How to be a dictator

Dictatorship is what lunatics do.

Yet learning the power dynamics of being a dictator is a fundamental skill to help navigate the politics at work.

I didn’t realise how exhausting workplace politics can be when I first entered management. It was a constant balancing act, keeping bosses happy with their high expectations while trying to protect my team yet not letting them ‘cruise’.

We can’t remove workplace politics, but by learning from the dictator’s handbook, we can better see the power plays at work, helping us feel less frustrated and more effectively shape our roles at work.

Don’t worry, I won’t be asking you to starve anyone or exile anyone to a gulag! ?

Dictatorship: a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in the hands of a single ruler or a small group. This ruling authority often suppresses opposition, limits freedoms, and centralises decision-making. The leader’s authority is maintained through force, propaganda, and limiting individual rights.

You don’t have to squint hard to see this is also how large corporates are run.

Decisions are centralised in the C-Suite and travel from the top downwards. This power imbalance means most employees have limited choice over key aspects of their work, e.g. their responsibilities, hours, or the processes they must follow.

While the C-Suite is those in charge, you too can be seen as the dictator of your team. More likely than not, you have immense control over the work your team does and influence on how they are perceived by the rest of the business.

By recognising this, you can start running your ‘dictatorship’ more effectively if you know the rules:

Rule 1: You can’t give power that you don’t own

This is the ground rule.

Dictators can’t wave a gun if they don’t control the army, nor can they pay their cronies without keys to the treasury.

In the workplace, you might want to give all your team members a pay rise and interesting work to keep them loyal and happy. But more likely than not, HR will dictate what pay you can hand out and the projects are limited to your department's priorities. Your team can moan and threaten to quit, but your hands are tied. ?

Dictators know if they want the support of the military, they need to keep the General close. This goes for you as well. If you want change at work, you need to keep a boss who has power over that change.

Effective dictators are clear on where true power lies and so should you. Do a power assessment on yourself and your boss/network to understand who has the power to make change.

Looking inwards:

Be honest about the power you have. Does your influence match your role/title? What key decisions can you make independently? Has your ego prevented you from recognising you’re not as influential as you think? Reflect also on any weak spots, e.g. are you influential with the technical teams but you lack power with HR?

Overestimating your power results in you overreaching, leaving you ‘up the creek without a paddle’. Worst yet, over-representing your power might impress a stranger but your team will think you’re selfish and hoarding treasure for yourself.

Underestimating your power and not using it when expected, means others see you as indecisive or lacking in confidence.

Looking upwards:

Asking your boss for things outside their control only results in your resentment towards them and them being frustrated at your unreasonable asks.

If you want a promotion, can your boss give it to you or rally his/her peers to agree on your promotion? If you want funding, can they allocate the budget from their own? If your boss provides promises but can never keep them, does it mean they are lying about their influence?

You might get along well with your boss, but if their limited power means they can’t help you advance, you will need to make the hard decision to find yourself a new boss or, at minimum, find additional senior champions for yourself.

Thinking longer term, understand how your boss’s power dynamics are changing, if they are the head of a manual processing team and your company is looking at automation then it’s probably a good time to jump teams!

Learning 1: Dictators are clear on the power they possess. To realise their desires, they build a coalition of cronies who provide the necessary power.

Rule 2: Own your success. Share the victory.

Corporations exist to combine diverse skill sets, enabling the creation of complex products that no individual could produce alone.

Steve Jobs needed a large team to make his vision for the iPhone a reality and dictators need their cronies to run the complex government of a nation.

While your career will feel singular, it exists in a complex environment. Your career’s success is interwoven with the success of your company, your team, and your boss’.

You cannot progress your career at the expense of others, this might appear to work in the short term but is catastrophic in the long term when you progress up the hierarchy.

Your career is less of a ladder and more like a triangle, there are increasingly fewer roles as you climb upwards, but you inherit exponentially more people below you. At a point, you run out of hours to be able to do everything yourself, you must start to work through your cronies.

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When you are beginning your career:

Dictators don’t become top dogs overnight.

They all started at the bottom and with luck, cunning, and skill got to the top role. When they were starting they were ‘men of the people’ they worked amongst the people and shared the concerns of the people.

