In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses how leaders can build and leverage their power bases to successfully influence up, down and across the organization.
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses how leaders can build and leverage their power bases to successfully influence up, down, and across the organization. For The Center for Leadership Studies. Here’s your host, Sam Shriver.
Sam Shriver
It was very rare that you could be in a room with Paul Hershey and not hear him talk about power. Leadership is an attempt to influence and power is influence potential. And really, it’s like Situational Leadership®. To me at least. It tells you what to do and when to do it. And the whole idea of your power, dictates why you’re either going to be successful or unsuccessful, effective or ineffective. What observations have you had in organizations that kind of connect leadership and power?
Marshall Goldsmith
Let me connect a couple of dots. It’s one I learned from Paul and then one thing learned from Peter Drucker. Paul talked about power and your influence potential. And Peter Drucker taught me every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision, make peace with that. Not the best person, the right person, the smartest person, or beautiful person. It’s made by that person. Make peace with it. Well, connecting the two dots, the first thing is one of the most common questions I’m asked, and I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times, sounds like this I’m working in a government organization, and I got this guy working for me. He’s about two years from retirement. He’s really a very mediocre performer. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to change his performance appraisal at all.
There’s no way I’m going to fire him. It’s just far too much effort. He’s not doing an awful job. He just shows up and does a mediocre job every day. How do I motivate him to be this enthusiastic and positive contributor and make a big difference? Well, my answer is prayer is one alternative. The person has described a situation where they have no power. Now, they might think they should have power, but they don’t. They have no power. So the question is, back in Paul’s terminology, how do I influence someone when I have absolutely no potential to influence someone? Well, the answer is you don’t. You work around it. You do the best you can do, but you can’t change what you can’t change. Well, learning that, Peter Drucker has taught me that lesson is such a great lesson in life.
Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make the decision, make peace. The other thing Peter Drucker taught me is that a person is a customer and they don’t have to buy. You sell what you can sell. If you can sell it, you sell it. If you can’t sell it, you let it go. And something in my book Triggers I talk about this one question before you deal with any topic. Am I willing at this time to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? If the answer is yes, go for it. The answer is no. Let it go.
Sam Shriver
Move on.
Marshall Goldsmith
Move on. As I’ve grown older, it my level of aspiration in life has gone down and down, but my level of impact has gone up and up. Why? Quit worrying about what I’m not going to change.
Sam Shriver
Yeah.
Marshall Goldsmith
Not going to change it. I’m not going to change it. Make peace. Make peace. Change what you can change. Can’t change it. Let it go. Let it go. Move on. Right. Well, we waste so much time in life when we have no power over things we’re not going to change. The thing I’ve learned is really put my focus on, whether am I going to have the power to make a difference. If you are, fantastic. If you’re not, why? I mean, you listen to those call-in sports shows where they’re carping about the football coach.
Sam Shriver
Yeah.
Marshall Goldsmith
Nobody cares what you think of the football coach. And by the way, the football players don’t care about you.
Sam Shriver
Very true.
Marshall Goldsmith
People get all excited about this stuff, right? They don’t care about you. So. Kelly. My daughter Kelly’s, a professor at Northwestern. We did some research and we looked at meaning and happiness. And what we found is you want to have a great life, live your own life. Don’t live vicariously other people’s lives. And back to Paul’s concept of power. Do I have influence potential?
Do I have the potential to make a difference? If you do, go for it. Now, what I love about what you guys are teaching on power, though, is you give people a model, and you give them a model to look at various levels of power, and then they can use that model to focus on how can I get the best leverage that I can in a specific situation? For example, a common case study is two case studies of power. One person is a Senior Vice President two levels down from the CEO. One is the Administrative Assistant to the CEO. Who has the most power? Well, you think about it, in theory, this Senior Vice President has a whole lot more power than the Administrative Assistant. What is this Senior Vice President going to do to hurt the Administrative Assistant? Not much.
