Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  Chapter 4 Who Controls Access to What We Value?

  Donatella Versace never wanted the power that befell her on July 15, 1997. On that day, her brother Gianni—the creative genius behind the Versace empire—was murdered in Miami Beach, Florida, by a serial killer obsessed with the fashion icon. Overnight, Donatella found herself at the creative helm of the company her brother had dreamed up and turned into a global force in the fashion industry.

  Ten years her brother’s junior, Donatella was Gianni’s first muse. When she was ten years old, Gianni would dress her for school in black leather miniskirts. When she turned eleven, he encouraged her to bleach her hair, outraging their mother but inspiring Donatella, who, by her teens, was a platinum blonde. As an adult, Donatella was Gianni’s trusted creative advisor and scout, the only family member to work with him on the creative side of the Versace business. While Gianni designed, her keen eye and global outlook brought innovations to the company that heightened Versace’s prominence in the fashion world. Her vision of the supermodel as a cultural icon transformed anonymous mannequins into public figures, women with distinctive identities and influence. “Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista. I’m the one who found them and brought them all into Versace,” Donatella told us.1 By 1993, she was so close to the business that few people realized Gianni had been ill with cancer, and that Donatella had quietly filled her brother’s shoes to bring his collections to market while he recovered.

  Despite these accomplishments, when Gianni was killed and Donatella officially replaced him as Versace’s creative leader, few people inside or outside the company thought she could design iconic fashion the way her brother had. “Nobody believed in me—not even my team, the people who had worked with me all along. To them, I was just the little sister of a great genius. It didn’t help that I was a woman in a company dominated by men in 1990s Italy. The weight of immense responsibility and total skepticism was crushing.” Nevertheless, she said, “at the time, selling didn’t cross my mind. Not for a second. I could never have given away my brother’s creation, his sweat, his blood, his passion. I had to keep it in the family, for the family, for him.”

  Donatella paid a steep personal price for her commitment. “I was barely surviving,” she remembered. “I had tunnel vision to get to the next collection. I couldn’t see any farther. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, and I kept asking everybody for input, not trusting myself. I needed to find my self-confidence, but it seemed that nobody around me had confidence in me,” she recalled. “I had a seat on the Board of Directors, but in the eyes of the other Board members, I was there only because I was the founder’s sister, so I didn’t count.”

  At a loss for allies to sustain her through the turmoil of grieving her brother’s death in the public eye and succeeding him, Donatella needed to be powerful and feel powerful, but power eluded her.

  POWER AND AUTHORITY ARE NOT ONE AND THE SAME

  As unique as Donatella’s situation was, her experience of powerlessness at the top isn’t unusual. Hierarchical positions seem, at first, like a useful proxy for power; and organization charts are indeed a good first step in identifying powerful individuals. In the military, orders flow down the chain of command. In politics, only presidents and prime ministers can issue executive orders. In business, managers can hire and fire subordinates. In these examples, title describes a person’s authority, that is, their formal right to give orders and commands, and to make decisions.

  Plenty of evidence exists, however, that authority does not always equal power. In a study we conducted in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, we saw how misleading it can be to rely solely on formal rank as a source of power. For one year, we followed sixty-eight clinical managers, all of whom had just launched a change initiative in their workplace. Some of these change agents were middle managers, while others were quite senior. But we found that a manager’s rank and formal authority didn’t improve the odds that their changes would be adopted. That’s not to say hierarchy isn’t important—in most organizations it is, as it was in the NHS—but it’s not everything. How much power comes from authority varies considerably.2

  For one, cultures ascribe varying importance to authority. For example, a comparative study of Citibank offices in China, Germany, Spain, and the United States showed that employees in the Hong Kong office were far more observant of workplace hierarchy than those in the other locations, even though they all had the same organization chart.3 Psychologist Michele Gelfand, who has conducted research on cultural norms in thirty countries spanning five continents, found that such deference is common in places with Confucian philosophical traditions, which view adherence to clearly delineated roles, responsibilities, and authority relationships as essential to preserving social order.

  Drawing on her analyses of people’s behavior in organizations, states, social classes, and communities as well as in countries, Gelfand classifies cultures on a tight-to-loose continuum. Tight cultures, which have stricter social norms and higher social order—Singapore is a case in point—tend to be more rule-abiding and responsive to authority. Loose cultures, in contrast, are less hierarchical: In Israel, for example, the use of diminutive nicknames is common, and extends even to people with very high status.4 (This is how Prime Minister Netanyahu turned into Bibi.)

