Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  David Gergen,18 who served as a key governmental advisor over the course of three decades, under four U.S. presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton), appreciates better than most the need to remind those in power that they too are mortal. While in Washington, he observed the emergence of hubris again and again, especially for presidents in their second term, when they were more prone to believe that they were the “master of the universe,” David told us. President François Hollande,19 who served as the president of France for one term, between 2012 and 2017, was aware of this danger when he was elected. Reflecting back on his years as president, he told us that one of the biggest challenges he faced was not only trying to avoid the trap of hubris himself, which he admitted was difficult, but also having to deal with the situation when the people he nominated fell into it.

  Presidents, politicians, and their appointees aren’t the only ones whose behavior can be changed by hubris. Miriam’s experience is a reminder that anyone who has some power risks falling victim to its dangers. And the more power you have, the higher the risk of abusing it. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton wrote in 1887, in a letter to Mandell Creighton (who would later become a bishop of the Church of England), as part of a conversation about how historians should evaluate the past. Acton argued that, contrary to Creighton’s opinion, not only should moral standards apply to everyone, but they should be particularly stringent for figures of authority.20 “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases,” Acton pressed.

  Unchecked absolute power is quite likely to corrupt absolutely. And, interestingly, while those who do not have power are aware of this trap and are then more prone to think of power as dirty, those who do have power seldom do, because the experience of power makes us less likely to feel morally impure. Let’s see why.

  POWER CAN MAKE US FEEL VIRTUOUS, TOO

  Do you have pen and paper handy? Or perhaps your phone? When you have something to write with, consider the list of words below, and fill in the missing letters as quickly as you can to compose words in the English language.

  W __ __ H

  F __ O __

  S H __ __ E R

  B __ __ K

  S __ __ P

  P A __ __ R

  Now look at the words you wrote and count how many of them are related to cleansing. Perhaps you wrote shower? Or soap? Do you have one such word in your list? Two? Three? The number matters because the word-task you just completed reveals unconscious feelings of moral impurity.

  That’s right. Research in moral psychology has demonstrated that people who behave in morally questionable ways embody their shame, such that they wish to cleanse themselves physically to rid themselves of the moral dirtiness of their actions.21 This instinct to wash away our sins is not news to people with keen insight into human nature. William Shakespeare, for one, had Lady Macbeth cry: “Out damned spot! Out, I say!” when she was overtaken with guilt for the murder she had led her husband to commit. Although she had no actual blood on her hands, she felt the stains acutely.22

  You don’t have to connive at murder to feel morally impure and fill the blanks with words like wash, shower, and soap, instead of neutral ones like wish, shaker, and step. The focus of this chapter on the perceived dirtiness of power might have been enough to conjure cleansing-related words in your mind as you wrote because it doesn’t take much to make us feel morally queasy. Take networking, a perfectly legitimate professional activity many of us engage in, at least on occasion.

  Across multiple lab and field studies, we have seen hundreds of working professionals come up with many more cleansing-related words when asked to think about a time that they went networking to advance their career and job performance than when they recalled socializing to make new friends. The moral value of altruistic behavior explains why. When we network socially, for friendship, we can easily feel altruistic, because the purpose is a mutually supportive relationship.23 In contrast, when we network for professional reasons, we typically do so to get valued resources such as information, job opportunities, or profitable new clients from others. The selfish intent behind our networking makes us feel morally questionable—unconscious as those feelings often are.

  And yet, there are exceptions: In all our studies, the people least likely to feel dirty when they network professionally, even when they do so with the explicit purpose of accessing resources from others, are those who feel powerful. Being powerful means, by definition, having control over resources others value. People who feel powerful, therefore, are more likely to network with a clear conscience, since they know they can benefit other people by giving them access to resources they control. When it’s a two-way street—at least in their mind—it takes the shadow of exploitation away from their networking. This doesn’t mean that powerful people always reciprocate benefits; nor that they are generous with their resources as they acquire resources from others. We all act selfishly at least some of the time. But the powerful can more easily justify their networking to themselves as altruistic and virtuous, because they have something of value, potentially, to contribute.

  Power thus liberates us to pursue access to valued resources without incurring moral qualms about feeling selfish. We saw this effect clearly when we studied professionals in a large North American law firm. We found that lawyers who networked to advance their team and share their collective expertise with clients felt cleaner than lawyers who networked to advance their own careers and personal success.24 Because these collectively oriented lawyers didn’t feel dirty about their professional networking, they networked more often and got more clients, thereby confirming its effectiveness. Here’s the catch, though. The lawyers who networked the most were the firm’s powerful senior members, while the most reluctant—those who felt queasier about cultivating relationships to access clients and connections—were the junior lawyers, who had the least power and needed networking most but didn’t feel they had something of value to offer.25 You can see how easily this phenomenon can perpetuate existing power hierarchies, since those who are most powerful are also the most unabashed in leveraging their power to gain yet more power, while the least powerful feel most uneasy about getting out there and seeking the resources they need.

