Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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Traditionally, the use of Machiavellian power is synonymous with deviousness, ruthlessness, cunning and the relentless pursuit of one’s own interests. Hence many people may choose not to engage with power and politics, believing that they are largely negative, dysfunctional and symptomatic of management failure. They may also believe that the misuse of power can lead to many negative outcomes. These may include time and energy being wasted in political power games, personality clashes, difficult negotiations between different interest groups in organizations, unthinking obedience to dominant leaders, back-stabbing, smear campaigns, victimization of minority groups, the creation of toxic corporate cultures, unethical business practices and fraud, lying and deception. However, as suggested earlier, power and politics can also be regarded as natural and inevitable facts of life in organizations, as individuals and groups seek to gain influence and control over finite resources in order to achieve their objectives. Consequently, it can be argued that some power conflicts are inevitable and even necessary for groups and organizations to function effectively, and to remain energetic and creative. Having said this, there certainly is a Janus-like quality to power and politics (Table 7.1).1

Table 7.1 The two faces of power and politics

Source: Adapted from McClelland (1975).

Which of the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides of power and politics we choose to operate within is dependent on our personal intentions and goals, because both are neutral concepts. How we actually use these will be influenced by our personalities, our perceptions of what constitutes effective leadership/management, the culture of the organizations we work for and the habitual leadership and management practices of the people we work with. However, as we have seen throughout this book, to become a more powerful leader in modern organizations we have to be prepared to give power away and, as far as possible, not use it in a coercive way. David McClelland describes why coercive power is so ineffective in this way:

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The negative face of power is characterised by the dominance–submission mode: if I win, you lose. It leads to a simple and direct means of feeling powerful (such as being aggressive). It does not often lead to effective social leadership for the reason that such a person tends to treat other people as pawns. People who feel they are pawns tend to be passive and useless to the leader who gets his satisfaction from dominating them. Slaves are the most inefficient form of labour ever devised by man. If a leader wants to have farreaching influence, he must make his followers feel powerful and able to accomplish things on their own. Even the most dictatorial leader does not succeed if he has not instilled in at least some of his followers a sense of power and the strength to pursue the goals he has set.

(McClelland, 1975: 263)

McClelland made these comments nearly 30 years ago, but they are as relevant today as they were then. In Chapters 1 and 4, we saw that genuine power in modern organizations stems from one’s ability to empower others, by giving power away and moving away from a command-and-control leadership/management style. By empowering their followers, leaders actually increase their own power and influence. These two aspects of power are closely related and have an iterative effect on each other: first, we have to acquire it, then give it away to others and, as a result, become more powerful; then give it away again to our followers and so forth. This does not mean that we give up control; we still remain in charge, but the locus of control is passed to our employees. However, giving up formal, positional authority can be a very threatening prospect to some old-style leaders and managers. Very few people will voluntarily give up power, particularly if they have fought hard to obtain it during their careers (‘Well I did it the hard way and there’s no reason why they can’t’). They might also be fearful about losing their status, special perks and privileges. Other old-school leader/managers may ‘look down’ on their followers, believing that they are incapable of being empowered, and do not have the ability to do anything more than simply obey orders. However, this viewpoint runs counter to all the evidence that has been accumulated on high-performing leader/managers and consistently successful organizations over the last 20 years (see Chapters 3, 4, 8 and 9). In the words of Kouzes and Posner:

As we examine powerless and powerful times, we’re struck by one clear and consistent message: feeling powerful – literally feeling ‘able’ – comes from a deep sense of being in control of our lives. When we feel able to control our own destiny, when we believe we’re able to mobilize the resources necessary to complete a task, then we persist in our efforts to achieve. But, when we feel that others control us, when we believe that we lack support or resources, we show no commitment to excel (although we may comply). Thus, any leadership practice that increases another’s sense of self-confidence, self-determination, and personal effectiveness makes that person feel more powerful and greatly enhances the possibility of success. The leader who is most open to influence, who listens, and who helps others is the leader who is most respected and most effective – not, as

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traditional management myth has it, the highly-controlling tough-guy boss [ ] The more people believe that they can influence and control the organization, the greater organizational effectiveness and member performance will be. Shared power results in higher job fulfillment and performance throughout the organization.