When starting your career, know that your role is to be with the team and to learn about their concerns. Be a team player who contributes to the common cause and ‘share the struggle’, this builds a solid foundation for your future.

But to stand out from the crowd, not only do you have to contribute harder than everyone else, you have to contribute visibly – I can feel you cringe at this.

If you have worked hard on your team’s success and your efforts are sincere, be proud and make your boss aware. Show them you understand their priorities, how you have worked towards those priorities, and most importantly helped your peers to also achieve the team’s goals.

If you stay quiet and expect others to take the initiative to notice you, you will only build resentment. Avoid this by proudly showing how you are a ‘man of the people’.

Be warned, I’ve come across a small handful of people in my career who, from day one, wanted to be boss. They stuck their head out before knowing the game and their careers ended before it even started. They had a self-serving approach and tried to exercise power when they didn’t have any. There is nothing more satisfying for the crowd to pull these people back into reality.

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When you are experienced:

Soon-to-be dictators graduated from commoner to crony by knowing how to cohere and work the people. Great contributors become managers, but those who inspire and rally people together become leaders. They paint a compelling vision that people want to be part of or follow simply out of curiosity.

Dictators are often charismatic, luckily for you in the workplace, this is not a requirement. The workplace is a safe and monotonous environment, so any coherent vision will generate curiosity for people to follow. Your hard work is to paint this vision of a positive future and help them take part. If people believe it will help them and bring about a better future, you will soon have a following.

Learning 2: Dictators learn the system and use it to rally people to their cause. They paint a better future not just for themselves, but one that others can relate to and want to fight for.

Rule 3: There is no place for charity

Everyone is selfish.

Self-preservation is built into each of us so we can look after ourselves and those we love.

Your cronies are also selfish, they expect to be looked after and rewarded. This is also why the answer to the original answer is C) to split the loot between you and your cronies and leave nothing for the public.

Why? Because money that is given to the public is money that could be given to your cronies.

If you choose to give $15bil to the public, another person vying for your role can come in and choose to give only $5bil, splitting the $10bil with the cronies. Your cronies would be better off with them. This happens until the most ruthless leader comes in and leaves nothing for the public.

This translates to the workplace as careful management of how you reward your team members, ensuring that those who worked hard are openly celebrated/rewarded and ensuring you don’t waste time and effort on those who didn’t contribute to your team’s success.

Nothing irks your team members more than spending the team budget on fancy branded merch they don’t get or you having them waste time on some random exec’s doomed-to-die pet project.

Your team wants to know their work will be rewarded by you / the company to the fullest degree. And while they can’t overthrow you, they will leave and find a boss who can get them better aligned and rewarded.

Learning 3: Dictators look after their supporters generously and ruthlessly cut out wastage.

Rule 4: A fiefdom with allies is a growing kingdom

While everything above might point to you building up walls around your fiefdom, your fiefdom will not become a kingdom without alliances to support your expanding needs.

If you’ve built an island, your growth is limited.

Likewise, if your loyalty is only with one boss, you are limited to their power (Rule 1) and should anything happen to them, you can be easily dispensed.

Building alliances with your peers and their bosses enables you to deliver bigger strategic goals, take a wider perspective, and build up resilience should things not proceed as expected.

Building alliances is different to disloyalty. Building alliances means working together to help each team achieve their respective goals, this is different to manipulating competition between the two for your personal benefit.

Inexperienced or jealous managers don’t understand the distinction, they create isolated islands that become targets during the next round of redundancies.

Lesson 4: Effective cronies know their own role, their strengths, and where they need each other. The military general knows they need the treasurer to pay the soldiers, and the treasurer know the soldiers provide the safety.

Workplace power dynamics mirrors that of dictatorships.

Recognising these rules of power will let you better play the game, making it successful for your career and more importantly less mentally draining. There is nothing worse than being stuck in an endless game where you don’t know the rules.

Go forth and be an effective dictator.

Should you want to dig a lot deeper into the power dynamics of being a dictator, I highly recommend this book: The Dictator's Handbook (Smith; Bueno de Mesquita) https://amzn.to/3Oeorbu