Power and Control

The hunger for power is human. Everyone wants to have some measure of control over his or her life; everyone wants to experience a sense of agency. Yet some people, perhaps as a product of their upbringing, have a disproportionate need for control. They might have grown up in a household that was tightly structured, or unusually chaotic; thus they might react strongly in the midst of any social disturbance, having spent many years satisfying their hunger to take control. Their mastery at taming chaos reflects a deeper need for order.

That need, and that mastery, can turn into a source of vulnerability. Consider what can happen when someone with that profile plugs herself into a stressed organizational circuit. Imagine the scene: People are experiencing high levels of disequilibrium as they struggle with difficult issues; there is great chaos and conflict. Rhonda rides in on her white horse, ready and willing (and desperate inside) to take charge of the situation. Indeed, she appears to be a godsend to folks in the organization. And sure enough, she restores order.

This is indeed a blessing initially, because when people in a social system are overwhelmed, they cannot learn properly. Social learning requires some challenge to the social order, but within a productive range of disequilibrium. So someone who can bring a semblance of order to the chaos, lowering the stress to a tolerable level, provides a vital service. Rhonda keeps the pressure cooker from blowing up.

But the hunger for control can lead Rhonda to mistake the means for the end. The person who has a disproportionate need for control, who is too hungry for power, is susceptible to losing sight of the work. Rather than keeping an eye on the ongoing effort required to mobilize progress on the issues, Rhonda is likely to focus on maintaining order as an end unto itself. Returning to the political work of clarifying commitments and facing tough trade-offs would lead back to the chaos she cannot abide. She says to herself, “Everything must be just fine because the situation is under control.” The people in the organization are happy because they prefer calm to distress. All seems well. Unfortunately, Rhonda has now become vulnerable to, and an agent of, the organization’s desire to avoid working its contentious issues.

James Kerasiotes was one of the most successful public managers we have known. He got things done. In the mid-1990s, Kerasiotes’s biggest challenge was managing the Big Dig, the $14.5 billion-plus public works project in Boston designed to move the Central Artery—the highway that splices the city—underground and build a third harbor tunnel to Logan Airport. By all accounts he did an extraordinary job, and for a long time. Then his need to feel in control caught up with him. The project went seriously over budget, but Kerasiotes told no one. He did not even inform the governor, who was running for reelection. He thought he was being noble and doing everyone a favor by controlling the situation and keeping the problem a secret until he could fix it himself.

If he had made the problem known when he first discovered it, the energies of federal, state, and local officials and citizens might have been marshaled to figure out a solution. Instead, the problem came to light as a result of outside scrutiny. Kerasiotes’s management then became the issue, and he was fired. His hunger for control had become the driving purpose, blinding him and preventing him from finding a strategy of sharing the work that would have enabled him to survive with his reputation intact.

Perhaps more than any other institution, the military prepares people to operate in the midst of chaos and to exercise raw power to restore order. It tends to attract people who have a need for control and in fact prepares them to take control. If you are in a newly formed group struggling to organize itself and a military person is present, you may find that the military person steps forward with the skill, and the need, to get things moving. Heroically, when the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 discovered from cell phone conversations over Pennsylvania that hijackers were probably going to crash their plane with the intent of killing many people on the ground, the men who acted to take back control of the plane had backgrounds in the martial arts and the military.²

On a much larger scale, when a government in the midst of political chaos no longer seems able to contain the conflicts and distress within the nation, the military frequently operates as a stabilizing force—the holding environment of last resort. This may prove a most important function that, in a dangerous and emergent situation, might save many lives. But because they are trained to suppress chaos and maintain order, the military may also go too far, suppressing the diversity of views needed to make progress on vital political, economic, and social issues. Containing conflict and imposing order may create some of the conditions for progress, but they are not progress itself.

If you find yourself heroically stepping into the breach to restore order, it is important to remember that the authority you gain is a product of social expectations. To believe it comes from you is an illusion. Don’t let it get to your head. People grant you power because they expect you to provide them with a service. If you lose yourself in relishing the acclaim and power people give you, rather than on providing the services people will need to restore their adaptability, ultimately you jeopardize your own source of authority.

Affirmation and Importance

When you take the lead, some will oppose your views and others will affirm them. As we discussed in chapter 4, there are many good reasons to keep the opposition close. You need to comprehend them, learn from them, challenge them productively, and certainly, be alert to attack. But it is just as important to keep a critical check on the positive feedback you receive. We all need affirmation, but accepting accolades in an undisciplined way can lead to grandiosity, an inflated view of yourself and your cause. People may invest you with magic, and you can begin to think you have it. The higher the level of distress, the greater are people’s hopes and expectations that you can provide deliverance. They may put too much faith in you.

