Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  Chapter 1 The Fundamentals of Power

  When we met Lia Grimanis in Toronto in 2008, she had a motorcycle helmet under her arm and was wearing a hot-pink leather jacket that matched her hot-pink BMW F650GS. The high-performing technology sales executive was an arresting figure, to say the least. But what we were there to talk about wasn’t high tech. Lia was passionate about creating an organization that would help homeless women regain control of their lives and futures. Why so passionate? Lia herself had risen from poverty and homelessness to security and stability. Now she wanted to help other women make a similarly transformative journey.

  To understand how Lia accomplished this remarkable feat, we must first examine the dynamics of power—what it consists of and how it works. Power as we’ve defined it is the ability to influence others’ behavior, be it through persuasion or coercion.I But what determines this ability? The answer is surprisingly simple: What enables one person to influence another is control over access to resources the other person values. Such control is the key to understanding the power dynamics in any situation, whether it’s one in which you have power over someone else, or one in which they have power over you.

  WHAT IS POWER MADE OF?

  To have power over someone, you must first have something, or some things, the other person values. Anything a person needs or wants qualifies as a valued resource. The resource can be material, like money or clean water, acres of fertile farmland, a house, or a fast car. Or it can be psychological, like feelings of esteem, belonging, and achievement. And, as we will see, material and psychological resources are not mutually exclusive.

  Whatever you have to offer—your expertise, stamina, money, track record, gravitas, networks—will give you power over someone else only if they want it. Think about a parent who promises their child a cookie to clean up a messy room. Controlling access to the cookie jar won’t be much use if the child doesn’t like cookies. In addition, the resource you have to offer must be something the other person can’t easily get from others. Are you one of just a few who can provide that valuable resource? Or are there many? Do you, in essence, control the other party’s access to resources they value, or are they widely available? If the child loves cookies, but can always get them from an indulgent neighbor, the parent’s offer isn’t likely to get much traction.

  Knowing what the other party values and whether they have alternatives to access what they value tells you how much power you have. But that is not enough to fully understand the balance of power between you. You must also account for whether the other party has something you value and the extent to which they can control your access to it. The effects of having power over someone vary dramatically depending on whether they, in turn, have power over you.

  Power is always relative. Does the other party in a given situation have power over you while you also have power over them? If so, you are mutually dependent. Then you must figure out if the current relationship is balanced, meaning your power over each other is similarly low or high; or, if it is imbalanced, meaning you are more dependent on the other party than they are on you (or vice versa). Power does not have to be a zero-sum game. The balance of power can shift over time, and as you will see, one party’s gain does not have to be the other party’s loss. But no matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of work you do, the fundamental elements of power, shown in the figure below, are the same. To be powerful, you need to offer valued resources over which you have unique control (or that are, at the least, hard to get from someone else). Then the strength of your grip on power will depend on your needs, and how much control the other party has over things you value. To illustrate these fundamentals, let’s return to Lia’s story.

  THE FUNDAMENTALS OF POWER IN A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP

  FROM POWERLESSNESS TO EMPOWERING OTHERS

  At sixteen, Lia was homeless, having run away from a home that had become violent after the death of her grandmother, the family matriarch. Navigating the dangers of homelessness was especially hard for Lia because she is autistic, and her autism (diagnosed only later in life) manifests as an inability to read facial expressions and interpret social cues. “It’s like a blind spot,” she explained. “You don’t see the train coming until you get hit by it.” After periods of couch surfing and a traumatic episode of sexual abuse, she landed, broken, in a women’s shelter. Only nineteen, she didn’t think she’d live to be twenty-one. “For a time,” she said, “the only question in my mind was: Do I live? Or do I die?”1 It seemed to her that the women who left the shelter just kept coming back. She saw no sign that homelessness was anything but a dead end, no role models that gave her reason to hope her life would be anything other than a constant struggle.

  Lia found new motivation to live in becoming that role model. She swore to herself that she would leave the shelter and return with a story that would inspire other women who, like her, had fallen through the cracks. After ten years of financial precarity and odd jobs—including running a rickshaw through the streets of Toronto, day in and day out, rain or shine, for four years—Lia had a chance encounter with “a guy who’d made $900,000 selling software.”2 She decided that was the way to go and applied to every software sales job she could find, never mind that all of them required a BA and preferred an MBA. Through all the rejections, for once her autism was an asset, she recalled. “If you can’t read the way people are thinking, then it doesn’t occur to you to be embarrassed or to doubt yourself. I had no idea that these people were quietly and politely telling me to go jump in a lake, so I just kept calling. Eventually, I must have worn someone down, because someone took a chance on me.”3

  From that point on, Lia worked insane hours, driven by the vow she’d made when she left the shelter. A few years in, she was making her company so much money that they didn’t hesitate about hiring an executive coach for her and investing five hundred dollars an hour in her career development. The coaching was a revelation; and as Lia reflected on how valuable it would have been when she was moving off the streets, the idea for what became Up With Women was born: She would found a charity to make the intensive, personalized developmental coaching she had received available to homeless women. To do that, however, she would need to convince certified coaches4 to provide their services pro bono for a year, and that, Lia quickly realized, meant offering them something they valued.