(Abridged from Kouzes and Posner, 1997: 184, 186, 187)

Furthermore, when we look more closely at the role and use of power in organizations, we find that there are five main sources of power and influence in them:

Referent or personal power

To a large extent, power stems from the image, impressions or perceptions that the people we work with have of us. In turn, these are based on many of the skills, qualities and characteristics of successful leaders and managers identified in Chapters 1–6 and, crucially, how we routinely present ourselves to others. These include character, honesty and integrity, agreeableness, the ability to motivate and empower followers, sensitivity to the needs of others, exceptional two-way communication skills, parity and equity, team leadership skills and, perhaps most importantly, the extent to which our actions and deeds match our words. There is an impressive amount of evidence to show that individuals with agreeable, outgoing, ascendant personalities are far more influential than those with disagreeable or toxic personalities (see, for example, Carlopio et al., 2001: 271; Kouzes and Posner, 1997: 190–91). Recall that successful leaders spend a lot of time building up relationships of influence with their peers and subordinates, in and outside work. If you already do these things well, you should already have a considerable amount of personal power and influence. To this, we need to add one additional element, dependency. Ultimately, real power derives from our lack of dependency on others and the extent to which people are dependent on us, for support, advice, rewards, knowledge and expertise.

Expert power

As captured in the old saying, ‘Knowledge is Power’. This refers to the authority an individual derives from the specific technical expertise and/or professional knowledge they possess. This has become increasingly important in businesses characterized by rapid technological change, and the emergence of knowledge and intellectual capital as important drivers of organizational growth, adaptability and success (and how these can be used as a strategic tool in organizations will be

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addressed in Chapter 10.) While this can be a significant source of power, it is important that this is not allowed to become our only source of influence, because we might become regarded as a niche player or someone whose opinions might not be sought in areas outside a narrow range of expertise.

Reward power

This arises from the opportunities leaders have to use rewards as a way to influence people (described in detail in Chapter 4). This has some parallels with coercive power, because the threat of removing rewards can be regarded as a form of punishment.

Legitimate and coercive power

One of the most easily recognized and widespread forms of power, this derives from the formal structural power and authority of an office, position or role in an organization. It can have quite remarkable effects on people’s perceptions of, and obedience to, authority figures and how they exercise power. For example, in one experiment in the 1960s, a ‘guest lecturer’ was invited to give presentations to several classes in a British university. He was introduced to each class as ‘a student’, ‘a lecturer’, ‘a senior lecturer’ and as ‘a professor’. After each presentation, the members of each class were asked to estimate his height. The same man was perceived as being progressively taller with each ‘increase’ in his academic status. The ‘student’ was perceived to be several inches shorter than the ‘professor’ (Wilson, 1968). Perhaps the two most famous examples of the effects of positional authority on obedience were the Milgram studies at Yale in 1961–2, and the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted during the summer of 1971. In the first experiment, a laboratory was set up where participants, acting in the role of ‘teachers’ were told to administer electric shocks to ‘learners’ who failed to repeat accurately two words that were read to them. The electrical generator had 30 switches, ranging from ‘slight shock’ (15 volts), through ‘severe shock’ and up to ‘danger: fatal shock’. The last two switches, at 430–50 volts, were labelled ‘XXX’. They were told that their patients were strapped into a chair in an adjacent sealed room, and to increase the shock level each time they got an answer wrong. What was remarkable about this experiment was that 65 per cent of the participants in the study obeyed orders to administer the shocks and, when instructed by the experimenter, compliantly delivered the maximum possible and, in real life, potentially lethal, dose of 450 volts. No participant in the experiment stopped before they had reached 300

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volts, and most continued administering shocks even when they could hear their victims writhing in agony. Of course, this was a set-up; no actual electric shocks were administered, but the participants did not know this. Before Milgram conducted this experiment he had asked mental health professionals to estimate what proportion of people would administer apparently dangerous levels of shock. The consensus was 1 to 2 per cent (Milgram, 1963). This study was replicated over a 25-year period, from 1961 to 1985, with similar results reported in Australia, South Africa and several European countries.

In the second experiment (in many respects the forerunner of reality TV shows like Big Brother and Survivor), the participants were divided into two groups, ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, in a realistic mock-up of a prison, and instructed to role-play as if it was the real thing. Nine students were ‘arrested’ at their homes, taken to ‘jail’, strip-searched and processed as if they really were prisoners. The ‘guards’ were given full authority to set the prison rules and allocate punishments for infractions by the ‘prisoners’. Soon, they were routinely humiliating the prisoner group in an effort to break their will. After the guards had put down a prisoner protest on day two, they steadily increased their coercive tactics and dehumanization of the prisoners, with the worst instances of abuse taking place at night when the guards thought the staff running the experiment were not watching them (by, for example, making prisoners clean out the toilets with their bare hands). What is most interesting about this experiment, which formed the basis of the 2002 German film, Das Experiment, was that all the participants were put through a barrage of psychological tests during the initial screening process, and had been judged to be the most normal, average and healthy members of an original group of 70 students. And yet, when given role power and legitimation of their authority, these apparently normal people started behaving like sadistic monsters within a very short time. Even after three decades, the creator of this experiment still expresses surprise at how willingly and enthusiastically the students took on the guard roles, observing that, ‘within a few days, the role dominated the person. They became real guards and real prisoners’. So disturbing was the experiment that he cancelled it after just six days, rather than allowing it to run for the planned 14 days (Zimbardo, 1999). It has never been repeated.

