Wish for power
Power and ego are crucial part in any organization, in fact, crucial in any human relation. Power is a strong desire that some psychologist will connect to our childhood and how our needs were treated and the love we received. Even if you can’t relate do the previous sentence, I am sure you encountered in the past people who were struggling for power at work, or abused the power and title that they received and gave it a different meaning from others.
The wish for power at work can be viewed in the decision making process of company, managers or contributors. How much emphasis they put into their point of view being accepted vs putting emphasis on the question in hand and making the right decision. This can be found in small decisions like small design questions or in minor product flows, and in bigger decisions like what technology to use or what features to develop and support.
This struggle for power is common in environments that lacks in providing autonomy for individuals, or ones that have hierarchies where title, rank and seniority have significant importance when making decisions. Many of the times these organizations members don’t know any other way of work, and will adapt easily to ego struggle culture, but most of them will also learn to fit into balanced and healthy environment when giving the opportunity.
Symptoms (Some or all):
- Use of power: loud voice, fist gesture and other power symbols in body language, over talking others during meetings, and more.
- Usage of phrases like: my way or the highway, this is my feature / responsibility / team / company
- Micromanagement in order to feel involved in the details.
- Search for title
- Hiring and promoting of yes-man (and yes-woman ;) )
- Requiring being last approval step, creating an organization bottleneck.
- Changes of organization architecture and decision making process to make sure they are required.
Prescription:
Accepting this wish in ourselves is a good place to start: require ourselves to focus on the unbiased objectives and goals, lead discussions and processes with questions, be open to other alternatives and compare these alternatives using matrices (or other tool you prefer), while supplying clear criterias of consideration.
For manager the challenge is not to use their “so called” power, and give clear objective goals and not specific implementations, in technology aspects and in product aspects. The ongoing process will be translating company needs and goals into numbers, product values and business impact and allowing team members to come up with a solution that meet these requirements and not management specific implementation. While it is challenging, the psychological benefits for the team members and manager can even affect their life after work, also known as life it self…
In an organizational level, using objective criterias can shift culture from power oriented to knowledge oriented, when people will feel their views are considered and appreciate, and when they are acknowledged as smart mature individuals who can make smart decisions using company culture and processes as guidelines.
Remedy Patterns:
- Focus on the why and not the how — “Fall in love with the problem not the solution”
- Encourage autonomy of thinking by creating a work process around challenges and business hypothesis and not specific predefined solutions.
- Practice being open for feedback and other opinions using questions before statements.
- Set objective KPIs to your team to measure your success and the team success.
- Set example and encourage visibility in decision making.
- Document decision making process using tools that enables criterias comparisons.
- Enable everyone in the team that understand the problem or working on it to participate in suggestions process, to eliminate rank over brain.
- Accept all suggestions that meet the criterias of the challenge in hand.
- Supply positive feedback on impact and tests for hypothesis, over measureless solutions.
- Supply professional growth path instead of hierarchy of power and titles.
