Three Ways Leaders Abuse Power...And What Can Be Done About It

Over the past four years at MMG EARTH, we’ve spent over 10,000 hours studying identity, power, culture, and society in organizations across just about every sector you can think of. Through that work (and beyond it), we've learned so much about power across race, gender, disability, and LGBTQIA+ identity.

Here are three ways that leaders in organizations wield privilege to abuse power and what can be done about it:

1?? Develop unspoken rules about expressions of emotion at work. Normalize dismissiveness and gaslighting but punish historically marginalized people for pointing out these dynamics, often through social exclusion, ignoring presence in meetings, and being unresponsive to emails.

What we’ve learned: Holistic approaches to changing the way a culture of an organization approaches emotion are important. People leaders are well positioned to add emotional awareness as an ESG goal that includes education, the addition of emotional awareness to annual performance evaluations, and sharing work-friendly resources that identify how distancing behaviors (including behaving as is if emotion is not acceptable) damage people, cultures, and society. Then, add a question or two on a Likert scale to employee satisfaction surveys that directly ask about emotional awareness individually and the overall emotional awareness of the organization as a whole. Be sure to track the shift or stagnancy of these numbers over time.

2?? Use legal teams to justify inaction. Prods legal to create extensive lists of exposure to lawsuits with initiatives and programs dedicated to ceding power to Black and Brown people, queer and trans folks, and people with disabilities. This inaction is often preceded or followed by evading actual laws when beneficial to the C-suite—for example, engaging in unlawful union-busting activities, witnessing blatant discrimination based on identity and looking the other way/pretending not to see it, and refusing to write up employees formally engaging in harassment.

What we’ve learned: Legal teams shouldn't exist within a silo that only allows CEOs to have access to them. Sometimes, people have this internalized view of law that its primary role is to uphold justice for all. Unfortunately, especially within corporate spaces globally, that’s not a reality. Legal teams are often hired to focus on compliance only and compliance is neither inherently just nor power-aware. Apply the concept of targeted universalism to your initiative planning. Develop a process for evaluating the goals, vision, outcomes, and KPIs for all organizational initiatives. Document what initiatives are accepted versus which are denied and the reasoning provided by executive leadership. Present a quarterly or annual report on these trends to the executive leadership team.

3?? Merit-based increases wielded as a tool to subject historically marginalized folks to constantly proving they are worthy of a raise. Meanwhile, their counterparts experience seemingly automatic increases that do not require them to demonstrate performance-based objectives, efficacy, or even competency in completing the fundamental responsibilities of their role.

What we’ve learned: It's time for the automatic annual increase. Merit-based increases have a tight stronghold on some of the people leaders we work with, but what really is its long-term benefit? According to Statista, monthly inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, with annual inflation reaching a multi-decade high of eight percent. Inflation fell throughout 2023, reaching 3.1 percent in June, and currently remains steady but above target at 3%. As the world we live in continues to become more and more expensive, merit-based increases (that exist on their own as the only means of raising pay) send a stark message: If you want to continue to afford the rising costs of inflation, you have to prove that you are worthy. Merit-based increases also invite identity bias, where it's incredibly easy to decide that a Black woman or woman of Color is unworthy of a merit-based increase. At the same time, her white counterparts consistently receive pay increases based on "merit."

Author Jonathan Reynolds once wrote about the concept of hiring the right people into the right seats. Automatic increases further emphasize this concept because if executive leaders consider it unfair that an individual is receiving automatic raises when their work outcomes are missing the mark defined by the organization and mutually agreed to, creating tensions across teams, inconsistently completing project tasks while relying on others around them to carry the slack, then executive leaders should do something about this and document those outcomes as opposed to allowing people (especially folks coming from more privileged backgrounds) to glide on the work of others around them.

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