Re-Introducing the Shadow Side of Power

Following is a update of the newsletter posted last year. Transform the energy!

We are more aware as elections near that shadows lurk around powerful roles and can derail the best leadership intentions and cause immense harm. But the Shadow Side of Power also holds massive potential energy for leverage, learning and legacy! Let's get smarter about recognizing it!

It was 1958, my 8TH grade year.?Some of us, including me were asked to be on the school patrol.?Wow!?I was psyched – my first formal power role.?Like others on the patrol, I was given a silver badge mounted on a thick brown belt that I wore diagonally across my chest and around my waist. I also carried a flag to wave in front of traffic at our corner-crossings. But there was more...?when I wore that badge and held that flag, I temporarily stepped into another persona –?one with powers beyond my being as a freckle-faced 14 year old with a brace on her leg.?In the patrol role, I felt super-responsible, and, I must admit looking back, just a cut above the kids who depended on my guidance.?I felt that extra surge of POWER!

At the age of 14, I experienced one of my first lessons about role power: it was an energy of its own.?This energy that goes with formal authority has been a major focus of my work for decades, and continues to both disturb and fascinate me.

We’d like to think that leadership is a rational process that we can teach behaviorally and conceptually- that there is a formula.?But once formal power differences enter the picture, all bets on rational solutions are off.?Actual and perceived power differences affect how everybody behaves, often replacing important and even shared goals of the institution and its culture!

The shadow is the unconscious place where we stow away potentialities and parts of ourselves, organizations, and society that we don’t want to acknowledge or are afraid to let loose.?We all have shadows.?Like our shadow in the sun, our shadows always accompany us. (There is a reason that non-humans in literature – zombies, vampires walk in the sun without shadows!)?No one is immune.?

For people with formal authority, the shadow plays out on multiple stages.?Formal leaders carry their own personal shadow, but they also wear the mantle of their role – and that mantle comes with its own shadow side:?formal authority in one organization may imply command and control – thus marginalizing participation and relegating it to the shadows.?In another organization, formal authority may have a paternalistic flavor leading to parent-child relationships that relegate individual initiative to the shadows where it begins to express itself as blame, hostility, and energy diverted to non-work ventures (shopping on the Internet?).?

There is a lot of energy in the shadow.?The first step to unleashing it is to recognize it.

So, become increasingly aware of the “shadow” that goes with formal leadership roles – yours and others’.?It can derail your best leadership intentions – but also holds immense potential energy for leverage, learning and legacy! Stay tuned!

More in the just released The Shadow Side of Power: Lessons for Leaders?(and Their Supporters). It's a short story about power where you enter (with a hero and his guide) into the Leadership Inferno. Emerge better able to recognize the shadows and turn them toward the light.

https://www.patriciamclagan.com also on Amazon and B&N?

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