Sometimes, as we struggle to see through the fog of our self-focus, events much larger than ourselves remind us and rekindle our empathy. The COVID-19 pandemic helped some to see that the unilateral exercise of individual power is futile and counterproductive.45 And many more of us have awakened to the truth of scientists’ dire warnings about the boomerang effects of invading and destroying ecosystems46 and “the need for a more holistic ‘one health’ approach [that] views human, animal, and environmental health as interconnected.”47
Life-altering experiences such as the pandemic also make us more aware of our impermanence, which has long been one of the defenses humans put up against the other great danger of power: hubris.
The Cultivation of Humility
When it comes to celebrating military victories and putting personal power on display, Rome has been the reference point for monarchs and autocrats for the last two millennia.48 Yet, in an interesting juxtaposition, some historians tell us that behind every victorious general riding in a chariot through the streets of Rome stood a slave whispering, “Hominem te memento” (“Remember you are [but] a man”), in his ear.49 Cultivating this awareness that we are mortal and that success is fleeting is key to protecting ourselves from the dangers of hubris. Nothing dampens illusions of invincibility and infallibility more than remembering the impermanence of our own lives and all life.
What can we do to remember we are mortal and keep our hubris in check, not only at our zenith but also day-to-day? Mashroof Hossain,50 a special representative of district police in Bangladesh, found his reminder in a life-changing exchange with a refugee during the Rohingya crisis. In 1982, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Myanmar, were excluded from the list of 135 officially recognized national ethnic groups eligible for “citizenship by birth”51 and became officially stateless. In 2017, civilian massacres, executions, infanticides, gang rapes, and village burnings caused hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to refugee camps on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, where living conditions are bleak and perilous.52 Among those called to help manage the situation at the border was Mashroof, who had joined the police force seven years prior.
Of the many people Mashroof encountered in the camp, an unassuming old man was one of the most memorable. Mashroof enjoyed listening to his stories, and they became friends. One day, he was surprised to learn from other people that the old man had been a general in the army. “And in Myanmar,” Mashroof explained, “if you’re a military officer, you’re like the king.” Yet in the blink of an eye, this man fell from the height of power to profound powerlessness. “Today, Mashroof, you may feel like you are on the top of the world,” the old man warned him, “but tomorrow you could lose everything.”
The man’s words stayed with Mashroof. Since that encounter, whenever he feels hubris lurking, he checks himself by remembering the general. “Feeling strong and powerful can be like a drug. When it happens to me… I remind myself of this general who is now a refugee with just one bag, like so many others who lost everything. And I know that this can happen to any one of us, so we should never take anything for granted.”
Mashroof was right to believe that cultivating humility is necessary for avoiding the trap of hubris. Empirical research shows that when we display humility, we enable others to help us stay grounded, because we give them permission to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear that they will be punished or humiliated. Organizational scholar Amy Edmondson has identified a number of practices that nurture such a climate of psychological safety.53 To encourage interpersonal risk, for example, leaders can first frame the work by reminding their team of the complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity in their environment, so that it is plain to see that no single individual can have all the answers. They can then invite engagement by making it a habit of asking questions to surface different perspectives, all the while acknowledging the limits of their own current knowledge. By admitting their own fallibility, they encourage others to follow suit. And when they do, the leaders must respond appreciatively: thanking those who speak up and destigmatizing errors by flagging them as opportunities for learning. The psychological safety these practices engender not only helps a leader keep hubris in check but also enhances the team’s innovation and effectiveness.54 When leaders express humility, the quality of team members’ contributions increases, together with their job satisfaction and retention, and their engagement and learning orientation.55
Humility—the acknowledgment of one’s limitations and the accurate perception of one’s abilities and accomplishments—increases our openness to learning and boosts our altruism, generosity, and helpfulness.56 Together, humility and empathy are thus what allows us to use power to achieve a higher purpose.
A DEVELOPMENTAL PATH TO POWER
PUTTING POWER IN GOOD HANDS
Beyond guiding our own development, understanding how to engage constructively with power should also guide whom we give power to, whenever that choice is available to us. A psychopath might fleetingly respond to empathy nudges, as we’ve discussed; but do we really want to put a psychopath in power and hope that he, or she, will morph into a paragon of wisdom? Of course not. And yet history is filled with instances in which awesome power fell into the hands of exactly the wrong people.57 These include individuals, chosen democratically, who became autocrats, and others who elbowed their way into positions of great influence and proceeded to make the worst possible use of it. The question is: Why does power end up in the wrong hands so often? Why do we allow power to go to people who proceed to take us down a spiral of abuse and loss?