  Lia’s first small cohort of coaches were attracted by the same things that draw Up With Women’s volunteers and donors today: both Lia herself—her passion and determination, as well as her stunning story of trauma, survival, and success—and the transformative impact of the charity’s mission, with coaching at its core. Other charities might provide coaching as an add-on to other services, but at Up With Women, the coaches are the most valued contributors; and Lia was promising them that their work would help transform someone’s life.

  In the beginning, however, everyone struggled. The coaches, accustomed to working with executives, had neither the tools nor the experience to connect with women who had been so marginalized and traumatized. Nor had Lia yet figured out how to identify candidates who would be ready to accept coaching and benefit from it. As a result, the clients weren’t finding the coaching helpful; and the coaches, for all their genuine desire to help, weren’t seeing the transformative impact Lia had promised them. So, “the early years were really tough for recruiting [coaches],” she told us. “Painfully tough.”5

  Money was also a challenge. Having left her corporate job in 2012 to focus entirely on Up With Women, Lia was quickly running out of the personal savings she’d been using to keep Up With Women going. And without enough coaches, clients, and results, she couldn’t attract new funders. “I was staring down the last five thousand dollars in my bank account, and I was telling our shelter partners that they might need to make room for me! I seriously thought I would become homeless again. I went bankrupt to save Up With Women.” But Lia’s years running a rickshaw, pulling as many as eight people at a time, had
made her “insanely strong,” and she came up with a solution to fortify Up With Women financially in a way no one else would have thought of: She earned two Guinness World Records for “Heaviest vehicle pulled 100 ft (female)” and “Heaviest vehicle pulled in high heels (female).” The ensuing publicity attracted the attention of the media, potential donors, and corporate partners, and the donations started coming in. And with her feat, Lia sent a powerful signal to struggling women: “You are stronger than you think.”6

  Lia still had to find a way to give her coaches what they needed and wanted to keep them “hooked.” And although she had been coached herself, she knew very little about the process, or what made a coaching relationship successful from the coach’s perspective. Fortunately, however, there were three coaches who were committed to the vision and eager to help her learn and recruit others. They articulated what an effective program would look like, and then took responsibility for creating it with her. For prospective coaches, it included providing them with the specialized skills that this most challenging client base required, such as proficiency in trauma-informed coaching, which most volunteers had little or no background in. For prospective clients, it included devising screening criteria for identifying women ready to take the next step. One such criterion was to focus on women who had recently come out of homelessness and were actively trying to regain their footing. Guided by this new approach, Lia started visiting shelters to get recommendations from staff who could best identify potential candidates.

  Before long, Up With Women was flourishing, as were the coaches and their clients. With the help of the coaches, the women were learning to uncover their motivations and strengths and find their own agency. The coaches were not only mastering new skills but also becoming active partners in a learning community unlike any they had ever experienced. As one of them told us, “This clientele really stretches a coach’s muscles and bandwidth, brainwidth, heartwidth.” As Lia talked with other coaches, she realized that they, too, valued the opportunity to stretch professionally in a community of like-minded colleagues whom they could relate to and learn from. So, she made that learning more accessible by establishing regular coach meetings and mentor-coach roles to give all the volunteers an increasing sense of mastery and belonging. She also engaged evaluation experts to develop measures of impact that would allow the coaches to see the tangible results of their work—a level of rigor not typically found in the corporate world, where rarely does anyone systematically assess the ROI from executive coaching.7 What ultimately mattered most to the coaches, though, couldn’t be quantified. As one of them put it, “It is one thing to see a VP get a promotion in the corporate sector; it is another to see a woman who hit rock bottom blossom. How do you measure that!?”

  Lia—who was completely dependent on the certified coaches to achieve her mission—had finally sorted out what the coaches valued most: inspirational purpose, transformative impact, deep learning, and a community of like-minded colleagues. Over time, she had made Up With Women irreplaceable for the coaches to access those valued resources all at once. It’s no wonder that you couldn’t find a more loyal group of volunteers if you tried. By understanding what the coaches needed and wanted, and then figuring out how she could give them access to those resources, Lia introduced a level of mutual dependence into the relationship. You could argue that the power was still imbalanced in the coaches’ favor—after all, Lia couldn’t deliver the program she had envisioned without them. But now she, too, had some power. Yet, she did not use it to coerce the coaches; she used it to enable them to help the women they coached. Lia had developed the kind of power relationship that pioneering social scientist Mary Parker Follett referred to as “power-with,” “a jointly developed power” used to facilitate “the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.”8

  We purposefully didn’t give you the example of a Caesar or a Napoleon to start on our journey to understand power because we want to help you see it differently. So we took you to a place where people seldom turn to look for it: a shelter for homeless women. Was Lia powerful? Absolutely! She managed to regain control over her own life against all odds, and then she was able to harness enough power to convince certified coaches to join Up With Women to help other women rebuild their lives and careers. But Lia not only gained power for herself, despite not having been born into an already powerful position, she also used her power to empower others. Her trajectory perfectly illustrates the lesson that Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate author, gave her students, “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”9