  POWER AND MORALITY: A CATCH-22?

  Wanting to have an impact in the world without having power is like wanting to produce electricity without a source of energy. It’s simply impossible. Yet as we have seen, holding power makes us more self-absorbed and arrogant—even when we think we are using our power for the purpose of benefitting others. Does this mean that it’s impossible to acquire and wield power without losing one’s moral compass? This is the catch-22 that Dr. Vera Cordeiro26 had to navigate as she worked to help the impoverished mothers and children in her care at Rio de Janeiro’s bustling Lagoa public hospital.

  As months turned into years, and her young patients cycled in and out of the hospital, Vera’s anger mounted. Illnesses that would be easily treated in private hospitals serving Brazilians with stable jobs, healthy sanitary conditions, and regular meals were death sentences for too many of her patients. In 1991, she founded a nonprofit organization, Associação Saúde Criança (now the Instituto DARA), to break this cycle via an innovative and, at the time unique, multipronged approach: In addition to providing the medicine children needed, the organization also supported the rehabilitation of their homes, the vocational training of their parents, and the health of all their household members.27

  Funding these activities wasn’t easy. Initially, Vera raffled off personal items from her home and relied heavily on the volunteer support of family and friends. But that could take her only so far. As the number of full-time employees grew, Vera realized she could no longer avoid seeking support from the rich and the powerful. In her mind, power was t
he sleek cars that crept through Rio’s shantytowns, and the politicians who took lavish vacations abroad—in short, greedy and corrupt. She wasn’t one of these powerful people, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But if Vera wanted to sustain and grow the impact her NGO was having, she could not shy away from power. From that point on, she and her team worked hard to attract the attention of private donors, public authorities, and the general public. They sharply increased their engagement with the media and their networking, not only in Brazil but also internationally in social entrepreneurship circles. An avalanche of accolades for Vera soon followed, and her NGO became one of the most highly regarded in Brazil. By 2016, it had directly helped seventy thousand people.28

  Along the way, Vera noticed that she had become more comfortable with power. She wasn’t so concerned about interacting with powerful people, and she realized that she herself had built a strong power base. She was well connected nationally and internationally, a frequent speaker at prestigious conferences like the World Economic Forum at Davos, where she could meet potential new funders.

  At the same time, she was starting to get some new and unexpected feedback from her staff and family: Colleagues told her that she was always interrupting them and didn’t let them speak their mind enough in meetings; her adult daughter questioned her about why she seemed to care so much about attending award ceremonies and public events. Their comments made her pause. Had she become one of those people who wanted more and more power to advance her own fame and interests?

  Having once been wary of power is no guarantee that you will be immune to abusing it. That Vera—a social entrepreneur who dedicated her life to trying to address the root causes of poverty and who initially shunned power—could be changed by the experience of power is another reminder that we are all susceptible to its intoxicating effects. The challenge is finding a balanced relationship that avoids the strictures of dirtiness and the perils of hubris and insensitivity to others. This balancing act hinges on both personal development and structural design—the way things work in the context where we wield power. Insights from the social sciences, neuroscience, and philosophy can guide us in tackling both dimensions.

  A DEVELOPMENTAL PATH TO POWER: CULTIVATING EMPATHY AND HUMILITY

  Developing a balanced relationship with power seldom happens overnight, not least because our emotions, not just our thoughts, are at play. Freeing oneself from the “power is dirty” narrative and understanding power’s potential as a source of energy to effect change is the first step, as we’ve seen. The next is recognizing that one has valuable resources to offer others—power that could be used to advance their well-being. This developmental process can help us to deploy our power as a force for good; and research finds that people who focus on the altruistic, collective benefits of building their power base feel worthier and are more likely to achieve better performance.29 But it is not devoid of pitfalls: The risk is that we convince ourselves that our motivations and behaviors are purely moral, that they transcend our own self-interest, when in fact they do not.30 As Vera discovered, engaging with power for a good purpose still makes us vulnerable to becoming self-focused and hubristic. We can, however, overcome these challenges to accruing power by cultivating both empathy (the antidote to self-focus) and humility (the antidote to hubris).

  The Cultivation of Empathy

  Diana, princess of Wales, broke many norms in her brief life as a British royal, perhaps none more so than how she mothered her sons, William and Harry. With public displays of affection for her children and her insistence on taking them with her on official trips, she was a warmer mother than the typically reserved British royal family had experienced. Nor did her break with convention stop at her own interaction with the princes: She was also determined to develop their empathy and took the unprecedented step of taking them with her to visit people in deeply challenging situations, such as AIDS patients. Asked why, she responded, “I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams.”31

  Princess Diana’s approach assumes that empathy can be developed by regularly exposing children to life experiences different from their own, giving them a chance to understand others emotionally and feel what they feel. Both neuroscience and psychology back up Princess Diana’s method, which, when sustained over time, can develop empathy in adults, too.

  Neuroscience has demonstrated that our brains are dynamic systems, constantly changing and adapting in response to the environmental stimuli to which we are exposed.32 Pioneering psychological research on empathy development is consistent with these findings on the plasticity of the brain. It shows that empathy is not a fixed trait that one is either born with or not; it is a skill, a capability that we all can build up and strengthen.33 Interventions to enhance empathy can be amazingly simple. In the lab, it’s enough to ask people to read a story of someone’s illness and imagine how the disease affected that person’s life, for the reader to feel more empathy not only for the individual featured in the story, but also for all those afflicted by the same condition.34 And if instead of just reading about someone we get to live their experience more vividly through immersive virtual reality technology, the engrossing simulated environment can greatly enhance our empathy for them.35

  Scientific interventions are hardly the only way to develop empathy. The more embedded you are in someone else’s reality, the deeper the empathy: The manager who works entry-level jobs before continuing to climb up the corporate ladder will appreciate the contributions of front-line personnel and blue-collar workers more than colleagues who leave their offices only for power lunches with clients and investors. The university student from an affluent family who takes a summer job at a fast-food restaurant will know what it means to be at the bottom of a corporate hierarchy, and how tough it is for people to live on a minimum-wage job. The banking executive who volunteers at an inner-city school or a local homeless shelter will think differently about the social role of a financial institution.

  What these interventions and experiences tell us is that increasing someone’s empathic accuracy requires asking them to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Incredibly, even psychopaths—whose defining traits are impaired empathy and uninhibited egotism36—respond to such nudges.37 Neuropsychologists have shown that asking psychopaths to focus on others’ pain, and to do their best to imagine how they felt, elicits mirrored suffering in their brains similar to that exhibited by non-psychopaths. Empathy nudges work. But sustaining their effects over time and beyond the immediate context in which they are applied is a lot more challenging.

  Deep and lasting development of empathy requires more than temporarily seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. It entails sustainably shifting from a focus on the self to an awareness and appreciation of interdependence. Psychologists think of this shift in terms of self-definition: People can view themselves as separate from and independent of others, or they can see themselves as connected to and interdependent with others.38 Like perspective-taking, this interdependent view of the self can be stimulated with simple interventions, like asking someone to read a story written with independent pronouns (I, mine) but substitute interdependent pronouns (we, ours) instead.39 The self is malleable, and, unsurprisingly, an interdependent view inspires greater empathy, more cooperation, and a collective orientation.

  The development of the self is ultimately about expanding what an individual is aware of and feels connected to and responsible for. We start self-focused and—if our development isn’t otherwise stunted—we evolve toward seeing ourselves as interdependent with something larger: family, community, country, and ultimately humanity and the planet.40 In chapter 8, we will appreciate how a society can cultivate this awareness of interdependence in its citizens, and through the empathy it produces, curb the nefarious effects of power when they emerge, and achieve collective prosperity.

  Social psychology isn’t alone
in believing that empathy rests on the awareness and appreciation of our interdependence. In Buddhist thought, all things are dependent on all other things, and interdependence is at the root of empathy and altruism.41 The Buddhist path of liberation from self-focus hinges, in part, on the practice of meditation, which helps cultivate the wisdom to see how the things we crave—wealth, fame, power itself—keep us compulsively focused on ourselves.42 Buddhism holds that training our minds to nonjudgmentally direct our attention to the present moment can help us let go of these destructive cravings, recognize our interdependence, and see the pursuit of the well-being of others as the pathway toward our own.43

  Seeking a way to break out of the tendency to get caught up in self-centeredness, Vera Cordeiro turned to meditation to help her come to grips with her self-focus. Developing a regular practice, she told us, “helped me have more empathy for my staff and families that our NGO serves, reminding me of the primacy of our social mission.” In connecting empathy with her organization’s mission, Vera took a fundamental step along the developmental path to power: the recognition that all people are part of the same human family, and all things are interconnected. This recognition is central in the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., who famously remarked, “all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”44 Recognize this interdependence, and empathy will spring naturally from it and, with it, a cleaner relationship with power.