CHAPTER 2

How Power Differentials Blind Smart People

Introduction

Have you ever found yourself furious at a person or group below you in your organization, wondering, “Don’t they understand anything about what we do? Why do they look inward and fail to pay attention to our customers or industry conditions?” Do you begin your interactions with these people by assuming that they just don’t have anything valuable to contribute, or haven’t thought through their request? Do you put them down when talking to colleagues? Chances are, if you are like most people, you’d answer yes to at least some of these questions. Even the nicest people with the best intentions, when in a position of power, will give short shrift to people below them.

Or maybe you have been part of a group that feels manipulated; perhaps you’ve been asked to make recommendations, then you find that your suggestions are essentially ignored. Have you been furious but scared to confront the inauthentic manager who talks one way but acts quite another? Was this fear one of the reasons that caused you to stay silent?

It is remarkable how perfectly caring and smart people can be dramatically affected when they are on either side of a relationship in which a substantial power differential exists. This chapter and the next will show how these dynamics work, how both relatively high-power people and relatively low-power people impact each other in ways that can impair both parties—including the apparent winners on the higher end of the power scale. We will help you figure out what tactics to use to influence anyone more powerful than you.

It isn’t news that great discrepancies in power can cause great problems for both ends of the spectrum. As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, “Power believes it has a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it does God’s work while it violates all his laws.” In other words, the powerful come to believe that they are doing something inherently right, and overestimate their own competence; they assume that they’re allowed to break the rules. The less powerful, on the other hand, underestimate their capacity to be heard without punishment—and in the process lose a considerable amount of effectiveness.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a Hans Christian Andersen story based on a fourteenth-century Spanish tale, is a good illustration of how the dynamics of power work. The story suggests that the illusions, or at least the pretensions, of the powerful can be seen by the less powerful, but it takes a child too young to understand the expectation of keeping quiet in the presence of such a high-power person to speak up and point out the emperor’s nakedness. Many interpretations of this tale have been made, but the behavior differential between high- and low-powered people is familiar across many cultures.

This doesn’t mean that power in itself is the problem. On the contrary, power is necessary for organizational success because it is the driving force required to get things done. Don’t you want a boss who has the power to get resources, grant permission, and open doors? And don’t you want power yourself to do your job and achieve goals above and beyond expectations? The negatives arise when a large power gap exists between people or groups—along with the blindness and silence such gaps tend to create.

Common Negative Consequences of Having Relatively Great Power

The destructive impact of large power discrepancy was shown in the classic “prison experiment” conducted by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in 1971. In the experiment, people randomly chosen to play prison guards rapidly degenerated to abusive behavior. Power simulations by Oshry and by Bolman and Deal had similar results—people who were assigned arbitrarily to high-, middle-, and low-power groups began to behave accordingly remarkably quickly. These findings show how much behavior is shaped by relative degree of power rather than by individual predisposition.1

Bolman and Deal’s simple classroom simulation arbitrarily divides participants into three groups. Ground rules dictate that a high-power group decides assignments and allocates resources, and a low-power group has to wait for instruction that a middle-power group conveys between levels. We have used this model with executives, MBAs, and undergraduates; in every population, the high-power group (often trying to be fair and reasonable) gets wrapped up in discussions among themselves, whereas the low-power group fumes about being restricted and waits impatiently to hear from the top. In less than an hour, even very individualistic, antiunion managers in the low-power group begin to rebel; they threaten to organize like a union, refuse to complete assignments, and lose patience with the top group. A few try to curry favor with upper management by acting as trusted helpers; however, most quickly gravitate toward collective action, which can increase their voice and impact, or go passive. Meanwhile, the top begins to look down on and discount or patronize what they might call “those short-sighted workers,” becoming trapped in its own deliberations. (As in many organizations, those in the middle are truly caught there; they begin to lose respect from both the high- and low-power groups). We see here a perfect example of the dictum that situation shapes behavior—and situations with great power discrepancies shape negative responses at both extremes.

This pattern is demonstrated repeatedly in research and in our own experience: Relatively powerful people tend to overestimate their own contributions and intelligence, and underestimate the contributions and intelligence of lower-power people. In turn, relatively low-power people tend to overestimate the power of and likelihood of retribution from high-power people, and underestimate their own actual and potential power to shape behavior.

