Diagnosing Power and Dependence

DIAGNOSING POWER AND DEPENDENCE

• Power (the capacity to get others to act as you wish them to) is the currency of political behavior.

• Political behavior or politics occurs because what you want is often not what others want.

• This difference/s in goals, your goal vs the goals of others, is what leads to conflict.

• In organizational settings, you, the manager, depend on others to realize what you want.

• Thus, politics is essentially dependence management: How do you manage your dependence on others (including your peers and subordinates) to get what you want.

• Even if there is goal agreement, people may disagree on the means to achieve those goals. This also will produce conflict and thus require political skills to resolve it.

• When an existing equilibrium is upset, eg: new product introduction, merger & acquisition, new market penetration, existing dependencies get reconfigured. And only political skills can help us stabilize such situation to reach a new and stable equilibrium.

MORAL

To manage is to manage dependencies. Therefore, the manager’s role is essentially a political one of reconciling these dependencies. Thus, power and dependence mutually define each other.

• Power is the actionable capacity to get others to do what you want

• In a deeper sense, power is the actionable capacity to get others to want what you want!

• Three faces of power:

Positional Power: Where you are

Expert Power: What you know

Relational Power: