Power games and leadership

By Toni Chinoy

Define cutthroat: competitive, aggressive, ruthless behavior in order to secure positional power and control of circumstances affecting your territory.

Among living things there is a constant dance to establish supremacy. Unfortunately because the instinct to dominate is both pervasive and unconscious, it is rare that even evolved humans study their own behaviors in terms of actual outcome.

“A power game may be either the most refined or the most blatant of attempts to establish dominance between any two individuals or groups. It can be as simple as controlling the conversation or as complicated as manipulating a series of deals.”
Isolate any segment, department, business unit, etc. and study it with a specific emphasis on identifying the power games and their effect on the efficiencies of the organization. Look especially hard at the leadership and how they treat each other, subordinates and outsiders.

As you observe any interaction to which you can remain objective, scrutinize the exchange with the following questions in mind:

1. Which party won the interaction? In other words, whose agenda dominated?
2. What was the impact on the organization of that person or group winning?
   a. Was the outcome the best outcome?
   b. Did the outcome diminish or enhance the self-esteem and enthusiasm of others?
   c. Did the relationships of those who must work together become stronger or weaker as a result of the outcome?
   The games of establishing pecking order (who has control of the outcome) may be so natural that the organization fails to see the price tag.

Power games at the top
Typically, in order to survive and thrive at the top, a person must be skilled at the power games. When the stakes are high, the games often turn vicious. Talented individuals are made to look foolish or ineffective by competitors in their own organizations. Lying and trickery are common.

If you follow the vertical path down each of these organizations represented by senior leaders at war, you will find alignment with the various factions at the top. You will also find confusion and chaos and potentially poor delivery on commitments.
All groups in a structured organization are interdependent. The natural competition for pecking order and advancement destroys an organization’s ability to optimize its results. This need to dominate is an ongoing distraction, and it exists in every organization.

The responsibility of leadership
If the power games affect efficiencies throughout the organization, why are they not stopped? Whose job is it to stop it?

The convenient response is to believe that the CEO should keep the troops in line. Certainly if your highest leader is aware of in-fighting for control, he or she has an obligation to step in and demand alignment of the leadership. That is usually not enough, however. At the point that your commander intervenes, the Games usually go underground and become more secretive. Participants choose their moments and method of attack more carefully and strategically.

Another assumption is that it falls to HR to stop the games. Human resources are often brought into the interaction by the person who is losing a specific power game. Unfortunately, too few HR practitioners have the credibility, the skill set, or the positional power to intervene when the games are at the top of the organization.

Another option is the expensive outside facilitators. Nature usually takes over when they leave, if not before.

The tricky answer to “who should stop the games?” is that everyone must engage in the solution. Leadership comes with responsibility. To be chosen and rewarded as a leader of an organization automatically obligates that leader to hold the organization’s well being above his or her personal gain or security.

How can one realistically expect people to do the right thing rather than what is good for them personally?

Creating a new construct for success
In order to stop the inevitable competitive positioning at the top, the senior leaders themselves must decide to stop. The words may come easily because to stop the combat is common sense. The behaviors will not necessarily follow.

Once a leadership group makes the decision that the competition among people who should be aligned is unhealthy, they must focus on how to think and respond differently to their challenges.

Realistically, before they do so, infrastructure should be designed to support collaboration rather than competition.

Senior leaders should identify the triggers, motivators, and rewards available to the most proficient warriors in their culture. And then, once identified, they must ruthlessly remove the incentive for the competitive cutthroat. This might include a review of the succession process, compensation incentives, and other rewards inadvertently designed to create opposition, leader against leader.

Reviewing and changing the reward systems can be a challenging and lengthy process. There will be an instinctive resistance to the changes by the very leaders who have acknowledged the need to do so. While steadily continuing an initiative to examine and adapt the infrastructure over time to one more conducive to collaboration, there are some rewarding initiatives that can impact the culture immediately.

Initiatives with immediate impact
A sequence of short meetings (two to four hours) addressing three topics should take place over a designated period of time. You will find that leaders embrace these concepts and make big inroads into changing the culture in these informal conversations!

First, the group should think of themselves as a leadership personality. If their organization were to be described as a person who might be cast in a play to represent their group, what words would be chosen? Would the organization be timid, passive, aggressive, brutal, cutthroat, etc.?

After determining who they are, the group should question whether that personality is the right personality to optimize their success. While being described as a pirate might be exciting, the fighting among the sailors might undermine the overall objectives.

This conversation leads to a discussion of what they might want to change in their behaviors to reflect a more successful personality to the rest of the organization, the community or the world.

In another session, leaders should examine their communications, all of them. Now that they know what personality they want to create, they should ask whether their communications are in line. The issue is not what they say, but the “feeling” they want those communications to produce. They must then be uncompromising in not allowing communications that send a different message. Nasty emails, voice mails etc, are all forbidden. Every communication to the organization should be screened for the feeling it conveys.

A third session would list and examine all key relationships. Associations with labor, vendors, subordinates, and each other, should be scrutinized. Are each of the constituents treated with respect? If not, what is the cost? Keep in mind that vendors, labor, and others who are treated as expendable will naturally look for other opportunities. Action plans to improve all important relationships should be developed.

Consistency
The above suggestions have proven very effective in starting a process of change. The toughest part of fixing an organizational culture is finding consistency. When you remember that human beings naturally gravitate toward jungle law, you begin to see how difficult it will be to align groups for overall effectiveness.

Obviously the most important ingredient will be leadership. Leaders must make their choices carefully, recognizing that they are stewards of the health of the organization. They will have to monitor their own instincts to do battle.

When a client arrives on my doorstep with a game of cutthroat to address, I always ask one very important question. “What is it you would like to have happen as a result of your decisions today?”

After I listen to all of the “get even” fantasies, piled on top of the “I want him to learn a lesson” endings, I ask again.

Until the person says to me that he or she wants to work together with the person effectively as an outcome of his or her next decisions, I know that we are not ready to begin the work of resolving the power game. Once the vision is clear and appropriate, we identify the strategies that will make that vision the most likely outcome.

Consistency in addressing cultural issues will only come when leadership unfailingly asks, and answers, the question of desired outcome. The right answer is an answer of alignment and cooperation. Perhaps then we will begin to see the potential we are now missing due to the distractions of infighting and adversarial relationships.

Toni Lynn Chinoy is the founder of Harlan Evans, Inc. and has spent over twenty years working with executives in multi-national corporations including General Motors, Avon, Microsoft, Godiva, Northwest Airlines, Kellogg and many others. She has written and published multiple texts to help her clients with step-by-step techniques for addressing complicated interactions: a list of her books can be found on her website.

You can visit the website at http://www.harlanevans.com or check her blog at http://www.shortcutstograce.blogspot.com.