Several factors2 contribute to and reinforce this negative pattern. Higher power entities:

• Spend more time with elite people and groups, leading them to dehumanize and stereotype lower-power people.3
• Are more oblivious to what other people think. This reduces their awareness of the way they are perceived by others, and makes them less able to accurately interpret what people around them are saying and more likely to pursue their own desires. It also makes them verbally dominant, making more assertions instead of exploring options. These attributes lead them to become more confident, more inclined to express their true attitudes, not care as much about what others think and say,4 “and jump in to arguments,5 . . . with less changeable attitudes,”6,7 which reduces their notion of how much attention to pay to others.
• Furthermore, they believe that they are more perceptive and have personal control, overestimating the areas in which they have expertise and underestimating dangers even in areas over which they have no power.8 In turn, they are more responsive to organizational goals than to feelings.9
• As a result, they believe that rules are made to be broken10 so are more likely to violate ethical standards while believing that they are more honest (therefore they come off as hypocritical),11 and are actually more comfortable with lying so are better liars.12
• Often believe they have to hide their vulnerability, for fear that making it visible will diminish their power, even though the opposite can often turn out to be true.
• Similar dynamics also operate within teams, where high-power leaders often discount and diminish the views of most team members.13

It would be hard to find a more vivid example of what can happen as the power gap grows than the saga of Jeff Kindler, chief executive officer (CEO) at the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Kindler was a former litigator whose intelligence, toughness, sponsorship wins, and political maneuvering led him to the top. Fortune magazine used exhaustive investigation to discover that Kindler was fired in December 2010 for behavior marked by domination and intimidation through micromanaging and second-guessing or berating executives—even bringing many to tears. He also dismissed both executives and scientists with deep expertise, showed favoritism to a controversial head of human resources who eventually had to be fired by the board, shouted at a board member at a retirement party, and delayed—then frequently reversed—critical decisions.

Although Kindler acted for some time in a manner that allowed him to get his way, his attitude also planted the seeds of his own destruction. High-power people tend to forget about how much they need those below them as they increasingly discount others’ worth—thereby hindering performance.

Here are some examples of quotations that show a powerful person who got too powerful relative to almost all those below him:

“Jeff seemed to believe he was the only smart guy in the room . . .”

“Kindler . . . bombarded [his deputies] with . . . questions at all hours . . . regularly scheduled conference calls on weekends . . . seemed oblivious to executive vacations . . . [and] expected immediate responses to his questions . . .”

All that did not only make life miserable for Kindler’s team; it also clogged the company’s decision-making process. Kindler was a voracious consumer of information—often a strength but increasingly a weakness.14 He bombarded his staff with ideas or questions during the night, and they would have to divide the assignments just to cope, whether or not they were worth exploring.

The Necessity of Power—But “Mind the Gap!”

None of this is to suggest that Kindler didn’t have good ideas or wasn’t willing to take on needed cost-cutting, reorganization, and strategic redirection. It also shouldn’t diminish the importance of power and power differentials in accomplishing organizational goals. After all, power in the social/organizational realm is the ability to get others to behave in ways they might not otherwise choose—and sometimes that is necessary for organizational transformation, growth, or survival. Power differentials also help to preserve order, by ensuring the appropriate division of labor that allows the various units and individuals to fulfill their distinct roles. Those who know of the need for change can mobilize others while overcoming inertia and resistance. Without legitimate power differentials, it would be very hard for any organization of more than 10 or so to make decisions and to move forward.

The problem is therefore not with inevitable and desirable power, or even with power differentials. Problems come into play when the gap between the powerful and the less powerful is too large. At first blush, this gap might seem like a good thing; powerful people can accomplish things without (visible) opposition. But that assumption is extremely short-sighted, because a large power gap hurts those with very high power as well as those with very low power. There are two important reasons why the gap harms both high-power and low-power people:

Even though some people end up abusing their power, it is not much help to either them or their organizations to strip away everyone’s power. Low-power leaders who are unable to get things done do not generate enthusiasm, gain followers, or create organizational growth. This kind of collective weakness and apathy can cast a pall over everything.

The solution is to create more combined power between higher- and lower-power people. This doesn’t reduce a higher-up’s power; it simply increases that of the less powerful, and leads to an overall net increase of power—and therefore to an overall increase in the capacity to make things happen. For those below, effectively exercising power means helping others accomplish valued objectives. For those above, using power to enhance others’ power actually creates more total power. Ironically, when higher-ups are willing to create more power for those less powerful than they are, the lowers will in turn want to grant power above—because the actions of the higher-ups have increased their feeling that it is possible to influence up.

