Power and Leadership
There are two types of power in organizations: positional and personal. Positional power is based on rank or title. A manager, executive, or teacher holds positional power. They also may have the ability to reward followers with raises, commendations, or advancement, or to punish them with termination, demotion, or restricting activity.
Personal power is emergent – it is gained over time through activities like building relationships, alliances, coalitions, and through behavior that inspires respect and trust. When used well, an individual with personal power can benefit others through increasing communication, interdependence, and effectiveness. But personal power can also be misused to create silos, divisiveness, and turf wars.
Most managers have positional power, but many have little or no personal power. Many misuse their positional and personal power. Leadership entails responsibility far beyond what is detailed in a job description. If you want to cultivate real power – power that comes from respect, loyalty and trust, consider these basic guidelines:
Leadership is:
- Earning the respect of your followers, regardless of your position.
- Being open to suggestions, complaints, and constructive criticism.
- Valuing the success of your followers above your own.
- Celebrating and utilizing followers’ strengths, talents, and skills, even when they are greater than your own.
- Using your position to create opportunities and garner recognition for your followers before yourself.
- Actively seeking feedback.
- Communicating openly and frequently.
- Clearly defining expectations, structures, processes, and requirements.
Leadership is not:
- Expecting respect before you have earned it with each individual follower.
- Ignoring or minimizing the concerns of those who are ranked lower than you.
- Taking credit for the accomplishments of your followers.
- Limiting opportunities for followers to communicate with you or each other.
- Ignoring opportunities for growth and leadership development in followers.
- Limiting opportunities for feedback.
- Maximizing opportunities for yourself before your followers.
- Allowing excessive ambiguity in expectations, structures, processes, and requirements.
Understanding the dynamics of positional power, while understanding the responsibilities that come with leadership is necessary for building effective and rewarding management practices.