Power: Breaking the Taboo

a Crash Course in Four Blogs

Last month, I was invited to speak to a group of women at Rabobank. They worked at every level of the organization, and in every department. It was a uniquely talented audience, full of female professionals who hold positions of authority in a major financial institution. And I was asked to speak to them about power - which I quickly realized they probably have much more of than I do. So what could I teach them that they didn't already know?

I started to prepare simply by listening. I interviewed women in other organizations: some of them I'd coached throughout my career, and others were close friends and peers that I respect. I decided to start by asking them about their relationships to power. And it quickly became clear to me that this is a subject few of us are prepared to discuss openly. "Power is often what prevents the best solutions from being heard," some of them believed. Or even more starkly: "I wish it didn't exist."

With such answers, I couldn't help but think about my own relationship to power. Because if I am truly honest, it's not that I wish it didn't exist - I just wish I had more of it. And that is a difficult thing to admit: that power is something desirable to us (and no matter how hard we try to deny it: almost everybody desires power.) Equally hard to admit is this: that we are afraid of power. Nobody wants to be ordered around, forced to do things we don't believe in, made to feel weak in the face of authority - and many of us are prepared to pay a heavy emotional or material price to avoid that feeling.

In the face of power, I feel both fear and desire. And I suspect that this is the case for almost everybody. But to speak about this is perhaps one of the greatest taboos in our culture. And yet, I propose that we start by acknowledging this simple reality, no matter how unpleasant it is. Because the more I thought, read, and learned about power, the clearer it became to me that this taboo affects women more than it does men; and that our inability to speak about power, to navigate it efficiently, also limits our potential; personally, professionally, and politically.

Why? Because power is everywhere. At the dinner table, on the workfloor, in our language, in our schools, in our churches, in our laws: it is inescapable. When we choose to ignore it, when we refuse to engage with it, we do so at our own peril: we abandon a part of the positive influence we could have in each of these spheres. So starting today, let's break the taboo and start talking about power. Because to navigate power effectively, to engage with it constructively, is a skill that will benefit you in every part of your life.

The thing is: while power is everywhere, it's not always the same power. Or rather, power works in many different ways: the power that your boss holds over you functions very differently from the power of the police or the prime minister. So the bad news is: there cannot be a one-size-fits-all way to deal with power effectively. Learning to navigate power requires mastery of different strategies, depending on the context.

That is why, building on my talk at Rabobank, I will be posting four blogs about power on my LinkedIn over the next weeks. Each blog will contain an important lesson which can help you understand the different types power at work in everyday situations. In every blog, I will offer concrete tools to help you work with power in your social environments. With these posts, I hope I can help you to turn power into something that works for you, as well.

The first entry will be posted tomorrow: make sure to follow my page to stay up to date, and please share with anyone you think might be interested.