Power that is not invested in goals beyond one’s personal ambition—power that is not, in other words, socialized power, as the psychologist David McClelland15 has called it—is thus power wasted. Although smart investments increase power, overuse diminishes it. Invested power yields positive returns; however, if it forces people to do things they do not value, it eventually diminishes them. Similarly, those who abuse their positions of influence will diminish their power, as it often prompts resentment or fear that inhibits future cooperation. Resentful and dependent lower-power people often subtly sabotage by passing responsibility upward and creating more burdens. For these reasons, effective executives prefer to use influence, and not coercion, whenever possible—even with those to whom they can legitimately give orders.

This is not to deny that there are some situations where power is a fixed amount (“so the more that I have, the less that is available to you”). That is the situation in many negotiations, for example. Also, even smart people with differing responsibilities can disagree on how to proceed. And there are times when programs have to be cut, operations closed down, people terminated, when it is impossible or impractical to attain consensus. Therefore, coercion is sometimes necessary to achieve important goals. Unwillingness to persuade others when it’s appropriate or necessary actually diminishes one’s power. This way of using power often arises when the various parties have incompatible goals. However, in dealing with one’s boss or influencing those higher up the power scale, there are many more times when goal alignment is possible, and allows for using influence as described in this book.

Sources of Power—Organizational and Personal

When addressing power gaps, it helps to understand that power comes from access to information, resources, and relationships. These things enable power. They can come as a result of formal organizational position that assigns access, and/or from personal qualities that induce others to be willing to follow. People can enhance their personal power with positional power, or they can be influential without positional power. For example, Jeff Kindler’s roles at Pfizer—general counsel, vice chairman, and CEO—gave him access to detailed knowledge about the business, important people such as board members and senior executives, and huge budgets. In addition, his brilliant, forceful personality (and apparently charm) prompted many people to willingly follow him. Kindler’s intensity—which some viewed as intimidation—was labeled by others to be drive and vision. The Fortune article points out:

[A former CFO] . . . and others say they view what some, in Pfizer’s nonconfrontational culture, saw as anger instead as passion or intensity. (They say that same intensity helped Kindler play a key role in persuading Big Pharma to back President Obama’s health care plan.)

Power is always relative; almost no one has zero power in a given situation. Those lower in the organization also have access to at least some information, resources, and relationships. On a national scale, one of the more dramatic historical examples of success from below was that orchestrated by Gandhi: unarmed citizens were able to stand up to armed British troops and eventually win. The world has recently seen instances in several extremely hierarchical Middle Eastern countries where peaceful demonstrators have been able to overturn dictators through collective action.

Focusing on relative power compels us to think about the interaction between the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless. It doesn’t matter where the behavior starts; once high-power people act in a dominant way, that can cause lower-power people to reinforce the behavior. The opposite is also true; a relatively low-power group’s passivity can cause the relatively powerful to behave in dismissive ways that only reinforce the passivity. But just blaming one group discounts the dynamic interactivity between the groups. Each triggers undesirable behavior in the other, so the actions of both groups need to be considered.

Bad Patterns, Not Bad People

When the behavioral consequences of power are considered, it’s easy for either group to write off the other. The lower-powered might say, “I can’t stand those arrogant, smug SOBs,” and the higher-ups might say, “Why can’t those wimps speak up or have an original thought about what’s good for the organization?” If you are like many people thinking about how to influence higher-power people, you might someday be in the flipside situation, in which you are the one looking down your nose from above. No matter which group you find yourself in, you should try to resist seeking a way to feel superior to the group with which you do not identify. Instead, try to better understand how you can overcome the costs of a large power differential.

The negative effects of the power differential are rarely intentional, and only a few can be blamed on high-powered individuals’ personalities. Although there are people who are inclined to dismiss just about everyone—and some who are intimidated by most people they encounter—either affliction reduces the likelihood of filling and holding responsible organizational positions for long. Even though those at the top are frequently determined and competitive, the usual pressures of occupying a high-power position more often drive the dismissive behavior, which, in turn, contributes to what makes upward influence difficult. Not everyone with high relative power succumbs to the pressures, but it helps to understand both the probability that they will and the methods for overcoming the consequences. We’ve observed that the negative patterns usually result from differences in the perspectives between high- and low-power people. Whether it’s due entirely to the fact that these individuals have been in positions to acquire power—or whether it just came as a result of their personalities—people who reach upper organizational levels must focus on broader issues, external forces, and organizational direction. They are expected to “think strategically.” On the other hand, those in lower-power roles tend to concentrate on fulfilling immediate tasks and conditions—to “meet their objectives.”