One reason is self-selection, in that people who want power the most are often the ones who seek and get it. People vary in their desire to occupy positions of influence; and one study has shown that those who do the best job in these roles are neither the people most eager to get them nor those who adamantly eschew them. They are, instead, the individuals who are somewhat reluctant to be at the helm.58 The reluctantly powerful, as it were, are most likely to use power well, but also less likely to acquire it, because they don’t seek it.
Selection is another reason power often ends up in the hands of people ill-suited to use it well. We allow such people to occupy positions of power they have attained illegitimately, and sometimes we actively choose them in free and fair elections. Why? Because many of us, across cultures, are disposed to prefer people who project an air of strength and a sense of supreme control, people who give us a feeling of security and stability.59 By the time we realize whom we have given power to, their hold on it, and their control of the narrative around themselves and their actions, may be too tight to overcome.
What must we do instead? We should apply the same insights from psychology and philosophy that can guide our own approach to power when we choose the people who will exercise it on our behalf: individuals who have demonstrated empathy and humility; a proven tendency toward altruistic pursuits and not only selfish ones; and competence, of course, without which even the best intentions fall flat. These are the criteria we should judge every political candidate against, and the standards by which every business leader should be measured. Our job should be to look for cues that a potential power holder isn’t so unwise and needy as to crave power for power’s sake. The evidence suggests that much too often we fail to use these anchors and let other, flashier signs of strength, confidence, wealth, and status lure us into giving the wrong people power. The lessons of science and the humanities allow us to do better.
In sum, embracing power while avoiding its pitfalls rests on two foundations: an awareness of interdependence, which allows us to counteract self-focus with empathy; and an awareness of impermanence, which fights hubris with humility. Empathy and humility, in turn, make it easier to let go of selfish goals and to pursue altruistic ones—the key to a virtuous use of power. This is, of course, easier said than done. If it were easy, we would all use power wisely, shrug off its intoxicating dangers, and counter our individualist
ic desires. This is why we cannot rely exclusively on developing ourselves into more empathic and humble individuals. We also need structural limits to help keep our worst responses to power in check.
MORE THAN PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE NEED FOR STRUCTURAL SAFEGUARDS
Vera found personal practices like meditation immensely helpful in cultivating empathy and humility, yet she also recognized that they weren’t enough. If she were to manage the intoxicating effects of power and avoid riding roughshod over her team members’ ideas and opinions, she would need some external checks and balances as well. To that end, she structured her organization’s weekly executive team meetings so that everyone had the same amount of time to report on their activities and to share ideas and concerns. She also committed publicly not to interrupt her colleagues and to listen carefully before sharing her reactions; and she asked others to do the same.
These external efforts helped facilitate teamwork by creating processes that ensured inclusivity and a shared sense of responsibility. Vera was right to do so: Research on team performance has demonstrated that, together with colleagues’ average empathy (measured as their ability to read others’ emotions from their faces), the extent to which team members take turns speaking is among the strongest predictors of team performance.60 Establishing protocols, such as those Vera put in place, to prevent a few (over)confident people from hoarding airtime and silencing dissenting opinions is critical. So are formal processes and organizational norms that keep everyone—especially leaders, who have more power—accountable for their actions. Such practices lead the powerful to focus on others and to act in a less self-serving manner.61 They also keep the newly empowered team members accountable: the psychological safety to speak up and be heard enhances team learning and effectiveness when everybody feels accountable for using their share of power to accomplish collective goals.62
The idea that underlies all these practices is that power sharing and accountability accomplishes two objectives: It doesn’t let power go to the leader’s head; and it improves the effectiveness of the group. Vera had applied this key principle of good governance. In doing so, she stayed faithful to the higher purpose of her team and improved its performance. But she knew that she had to remain vigilant, as power sharing and accountability need to be constantly reinforced to curb hubris and self-focus. And as we will see in chapter 8, these limits on power matter as much for a small team in an NGO as they do for a giant corporation or the political system of an entire country.
So, power doesn’t have to be dirty. If we cultivate both empathy and humility and put in place structural safeguards that ensure power sharing and accountability, we can avoid the pitfalls of power. Such knowledge frees us to seek the power we need to pursue objectives of our own choosing, instead of resigning ourselves to letting others—“the powerful people”—decide for us. Equipped with the developmental and structural tools to help us engage with power and use it responsibly, the next step is figuring out how to get it. This brings us back to the fundamentals of power, to the idea that power is always situated in a specific relationship. To be powerful in that relationship, you must have some control over resources the other party values. And vice versa, others will have power over you if they have control over things you value. Take these fundamentals seriously, and you will realize that diagnosing where the power lies in any situation comes down to answering two questions:
What do the people involved value?
