Jeffrey Pfeffer: Why Cultivating Power is the Secret to Success

[Music] power according to Harvard Professor Rosabeth mosaner is the organization's last 30 secret it is however the secret to success power is a subject that I think makes many people extremely uncomfortable um they it violates their idea that the world is a just and fair place it violates their basic belief that people can get ahead just on the basis of their hard work and their good effort it violates often and oftentimes what they feel comfortable with doing in terms of networking or flattering people or getting control over resources or all the various sources of power um so the power the idea of power is I think difficult for many people to accept and so what we try to do and what I try to do in my work on this is to uh first of all give people lots of examples of you know from everyday life and from their own life and have them in addition to giving them examples and cases and readings and things like that so to make them understand that power is in fact all around them kind of like air and water and gravity um the other thing which we which I really try to do a lot is to have them reflect on how power has played out in their life and to reflect on what their strengths and weaknesses are and to think about specific strategies and specific actions that they might take and how they might be more effective um it's slightly more effective and even slightly more effective will put them in a very different [Music] place there are many practical strategies that people can use to increase their power within an organization one is to first of all most basically diagnose who has power not just the formal power but the informal power often times it's an assistant or a secretary or people who don't necessarily are that high up in the organization chart but to diagnose the real distribution of power and then to figure out how to get closer to uh the people with power and get those people on their side and one could be doing small tasks that make those other individuals lives easier one thing could be networking with them spending more time with them building social relationships one thing they could do would be to flatter them because people like to think good about themselves and all love people who make us think good about well of ourselves and one of the best ways to make people think well of well of themselves is to flatter them so that would be three things that you could do fourth thing you could do to gain power is to figure out what are some resources unexploited resources U that can be used oftentimes organizations have budgets that will permit you to put together a speaker series that will let you meet people sometimes there will be um resources to do dinners or lunches whatever those kinds of resources are that permit you again to put yourself in the center of of of a series of [Music] relationships everybody in the world I think understands that organizations and work life is all about social relationships and the better higher quality more with more powerful people social relationships I.E networks that you have the better your career is going to go but people find networking to be icky or aversive or something that doesn't feel natural or it feels contrived to them or something and so one of the things we try to get them to do is to say okay who are you spending time with it's interesting um who do you need to know in order to be successful given your particular industry and function and the career that you want to pursue how might you reallocate your time in ways that cause you to spend more time with people who are going to be useful to you in your job and your career and less time with people that you're just comfortable with being with who are often times who are people who are very similar to you so they are sources of redundant rather than non-redundant information and ideas and social context you really want to meet people who you don't know very well who can link you in to different ideas and different social relationships and different jobs and different networks than you're used to um to being with so a lot lot of what um a lot of what my teaching Empower is about is getting people comfortable with doing things that they didn't think they could do but once they do it they find out often times that they actually can do it and that they actually like [Music] it your job as a leader is not to be authentic or Genuine or whatever true to yourself your job as a leader is to be true to what the situation requires of you so if you're an entrepreneur out raising money and you feel discouraged and you're not sure exactly what you're doing because that's really the condition of many entrepreneurs the last thing you want to do is to go to your potential job recruits and your potential investors and to to potential customers and to signal to them that you don't have confidence in your own success so confidence is contagious if you're confident in your own abilities and your own capabilities other people may have confidence in you and that confidence then permits them to invest their human capital or their Financial capital in your Enterprise and then you become successful so you have to be able to sometimes display emotions that you're not really feeling and that may be inauthentic but it's what success requires [Music]

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 124,257

Keywords: Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior, business takeaways, informational series, stanford mba, stanford research, gsb, gsb faculty, stanford gsb faculty, mba, stanford faculty, stanford gsb, Jeff Pfeffer, business insights, higher education, faculty research, faculty insights, workplace politics, how to win at office politics, navigate office politics, navigate workplace politics, how to play office politics the smart way, how to navigate office politics

Id: AozJ4AkgAMw

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2015