These three examples highlight the influence that legitimate or positional power can have on people’s behaviour, although it is important to emphasize that formal authority of this kind is quite different from leadership. And, as the last two examples show, legitimate power is often associated with coercive power. This refers to the use of exclusion, threats, sanctions, pain and punishment to influence people’s

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behaviour which, as history has shown, have all too often been used for truly monstrous reasons (adapted from French and Raven, 1959; Carlopio, 2001: 260–80).

Which forms of power are the most effective ones to use? One of the best-known large-scale studies of the way 750 managers use power revealed that they typically used seven influencing strategies when dealing with their bosses, subordinates and co-workers. In order of popularity, these were (adapted from Kipnis, 1984):

•using reason, data or logic (‘expert’),

•friendliness and assertiveness (‘referent’),

•forming coalitions with others (‘referent’),

•bargaining and/or negotiation (‘expert’, ‘rewards’ and ‘referent’),

•ordering compliance (‘legitimate’, ‘coercive’ and ‘rewards’),

•gaining the support of a higher authority (‘legitimate’),

•sanctions or punishments (‘legitimate’ and ‘coercive’).

In a similar vein, Hughes and colleagues (1999) cite the example of the fictional but iconic leader, Jean-Luc Picard. Captain Picard normally used referent and expert power to influence his subordinates. However, during crises or emergencies, he did occasionally use legitimate and coercive power. On very rare occasions, he used reward power to get his own way with a recalcitrant member of his crew. There is considerable evidence to support the view that logic and reason are the most effective power strategies. Leader/managers who use information, facts and data to support their decisions are rated far more highly by their subordinates, when compared to those who use either coercive or legitimate power to force through their ideas. Those who consistently use these two strategies have less motivated, more stressed and poorer performing employees. Those who habitually use force, coercion or Machiavellian strategies to drive through their decisions also end up making more bad decisions than good ones (Schmidt and Kipnis, 1987; Kipnis and Schmidt, 1983).

Coercive and legitimate power strategies also act as extrinsic motivators. We saw in Chapter 4 that these are the least effective ways of motivating people because, over time, they diminish the capacity of individuals to change, improve and develop themselves. High intrinsic motivation is one of the primary drivers of both individual and organizational excellence. Further support for this position can be found in numerous research experiments on small work groups. For example, in one study by Kipnis, work groups were divided into two sub-groups. The first were given the freedom to make influential decisions about their work tasks, and the other group were prohibited from doing this.

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chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose: but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment that never fails.

(Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince)

In the preceding section and Chapter 1 it was suggested that most managers and professionals have great respect for leaders who do not engage in ‘Machiavellian’ politics and who exude professional trust, integrity, empathy and reliability. As a general rule this is true, but, at some point in our working lives, we will come across truly toxic individuals whose only mission in life is to impose their overbearing egos on everyone around them, bully their staff and treat their subordinates badly. At other times, we may also find ourselves working in highly politicized organizations. How can we deal with these situations? First, recall what we discovered about toxic personalities and bullies in Chapter 1:

[Bullies] exhibit most of the following traits: impatience, arrogance, perfectionism, defensiveness, rigidity, bluntness and a keen ability to hold grudges. People who are tyrants and bullies in adulthood became little tyrants and bullies during their formative years [and] many childhood bullies do then evolve into cunning and manipulative managers. They are likely to be intelligent, but use this entirely for their own ends and their own self-aggrandizement. They have no empathy with other people and any decisions they make are driven by one consideration, ‘What’s in this for me?’ They will utilize an autocratic management style on their subordinates but behave compliantly towards their superiors. They will often lack a sense of humour and take themselves and their own opinions very seriously. Some toxic personalities may become fully-fledged psychopaths. To be labelled psychopathic, an individual needs to display 10 out of 16 psychopathological tendencies. These are selfishness, callousness, remorseless use of others, lying, cunning, failure to accept responsibility for actions, extreme egotism, extreme sense of self-worth, emotional instability, antisocial tendencies, need for constant stimulation, behavioural and emotional problems in childhood, juvenile delinquency, irresponsibility, unrealistic long-term goals and a sexually deviant or promiscuous lifestyle.