What can this assistant do to hurt him? Plenty. Who really has the power here?
Sam Shriver
Oh, yeah.
Marshall Goldsmith
So sometimes when you look at the concept of power, what I like about the way you guys teach this is you get out of this simplistic view that just because your box is higher up on some chart than someone else’s, that means you definitely have more power than them. Not always. Sometimes somebody at the bottom has more power than somebody at the top. Another one of the power bases you’re talking about is connection power.
Sam Shriver
Oh, yeah.
Marshall Goldsmith
They may be connected with people that are important, all kinds of things. And I like the way you guys teach it because what you do is you really cause people to think and analyze power as opposed to making these naive assumptions. And when people make the naive assumptions, that’s where they get lost in, quote, what should be, yeah, well, I’m the boss. I should have the power to make this person go out and bust their butt. Well, that’s nice. Theoretically, you should, but practically you don’t.
Sam Shriver
Yeah.
Marshall Goldsmith
Make peace, move on, get going, do what you can do, but don’t sit there carping about what you’re not going to change anyway.
Sam Shriver
Yeah.
We’ve recently done a couple of studies with Training Industry on kind of revaluating the seven power bases. And interestingly enough, across generations, all seven of those power bases are still highly valid.
Marshall Goldsmith
Of course.
Sam Shriver
Will people do things to avoid punishments, the coercive? Of course they will. And a lot of times misunderstood. I think style one really the purpose of that is to create movement. So if somebody is scared and they don’t know what they’re doing, and you, the boss, say, okay, I want you to follow my exact instruction, they may take that first step because they want to avoid punishment, but once they do, they’re into the developmental cycle and you move on. But the three big winners in terms of the power bases were people really said, yeah, of all seven, these three make the most sense. I would change my behavior if my boss asked me to do something differently on the basis of these three. And the first one was legitimate power. If you’re the boss, there’s that whole idea of oughtness.
Marshall Goldsmith
Right.
Sam Shriver
It’s kind of like you should make this decision. And a lot of times with legitimate power, you think about the whole idea of holding people accountable for things and making those difficult decisions. And so often in organizations, from our perspective anyway, culturally, whatever, people shy away from that. They’re afraid to do that. And what that does is it really impacts their reference power because people see them as unwilling to exercise their authority when their authority should be exercised.
Marshall Goldsmith
Right.
Sam Shriver
And it really impacts the whole idea of my identification with you as a leader. And then the third thing was expert power, legitimate reference, and expert power. Two of those three. There’s almost no end to the creative approach that you can take to build your referent power or your expert power. It’s a lot like emotional intelligence, right? So if I want you, for whatever reason, to identify with me, I have to invest, I have to listen, I have to understand, I have to do things for you on a consistent basis over time. Where you’re going, Sam isn’t such a bad guy. Maybe when he asks me to do something I don’t want to do, I’ll just pitch in and do it.
In terms of developing expertise, if I really want to become an expert, there are a ton of things I can do to sort of increase that ability. But with legitimate power, as the Doc used to say, position power, it’s given to you. If you don’t use it, you lose it. So those three things really drive the effectiveness of pretty much any style you’re going to employ. And so much of referent power, as you’ve talked a lot about, is just saying goodbye to ego. If you’re saying to somebody, do this because I’m in charge, you’re probably on shaky ground there. But as you go up in the organization, is that valid from your perspective? Like legitimate, referent, and expert as kind of really being the drivers of effective influence?
Marshall Goldsmith
Yeah, I agree. That makes lots of sense to me.
Sam Shriver
Yeah.
Conclusion
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading executive educators, coaches and authors. He’s a pioneer in helping successful leaders get even better. His books Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Are New York Times bestsellers. Marshall has been ranked by Thinkers 50 as the number one leadership thinker in the world and the number one executive coach in the world. Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit situational.com or call 919-335-8763. The Center for Leadership Studies, the global home of Situational Leadership®.
