Power and Influence

Spanish-speaking Browns,

the type of knowledge that is particularly important in leadership jobs is not the kind one finds in books or in educational programs. It is detailed information about the social reality in which the job is imbedded.

needed—because of increased interdependence—is a much larger number of people who have leadership skills, broadly defined.

worked with key marketing personnel to identify some unambiguous measures of short-term marketing performance, so as to avoid later arguments about how well they were doing,

Young employees, in particular, often naïvely assume that “good performance speaks for itself,” which then leads them to undercommunicate with their superiors. That is, as long as they think they are doing a good job and that there are really no problems, they tend to communicate little with their bosses.

In terms of self-awareness, nothing is more important for a subordinate than to know his or her temperamental reaction to a position of dependence on an authority figure.

He took information supplied to him at face value; he made assumptions in areas where he had no information; and—most damaging—he never actively tried to clarify what his boss’s objectives were.

In all these situations, and in hundreds of others that are fundamentally similar, social complexity, not character, is the key driving force. And when such situations are not handled with great skill—a leadership skill that was somewhat lacking in all three of those cases—destructive power struggles are almost inevitable.

career path, it requires that one move, over time, toward positions where one can help manage some strategic contingency for the organization. All professional, managerial, and technical people face situations each and every day where they can increase or decrease some of their power. Developing a power base in one’s early career requires that one

people who think of their jobs as providing leadership in some technical area, even though the people they have to lead do not report to them.