  Wherever your culture falls on the tight-to-loose continuum, limits to the power of authority affect everyone, including the heads of state in democratic countries, who are bound by checks and balances within the government and in society. “In reality, my power as the president of the republic was shared,” François Hollande, France’s president from 2012 to 2017, told us. “It resided in the prime minister, the ministers, the bureaucrats, local representatives, [and] civil society. People think that the president of the republic has the power to enact reforms unilaterally. It’s a false preconception! The truth is: Power is the ability to effect change, and change is often slow in our democracy, because power is decentralized. Power is compromise.”5

  The sooner you stop conflating formal authority, or rank, with power, the greater the odds that you will identify who the power holders in a given environment really are, and whether you are one of them. As we’ve seen, the realization that being at the top isn’t the same as being powerful wasn’t lost on Donatella Versace. But if being the boss wasn’t enough to make her powerful, what was? Or, to put the question more broadly: How and why does power deviate from what the formal hierarchy dictates?

  To answer this question, you need to be able to identify both the resources the organization in question values, and the people who control them. In addition, you need to understand how individuals whose roles do not put them in a position to control those resources can become influential nonetheless. Navigating the path to exercising power and achieving our goals can be challenging for everyone, even those who are famous and privileged like Donatella. Travel this path with us, and we will take you back to Donatella and how she found her power at the journey’s end.

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RANK AND ROLE

  In the 1950s, researchers at a French plant conducted a study that became foundational to understanding how people accrue power in organizations.6 Workers in this plant reported to foremen who themselves reported to top management. Every step in the production process was thoroughly planned and strictly controlled. In such an environment, you would expect power to be strictly hierarchical and to reside with top management and foremen, who had the authority to set goals for the workers, monitor progress, and fire and hire employees. But they were not the most powerful people in the plant. In fact, the workers—mostly women making cigarettes on the factory floor—didn’t seem to pay them much attention. Instead, it was the maintenance personnel who seemed to have the most power over other workers: Why?

  Days of observation and interviews gave the researchers the answer: The plant’s machines were prone to breaking down. When that happened, production was interrupted,
jeopardizing not only the targets set by top management, but also the line workers’ pay, which was based on the number of cigarettes produced each day. The maintenance workers were the only people with the expertise to fix the machinery. Knowing that they had sole control over this highly valued resource, the maintenance workers kept a tight grip on their expertise. Instead of teaching production employees how to perform basic repairs, or asking management to hire additional maintenance staff, they deliberately hoarded their critical knowledge and made sure they kept neither records nor repair manuals.

  Depending on their role, employees may thus have more power than their formal rank would suggest because they control a resource critical to the organization’s survival. This is why client-facing, profit-making roles in business organizations typically wield more power than back-office, cost-center roles like HR or accounting, removed as they are from having a direct impact on revenues and profits. Even in non-business contexts, those who deliver resources central to the organization’s mission and survival have power regardless of where they are in the formal hierarchy.

  So, while authority can be a source of power, it is no guarantee of power. The idea that power is only for those at the top is therefore a fallacy, one of the misconceptions that we must debunk. Authority lets bosses issue directives, but it doesn’t necessarily mean people will follow them. And those who have no formal authority can still influence others’ behavior if they control access to a critical resource. Sometimes this power is simply a function of role, as it was for the French maintenance workers. But the disconnect between authority and power can—and often does—emerge through another channel: one’s network of relationships.

  LIFTING THE VEIL FROM THE ORG CHART

  To understand the power of networks, let’s start with a story about Manuel, a manager hired to reorganize the audit department inside the aircraft engine manufacturing division of a large defense contractor. Internal auditing was critical to this company, which had to comply with federal government standards and deliver flawless work to maintain its access to contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense.7 When Manuel joined the unit, they were taking 28 percent longer to process audits than their peers. His experience allowed him to see that the delays stemmed from a lack of coordination between the auditors and the administrative staff (the figure to the right shows the audit department’s org chart). So, Manuel made a few basic changes that he had already used successfully in another unit: He assigned each auditor to a specific administrative assistant, being careful to pair more experienced assistants with auditors who performed the most complex audits. He also instituted a scheduling system that allowed the admins to see when they were likely to receive an audit, giving them more visibility into their workload and protecting them from receiving too many audits at the same time. He ran the changes by the group before implementing them, and people seemed just fine with his proposed course of action.

  FORMAL POWER IN THE AUDITING DEPARTMENT

  A few weeks later, however, the backlog was longer than before. Manuel was dumbfounded. The changes he had put in place were sensible and uncontroversial. Why hadn’t they worked? At this point, desperate for an answer, he approached Professor David Krackhardt, an organizational scholar, for help. Using a simple questionnaire, Krackhardt asked each team member to describe who they went to with questions at work. The picture that emerged is shown on page 72, where the number of arrowheads going to one person corresponds to the number of people who reported seeking that person out for advice and information. The higher the number of arrows, the more prominent that individual was in the audit unit’s advice network.

