SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : POWER, PRESTIGE, STATUS : Gaining Power: How to Stand Out From Crowd
“Not all vice presidents are created equal” is an old saying among management consultants. But it also applies to the rank and file.
Power and influence in the workplace arise from far more than mere rank on the organizational chart. A company’s shifting needs, your political skills--even the way you speak--can affect where you stand relative to your colleagues.
Who emerges as first among equals “is the function of a lot of complicated factors,” said Robert Lefton, president of Psychological Associates in St. Louis, a management consulting firm. “But the most important is a person’s credibility. And I would define credibility as being a function of the expertise he has, how likeable he is and his trustworthiness.”
Lefton said that the surest way to “instant credibility” is to argue against your own point of view in meetings with co-workers.
A second route is to promote a climate of candor, in which there is room to consider all views. “I think a person who can stand out in a group is a person who can lead the group to build that kind of culture,” Lefton said.
Merely paying attention to co-workers can also help. “When you listen to others and involve them in your discussions, that’s a gift of reciprocity that has enormous power to it,” Lefton said.
But he said that people who are neither likeable nor trustworthy can still be influential at work, because there is room for fakers to stand out. In fact, generally ethical people sometimes send the wrong signals, at great expense to their leverage with co-workers.
“Take . . . a basically honest . . . person who tends to exaggerate things. Over a period of time, people will say, ‘I don’t trust that guy.’ ” Lefton said. “Or take a poor listener, or someone who talks too fast, or someone who only talks about what’s good and doesn’t talk about the negatives. . . . These people pay a terrible price.”
By contrast, those who can exploit contacts and manipulate others may exercise far more influence than their competent--but less politically savvy--colleagues.
“You’d like to think that the brightest, most creative, astute” workers dominate the company’s decision-making, said Samuel Culbert, a UCLA management professor. “It doesn’t work that way. What happens is that the guys who are more clever at working the politics and using their relationships wind up building a network of power that allows them to assert” themselves.
Usually aggressive and articulate, such people sometimes kill others’ ideas by painting pictures of doomsday if ideas other than their own are followed, said Culbert, who is a psychologist.
In addition, the stereotype of a leader as hard-charging and aggressive is not always borne out by workplace reality.
“You think a leader ought to be outgoing,” said Jerald Jellison, a professor of psychology at USC. “But some people are very quiet and they emerge as the leaders. You can name any kind of characteristic, but what it seems to come down to more are resources.”
Typically, the most important resource to a company is seen as the one that makes the biggest profit, he said. Accordingly, the expert salesman may have a lot more sway than his organizational chart equal who is in charge of negotiating medical benefits.
Generally, you can tell who is influential within a group by listening to how people speak.
Powerful people “tend to be much more direct,” Jellison said. “People in lower-power positions tend to hint more, tend to talk more in generalities rather than specifics, tend to rely more on emotions rather than words.”
Jellison, a self-described specialist in the “fundamental people problem (of) how you get somebody to do something you want them to do,” added: “We all know how to be high power and how not to be. . . . It is an element of all relationships. . . . And there’s a good reason for it. . . . There is an efficiency associated with having one person make decisions.”