  REBALANCING POWER

  Lia’s story shows both the interplay of the fundamental elements of power and how these elements can be rebalanced over time. Just as there are four elements that define the distribution of power across two parties in any relationship—the resources each party values, and whether they each have alternatives to access those valued resources—there are four strategies for shifting the balance of power: attraction, consolidation, expansion, and withdrawal, as shown in the figure to the right.10 These strategies are used today, as they have been since antiquity, and they are relevant for all kinds of relationships—those you have with family, friends, and colleagues, and those that emerge between organizations, industries, and nation-states. To illustrate, we will use the diamond industry as our lens, looking at each of them in turn, starting with the attraction strategy advertising agency N.W. Ayer developed to persuade generations of prospective brides and bridegrooms that the sparkly gems are much more important to them than they might have thought.

  FOUR WAYS TO SHIFT THE BALANCE OF POWER

  In 1938, the Great Depression was beginning, fitfully, to lift, but war was on the horizon as the world watched Hitler march into Austria. Many families still struggled to make ends meet, and diamonds were not much on people’s minds. Only 10 percent of engagement rings contained diamonds.11 Harry Oppenheimer, the South African president of De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., the world’s largest diamond company, was worried, and so were his bankers. They were pressing Oppenheimer to find a way to increase demand, drive the price up, and make De Beers more profitable.

  Hoping that advertising could help, Oppenheimer traveled to New York to meet with the Ayer executives.12 The agency more than met the challenge: The core elements of the campaign they developed—associating diamonds with eternal love, success, and marriage—still resonate today. Ayer achieved this by deploying advertisements with movie idols and socialites to promote the gems and amplify the campaign’s iconic tagline, “A diamond is forever.” Less than three years later, diamond sales in the United States were up 55 percent.13 By 1990, 80 percent of engagement rings had diamonds.14

  Salespeople and marketers may be particularly adept at using attraction as a strategy, but they are not alone. Attraction—or increasing the value of a resource in the eyes of others—is one of the moves most often used to rebalance power. Think about Lia: The promise of transformative impact along with new professional skills and networks is what attracted coaches to Up With Women and kept them hooked.

  An attraction strategy can hinge on both perception and reality. The impact of Lia’s coaches on the lives of their clients is real: These women get out of poverty, give their children a stable home, and start careers—undoubtedly tangible changes. But the value of a diamond owes a lot to perception, and psychologists have taught us how easy it can be to shift people’s perception of a resource’s value by using simple levers of persuasion.15 This is true even when the value of a resource is easy to assess objectively. Diamonds are a case in point: cut, color, clarity, and carats determine their quality. And yet, a study of 1.5 million eBay transactions found that diamond rings of exactly the same quality received lower bids when the seller described them as being for sale for a “tainting” reason, like a cheating fiancé, versus a benign one, like an heirloom from a happily married aunt.16 Whether real or perceived, increasing the value someone sees in a resource you have to offer
can be an essential strategy for rebalancing power in your favor.

  But even an attractive resource gives you little power if it is available from many. In such cases, you can increase the other party’s dependence by reducing the number of alternatives they have. Doing so requires consolidating with other providers of the same resource. Cartels are one example of a consolidation strategy designed to decrease the number of providers of a valued resource. That’s how OPEC has increased the power of petroleum-exporting countries since its founding in the 1960s. One of the most extreme and well-known incarnations of this approach is the power of monopolies. The etymology of the word “monopoly” is monos and po-lein, which in Greek mean “single” and “sell.” In other words, “you’ve only got me.” When a company acquires providers of the same resource to eliminate its competition, it is also using consolidation to increase its market power. This is why antitrust laws are important: They prevent companies from concentrating too much power in their hands. But whether voluntary or coercive, consolidation rebalances power in favor of the providers of a resource, who come together to reduce the alternatives available to the other party.

  This was the case with De Beers, which used a consolidation strategy for decades to win control over the world’s supply of rough diamonds. To increase its power over suppliers, De Beers created a Central Selling Organization that developed exclusive contracts with diamond sellers. At the same time, De Beers also increased its power over its customers by setting up an exclusive club for the world’s top diamond buyers. By the 1980s, De Beers controlled 80 percent of the world’s supply of rough diamonds.17 If you wanted to trade in diamonds, you had almost no alternative but De Beers.

  Different as they may seem from monopolies and quasi-monopolies like De Beers, unions also leverage consolidation. How much power does a single worker really have in his relationship with his company? As long as the company needs his work to produce its products or services and he is protected by labor laws, he certainly has some. Yet his power is limited, as the company could likely find a replacement either internally or through external recruiting. This creates a real power asymmetry, which is even greater when there are a lot of available recruits able to accomplish the work and looking for jobs. Such asymmetries can make it hard for workers to protect their rights, which is why they created unions. As the etymology of the word “union” (unus, the Latin term for “one”) reminds us, by unionizing, workers can be represented as one group and, in so doing, prevent their employers from simply turning elsewhere should there be disagreements about acceptable working conditions.