Your Power

All power has limits, and no power acts in isolation: part of a reflective Leadership practice is to understand the type of power that we hold, and the ways that it converges with others. To know which type of power is most effective in any given context or situation, which type of power sits behind our stories and, sometimes, to understand why we hold almost no power at all.

My iPhone hold one type of power in one dimension: the battery. Conveniently it quantifies itself by expressing how ‘charged’ it is. This type of electrical power is useful as, when i have it, i can do things, and when i lack it, i cannot.

So the iPhone is my conduit to a second type of power: connection. When the battery dies, i not only lose the first degree effect of turning the screen on, but also the second degree effect of activating my network.

But where is the percentage score for the network? How do i quantify my power in that space?

People try many ways to do this: the number of connections, the quality of connections, persistency of connections, effectiveness of connections, noise of connection and so on. Many of these measures are interaction, frequency, or volume based.

Our power as a Social Leader, is complex, typically framed by the formal, quantifiable type, and held in the social and subjective.

Some types of power are directly connected: if i take the battery out of my phone, it will die. Others have a more elastic or tenuous connection: if you take me ‘out’ of my community (by putting me in prison, for example), you may amplify my power, if my Community believes that i still deserve their support.

Power is not always digital or logical.

We can see power at play in various Organisational contexts: in Learning and Development, for example, the power is held in various aspects, from understanding who gets to assess you as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, through to understanding who ‘owns’ the stories that get told or learning that takes place.

Power rarely flows downhill like water: instead it may clump and cluster, or even become attached to other things, like a magnet: power often sticks to ‘places’, to rituals, to costumes and uniforms, to ideas, and to specific times of the year (like Performance Reviews).

Sometimes power sticks to power: when you have some it can be easier to accrue more. Although some types of power are teflon coated, revolutionary, and cannot be held by anyone who holds formal power.

If you ask people about the types of power that they find are most effective, the answer is almost overwhelmingly that people value ‘permission and consensus’ based power, more so than the absolute one – or to put it another way, they value the power that people invest in them more so that the power that Organisations give them (although there is a contextual element to that). Essentially, we like to believe that we lead with permission, and that people trust/invest their followership in us.