When people at the top spend a large portion of their time planning for issues that get far less attention from those below, they naturally believe that it is their (wonderful) personal characteristics and capacities that allow them to “see more and farther.” They don’t realize how much time they have been working on—often even obsessing about—complex and challenging issues. Even when they have tried to convey this information to others, many people don’t absorb it.

These failed attempts to communicate are therefore likely to make people worry about impending danger, or assume that they need to change course. This leads almost everyone to eventually perceive a deficiency in the system—which in turn inhibits the chance that higher-ups will listen to the opinions or views from people below. Eventually, less-powerful people assume that higher-ups simply won’t listen to them. Of course, because many people hold ingrained negative beliefs, learned through experience, about what it means to deal with people at the opposite end of the power spectrum, it often doesn’t take much to “confirm” their negative expectations of the other tribe. Once you decide that the other side is intimidating and uninterested, or short-sighted and feeble-voiced, it is hard to notice any evidence to the contrary.

Do some people in elevated positions become power-hungry? Are they so focused on acquiring power that it becomes an end in itself? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Even more unfortunately, there are some hard-nosed “experts” who claim that acquiring personal power is more important than doing something valuable with that power. Some people will urge you to become totally Machiavellian and seek power for its own sake. From these people you will hear advice such as, Don’t be afraid to bully, intimidate, or use fear if you want to keep your power; you get an advantage from appearing a little tough or even mean or Forget about being honest and self-disclosing; others will use that against you. They’ll also tell you: Don’t be put off by old wives’ tales about bad things happening to people who desperately want to get ahead; good things happen to powerful people.

Joel Peterson, chairman of the board of JetBlue and former CEO of the real estate development company Trammell Crow, argues the opposite. Peterson maintains that power comes from competence, not from bullying, and that managerial mind-set works best when it isn’t “all about me,” but rather focused on achieving common goals.

We agree with Peterson. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessary to have to occasionally “play hardball”; however, you should play this way only as the last resort, and you can play fairly. In fact, those who believe that it’s all about enhancing their own power set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you constantly put yourself first without bothering to consider how your actions impact others, others will likely respond in kind—which further weakens trust all around.

Powerful people who operate with short-term, “me-first” thinking are wrong about what it takes to acquire and sustain power. Many have been temporarily successful but were blown out of the water when they persisted in trying to make themselves look good. Others have tried to climb the corporate ladder but froze on the way up due to the mistrust they created. Most contemporary organizations must bring together diverse experts to resolve complex problems, and require far too much collaboration for those playing only for themselves to succeed.

We don’t have to demonize powerful people. By assessing the dynamics of interactions between high-power and low-power people, we can keep from personalizing differences in views, and avoid blaming individuals or entire groups. However, few organizational members manage to shake off the tendencies that mutually reinforce beliefs in others’ deficiencies. Certainly, some very powerful people are so determined to have their way that they don’t see the long-term consequences of stepping on or diminishing others. Yet helping them notice may influence their behavior.

Consider Chandran Menon, the founder and CEO of Menon and Menon Diesel Engines in Kolhapur, India. A brilliant and dynamic entrepreneur, inventor, and self-taught engineer, Menon recognized that managing wasn’t the same as creating a company, and he was determined to learn also to be an extraordinary manager. He decided to run an executive development retreat and hired one of us (Allan) and a young, inexperienced colleague named Mollie to facilitate.

Early in the workshop, small task groups went off to work on assignments. They returned, and the first group was barely two minutes into their report when Menon—who wanted to correct an assumption they’d made—burst in to tell them how wrong they were. His outburst resulted in complete silence. Mollie replied, “I wasn’t particularly committed to this idea when we discussed it in our group. But you were so rude and insulting that now I want to defend the idea fiercely.” This stunned Menon into silence. After a few awkward moments, with welling tears, he confessed, “I had no idea. Will you please all forgive me?”

