals and attention from all over Hong Kong. They never publicly proclaimed themselves “the richest couple in shanghai,” but their friends, associates, and the media constantly introduced them that way. unfortunately, recently they were arrested for corruption. This taught me two lessons:
What Greene and Elffers suggest does work in real life.
Be cautious of people who have built a reputation this way.
It is interesting to point out that acquisition and exercise of personal and relational power is more or less t
he same as what is often referred to as “playing office politics.” At HBS, many agree that, like formal power, politics is the natural by-product of human interaction. It cannot be eliminated or ignored. understanding personal and relational power can help you decide how much politics to use and how to fit it with your own career goals and ethical standards.
Notes
1. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 13.
2. Ibid., 55.
3. Story available online: www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/David_Ogilvy (access date: January 17, 2009).
4. Robert Slater, Jack Welch and the GE Way (New York: McGraw-Hill), 41.
5. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 54–56.
6. Jeffrey J. Fox, How to Become A Great Boss (New York: Hyperion Books, 2002), 21.
7. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 54–56.
8. Robert Slater, Jack Welch and the GE Way (New York: McGraw-Hill), 38.
9. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 56.
10. Management books and research on the importance of goal setting abound. Recent books I have read include How to become a Great Boss by Jeffrey J. Fox, Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do and What to Do About It by Ferdinand Fournies, and First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
11. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, “Leading Clever People,” Harvard Business Review (March 2007).
12. Ibid., 5.
13. Harvard Business Essentials, Power, Influence, and Persuasion (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005). I find the Harvard Business Essentials series quite useful as a summary on many topics. As explained in the inside cover of each book, “the series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. . . . To ensure quality and accuracy, each volume is closely reviewed by a specialized content adviser from a world-class business school.”