Who controls access to what they value?
The answers to these questions vary across contexts and over time, of course. But this variability contains patterns that we can make sense of to reliably diagnose any power relationship, whatever the context, and give ourselves a chance to harness power, instead of being swept away by its force. Let’s start with the first question: What do people value?
Chapter 3 What Do People Value?
How can we possibly know what another person values when human needs and desires are so diverse, multifaceted, and mutable over time? Philosophers, poets, and writers from Lucretius and Dante to Shakespeare and Yourcenar have devoted some of humankind’s finest thinking to answering this question, as have psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and social scientists of every stripe. The arts and sciences have given us scores of models of human nature and motivation, each emphasizing different drivers of people’s behavior. What follows is not an exhaustive account of this vast literature; that would be a feat far beyond the scope of this book, were it even possible. Rather, it is our distillation of the points of convergence we have found among these many bodies of work. Other scholars could—and undoubtedly would—make different, equally valid choices.1 Recognizing this, we offer our analysis not as some new “last word” on human motivation, but as a useful guide for those who seek to uncover the needs and desires that activate power relationships.
HUMANITY’S TWO BASIC NEEDS: SAFETY AND SELF-ESTEEM
Observed from afar, humanity is but a speck of dust in an endless universe, our position as inconsequential as it is fleeting. At the deepest level, what we humans long for are two defenses against this existential dilemma: first, protection from the whims of dangerous forces much greater than our own that could annihilate us in a moment; second, reassurance of our value as individuals in a universe that is indifferent to us. Ultimately, then, we aim to satisfy two basic human motives: safety from harm and confirmation that we are worthy of esteem. The need for safety and the need for self-esteem are so fundamental that they reliably shape power relationships across time and space.
Consider the dire perspective of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chillingly summing up the vulnerability of the human condition:
It seems that every time a pressing danger is avoided, a new and more sophisticated threat appears on the horizon. No sooner do we invent a new substance than its by-products start poisoning the environment. Throughout history, weapons that were designed to provide security have turned around and threatened to destroy their makers. As some diseases are curbed, new ones become virulent; and if, for a while, mortality is reduced, then overpopulation starts to haunt us… The earth may be our only home, but it is a home full of booby traps waiting to go off any moment.2
In the face of such looming danger, is it any wonder that we value safety from harm first and foremost? Our survival instinct is primal, which is why controlling access to resources that are critical to our physical and physiological safety—water, food, shelter and protection from illness and violence—is an effective strategy for wielding power. We shrink from what threatens our safety and embrace what promises to protect us from harm.
If this sounds nefarious, it’s because it can be. Threatening someone’s physical safety is as blunt an instrument of power as it is effective. It is a way that autocratic regimes squash dissent and control the people they rule,3 mafia bosses keep families and businesses under their thumb,4 and violent spouses hold their families hostage.5 Threatening someone’s livelihood is likewise a way to exercise power, albeit without the need to resort to physical violence. Holding someone’s job hostage is a potent threat, given the physical and mental stress of unemployment.6 Firing employees who refuse to work in dangerous conditions,7 or ousting public officials who won’t stand silent in the face of a political leader’s unethical behavior8 sends an unmistakable message about where the balance of power lies in the relationship.
Before our need for safety leads you to conclude that we live in a Hobbesian world of each against all,9 however, remember that the promise of protection from harm is also a highly effective source of power. This promise is why human beings agree to form governments, create public institutions, and enact laws to safeguard our rights and protect our societies from falling back into a state of nature. Such protection is essential, because it is only when we do not depend on the goodwill of others for our security that we can all “look others in the eye without reason for fear” and act as free people, as philosopher Philip Pettit has pointed out.10 But, t
he line between safety from harm and threats to safety can be easy to cross. Faced with a new and unpredictable danger, people tend to be less attentive to safeguarding their freedom, as the acceptance of increased government surveillance of private citizens after September 11 illustrates.11 And, when they give power up willingly, they leave themselves open to its abuse.
While our basic need for safety stems from the precariousness of the human condition, our need for self-esteem responds to our relative insignificance. Across the millennia, over 100 billion people have come and gone,12 leaving little or no trace, almost invariably forgotten. Questions about the meaning and value of existence are therefore at the root of humankind’s robustly documented need for self-esteem, or the desire to maintain a positive view of ourselves, both privately and publicly.13 The profound existential problem to make sense of our time on earth triggers the need to understand the worth of our life and its value for others.14 Viewing oneself as a valuable person is, by some accounts, the superordinate goal toward which most other goals in life are oriented.15
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