  From a glance, Manuel knew that he was far from being the department’s most connected person.8 It made sense; after all, he was new. The only people who said they sought him out for advice were the managers who reported directly to him—demonstrating that the formal chart does indeed drive a portion of the informal advice networks that emerge in every organization.9 On the other hand, Nancy was nearly everyone’s point of reference, including Manuel himself. She might be at the bottom of the formal hierarchy, but she had the deepest understanding of what mattered and what didn’t in the organization. She knew which rules had to be followed and which could be bent, and she had an “uncanny ability to forecast both audit problems and problem audits,” as Manuel put it.10 That’s why everybody went to her.

  INFORMAL POWER IN THE AUDITING DEPARTMENT

  Recognizing his foolishness in overlooking Nancy’s perspective and influence, Manuel approached her to ask her opinion about pairing assistants with auditors. At first, she was reluctant to share her views. He was her superior. But with some prodding, she said that it was not a good idea, without elaborating. Manuel surmised that having been accustomed to allocating audits amongst themselves, the admins were unhappy about their loss of autonomy. Over the next two months, he and Nancy worked out a compromise that gave the admins a greater say in how they worked with the auditors. A month later, the team’s performance was exceeding company targets, and Manuel had learned a key lesson: Driving change requires identifying and enlisting those who are well connected in the network of the organization.11

  Remember Ning in the call center? His effectiveness came from the trust he inspired in people up and down the hierarchy: trust in his intentions to help and trust in his ability to deliver on his intentions. These “lovable stars” are the most likely to be sought out by their colleagues and to become highly connected in the advice network. All these connections, in turn, give them power by increasing their access to information, contacts, opportunities, and other resources that people value.12 An administrative assistant who is well connected may be much better at effecting change than a manager, no matter how smart or talented, who is peripheral in the organization’s network. Many CEOs and executives who come to us because their change efforts are failing learn this lesson the hard way. You can imagine their reactions when we advise them to delegate certain leadership duties to middle managers who are well connected within the organization. They cannot or, perhaps, do not want to understand that the middle manager may have more power in this context than they do. Over time, however, our advice pays off and the results speak for themselves: The executives witness the importance of network connections as a source of power.13

  Their mistake is equating authority with power. Authority lets you command compliance, but you can never command commitment. Anyone who wants to enact change, no matter how high in the hierarchy they may be, must identify the right people to work with. Even the best change is unlikely to be adopted when placed in the hands of someone who isn’t well connected to implement it.

  MAPPING POWER: WHO HOLDS IT AND WHY

  When faced with an environment you wish to influence—particularly if you have a new role, new goals, or an organizational change to advance—understanding who is best positioned to help you is critical. You will need help because effecting change, even a modest one, is hard. Change triggers primitive signals warning our safety may be at risk. In effect, we are hardwired to favor constancy and resist change. This instinct, which psychologists call the status quo bias, is so strong that people resist even trivial changes they themselves control14—like switching toothpaste brands. And when that sense of control is missing, as it so often is when dealing with others, our defensive alarm systems ring even louder. This is one reason we find that people well connected in their organizations’ networks are more effective change-makers.15 Others trust them, and trust is a conduit of influence, especially when people feel threatened.

  Overcoming resistance to change requires lifting the veil from the formal structure, accounting for people’s connections to one another, and building a detailed power map to answer the following questions: Who are the powerful players in your immediate circle, your organization or institution, your industry or profession? What resources do those players value, and what valued resources does each possess? How much control over access to those resources do they have? Wh
at are the alliances or coalitions among those players? And what is the nature of your relationship with each of them?

  Research shows that the ability to map networks is itself a source of power. A study of a small entrepreneurial firm in the 1990s revealed that people who had an accurate understanding of who went to whom for advice tended to have more power, independent of their formal rank and network connections.16 This means that, even when you are not at the top and you don’t have a great network, viewing the map of power clearly—who is close to whom, who influences whom, who is indispensable but underappreciated, who will resist or support you—matters. These insights are themselves a source of power.17 Power mapping may sound sneaky to some, but it is essential to having any kind of positive impact.

  People often struggle to draw accurate power maps, however. They make mistakes of omission (for example, failing to see how central someone is, as Manuel did) and errors of commission (like seeing someone as more sought out for advice than they are). These errors are not surprising. We all have limited powers of observation, confined as we are to the social circles we inhabit and unaware of networks farther away from us.18 Ironically, as people get more powerful, they become less likely to harness the power that comes from accurately viewing the network beneath them. The reason? The self-focus power induces: It’s not that people at the top are more stupid than everybody else, but they do tend to be inattentive to people of lower rank and can’t be bothered to map their subordinates’ networks. Studies in the controlled conditions of a laboratory show that people who feel powerful are less adept at recognizing the social relationships around them than people who feel powerless.19 The same pattern emerges in field studies conducted in organizations: The higher up in the hierarchy someone is—and hence the more powerful they feel—the less accurate they are about the networks linking employees in their organization.20