Menon later marked that moment in his official biography as a turning point in his own leadership evolution. It was the point at which he stopped allowing his brilliance and dynamism—the very brilliance and dynamism that had led to his disproportionate power—to inhibit others.16 Although these realizations are not always so effective or immediate, this was a case where, like the child telling the emperor he had no clothes, one voice made a difference to a powerful person whose brilliance had gotten the better of him.

Influence challenges are not just a consequence of high-powered people’s bad behavior; they result from the interaction between the higher-ups’ actions and the lowers’ action (or inaction). If Mollie hadn’t said anything to Menon, it would have looked like he was arrogant and impervious to feedback from those below him—partially because he would have had no idea of his behavior’s impact. He could have continued thinking, as often happens, “If they had anything to contribute they would have done it; their silence proves they have too little to offer.”

This is why we’ll now examine what it is that relatively low-power people do to compound the difficulties in interactions with higher-power people. And from there we will go on to provide plenty of advice about how to gain influence, even from the lower-power position.

Notes

1. P.G. Zimbardo, C. Maslach, and C. Haney, “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformation, Consequences,” in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, ed. T. Blass (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), 193–237; Barry Oshry, Leading Systems: Lessons from the Power Lab (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999); Lee Bolman and Terry Deal, “A Simple—But Powerful—Power Simulation,” Exchange: The Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal 4, no. 3 (1979): 38–42.

2. Vicki Haddock, “Psychology of Power: What Drives This Powerful Men? And Where Are They Driving Us?” http://compenetration.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/psychology-of-power-what-drives-this-powerful-men-and-where-are-they-driving-us.

3. G. Chen, L.K. Trevino, and D.C. Hambrick, “CEO Elitist Association: A New Understanding of an Executive Behavioral Pattern,” The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009): 316–328; J. Lammers and D. Stapel, “Power Increases Dehumanization,” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 14 (2011): 113.

4. Cameron Anderson and Jennifer Berdahl, “Experience of Power: Examining the Effects of Power on Approach and Inhibition Tendencies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1362–1377; J.L. Berdahl and P. Martorana, “Effects of Power on Emotion and Expression during a Controversial Group Discussion,” European Journal of Social Psychology: Special Issue on Social Power 36 (2006): 497–510; A.D. Galinsky, J.C. Magee, D.H. Gruenfeld, J. Whitson, and K. Liljenquist, “Power Reduces the Press of the Situation: Implications for Creativity, Conformity, and Dissonance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1450–1466.

5. A. Guinote, “Power and Goal Pursuit,” Study 4, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33 (2007): 1076–1087.

6. A.A. Eaton, P.S. Visser, J.A. Krosnick, and S. Anand, “Social Power and Attitude Strength over the Life Course,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (2009): 1646–1660.

7. P. Briñol, R.E. Petty, C. Valle, D.D. Rucker, and A. Becerra, “The Effects of Message Recipients’ Power before and after Persuasion: A Self-Validation Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (2007): 1040–1053.

8. Chen, Trevino, and Hambrick, “CEO Elitist Association: A New Understanding of an Executive Behavioral Pattern,” 316–328.

9. Jennifer R. Overbeck and Bernadette Park, “Powerful Perceivers, Powerless Objects: Flexibility of Powerholders’ Social Attention,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 99, no. 2 (March 2006): 227–243.

10. Roderick M. Kramer, “The Harder They Fall,” Harvard Business Review OnPoint Edition (October 2003).

11. Joris Lammers et al., “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 737. doi:10.1177/1948550611418679.

12. Dana Carney, “Defend Your Research: Powerful People are Better Liars,” Harvard Business Review (May 2010).

13. Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H. Gruenfeld, “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (2006): 1068–1073.

14. The woeful saga of Jeff Kindler and all the subsequent quotes about it come from Peter Elkind and Jennifer Reingold, with Doris Burke, “Inside Pfizer’s Palace Coup,” Fortune (August 15, 2011): 164, 3, 76- XX.

15. David C. McClelland and David H. Burnham, “Power Is the Great Motivator,” Harvard Business Review (January 1, 2003).

16. Savita Bhave, Casting a Destiny: The Biography of Chandran Menon, trans. Nandu Dange (Pune: Ameya Books, 2004), 43–44; Allan R. Cohen, “Training for the Transition from Entrepreneur to Manager: A Case Study,” in Administrative Issues in Developing Economies, ed. K. Rothwell (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1970).