There are several practical insights that can be drawn from this extract. First, we are better people than the bully or domineering boss. Second, we do not have to accept their abuse of power and we must not acquiesce to it. If we do, this will only encourage repetitions of this kind of behaviour. Third, we can be assertive and stand up to it, because most bullies are revealed to be cowards when they are challenged. We can tell the person in question how we feel about their behaviour, why it is unacceptable and why we expect their behaviour to change. This should be done calmly and without aggression, because they thrive on the emotional anxiety and discomfort of others. If this approach does not produce the desired change, and there are no other options (such as resigning and moving to another organization), it may be time to employ some Machiavellian techniques. Several books appeared in the

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1990s and early 2000s with the stated intention of ‘putting Machiavelli back into business’. These include Grifin‘s Machiavelli on Management: Playing and Winning the Corporate Power Game, McAlpine’s The New Machiavelli: The Art of Politics in Business, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, and some tongue-in-cheek advice from a real-life coup leader, André de Guillaume, in How to Rule the World: A Handbook for the Aspiring Dictator. These authors suggest a number of more devious and underhand strategies that employees can use to achieve their ambitions within political organizational cultures. It has to be said that some of their suggestions are rather nebulous or vague, and a few may even be illegal in some countries. However, an abridged selection of the best of these and a few of mine are presented below.

Power is a social game

The word ‘game’ is often used synonymously with power and politics, and for a very good reason. Like chess, this is a game which must be played with a clear idea of your personal strategies (and alternative strategies) and a good understanding of what your opponent’s strategies are likely to be (and where their strong and weak points are). Your energy must be focused at all times on the best strategies to use, as well as the personality of your opponents. To use power well, we have to be both master players and master psychologists, recognizing the needs and motivations of others, while at the same time not becoming emotionally involved with them. An understanding of these hidden needs and motives is the greatest power-tool that we can ever possess, because we will then be able to appeal to, and make use of, the self-interests of others while pursuing our own goals and objectives.

Guard your reputation

Your personal reputation (how others see you) is the keystone of your power. Once this slips, you are vulnerable. Make your reputation unassailable. Maintain a professional (but friendly) space between yourself and work colleagues. As a former mentor of mine once observed, ‘I look at it this way. You don’t have to make love with these people, you don’t have to socialize with them after work or be their lifelong buddies. I deliberately maintain a space between myself and everyone else who works here. What you have to try to do is develop good working relationships and maintain a professional, impartial approach with everyone, even if they do sometimes behave like ******s.’

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Praise your leaders

Or, at least, do not criticize them by name in public. Sooner or later, someone will report back to them what you have said. Act as the perfect courtier; yield to superiors and flatter them when the opportunity arises. Don’t ever upstage them in public. Learn about their private interests and personal goals. Support their ideas in public, but offer critical advice, tactfully, in private. Your power and influence will also increase if you are willing ‘to go the extra mile’ for them, and help them out with problems and difficulties they may encounter at work.

Make people dependent on you

To maintain your independence, you must be needed by other people. The more you are relied on, the more freedom, influence and power you will have. Cultivate relationships at every opportunity – with your peers, your bosses and with your clients. Act as a mentor for junior staff. Be a team player and share in your colleagues’ accomplishments. Support their ideas and suggestions and be responsive to their problems, without endangering your own interests. Be seen as someone whom people can chat with confidentially about work issues. Be honest with the people who do rely on you, but keep your cards close to your chest. Don’t reveal more than you need to. Find allies and mingle – isolation is dangerous. Work on people’s hearts and minds. If you have to ask other people for help, appeal to their self-interest. Try to find or uncover something that will benefit them if they help you. Professional politicians know this as the ‘reciprocity strategy’.

Avoid people who are negative, self-obsessed, unhappy or unlucky

Associate with people who make you feel good and valued, or whose positive reputation will reflect well on you. Avoid people who are always negative, self-obsessed or just interested in their own agendas. But try to deal professionally and calmly with second-rate, difficult or toxic employees at all times.

Be calm and objective

Power is amoral. Your focus must always be on your opponent’s actions and strategies, and what these mean. Anger and emotion are counterproductive because, as we saw in Chapter 3, they cloud reason and clarity of thought. Try to remain calm and objective at all times.