Sometimes there are good strategic reasons to sustain people’s illusions, at least for a while. In times of severe distress, people need to hope against hope. You may have to show more confidence than you personally feel. Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush maintained his poise and provided much-needed reassurance to the nation. He proclaimed that the people behind the raids would be caught and brought to justice, and that while the struggle against terrorism would be long and difficult, we could and should go on with the normal course of our lives. His approval rating nearly doubled. In the meantime, of course, the tough trade-offs lay ahead.

As a senior authority during an organizational crisis, you may decide to withhold some bad news and allow your people to revere you temporarily; this strategy gains a little time if you are uncertain how much conflict they can tolerate and how fast they can take on the challenges ahead. But be careful to keep your thinking clear and strategic, and don’t be lulled into complacency and overconfidence by their affirmation. As quickly as possible, people need to know the truth so that they can wrestle with the issues and the changes they may need to make. Over time, if you pretend to have more answers than you do, reality will catch up with you; ultimately, you risk your credibility by feigning wisdom.

In a similar vein, there may be zealots among your followers, passionate for your causes and eager to use their influence on you. In their exuberance, they may argue that your pacing strategy is an avoidance of the issues. Zealots are terrific at pushing the envelope, but they frequently set the wrong pace by failing to respect the views, stakes, and potential losses of their adversaries. Indeed, one of the great seductions of leadership comes from zealots who play to your need for affirmation and pressure you to move dramatically—and sometimes unwittingly over a cliff. Something like that may have happened to President Bill Clinton when he brought out too much of his health care plan too fast.³

In ancient Rome, the emperors had a man stand close to them at all times whose job was to remind them of their mortality. For an authority figure in an environment of unbridled political cunning and savagery, having someone perform this task was no doubt necessary for day-to-day survival, not to mention success. It is not so different for you as you strive to enact deep, perhaps unwanted, change. We suggest that you find someone to do this job for you—someone not subject to your authority.

The skill of managing any tendency you might have toward grandiosity goes hand in hand with remaining mindful that people see you in your role more than they see you as a person. Indeed, what those in your professional surroundings see is the fulfillment of their goals or, conversely, the disturbing questions you represent. They see not your face but the reflection of their own needs or worries. These dominate their perceptions of you. To believe you have inherent power is a trap, both for you and for them. In the long run, dependency entraps people, and you must control your desire to foster it. Dependence can readily turn into contempt as the group discovers your mortal failings. Indeed, a hunger for importance can make you discount obvious warnings that you are in danger. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when someone warns him from the crowd, “Beware the ides of March,” he discounts the warning, saying, “He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.” Caesar was cocksure of himself because he believed that he, rather than his office, was the center of everybody’s world.⁴

Managing one’s grandiosity means giving up the idea of being the heroic lone warrior who saves the day. People may beg you to play that role; don’t let them seduce you. It robs them of the opportunity to develop their own strengths and settle their own issues. Don’t begin to believe that the problem is yours to carry and solve. If you carry it at all, make certain you do so only for a limited period of time, while people accustom themselves to their need and ability to take responsibility for the challenge.

Pete, the fellow in chapter 4 who was trying to site a facility for the mentally disabled, was defeated in part because his self-importance made him vulnerable. He suffered from a kind of hubris. We asked him why he didn’t see the opposition coming. Here’s what he said: “I thought I had all of the law on our side. I could have won in court. I figured I had the big stick. It was based on my experience in 1992 when neighbors tried to block us from taking over an abandoned army base. We met with them for about a year and had found them implacable. So I tried that route and it hadn’t worked. This time I had all of the political power on my side. It gave me a false sense of invulnerability. The voices I was listening to were saying that this was the right thing to do and the right place to do it. Several people on my board were cautionary, but I never paid attention to their concerns.” Blinded by his impatience and certainty, he listened only to affirming voices and stopped listening to critical ones—and the latter brought him down.

Of course, every human being hungers for importance and affirmation. Every person wants to matter in life, at least to somebody; but some of us are more vulnerable than others in this regard. We include ourselves in this group. We love feeling needed and important. Like many people with this need, we spent many years of our lives learning how to solve problems for people, investing enormous personal energy and discipline in formal and on-the-job education. If we can solve people’s problems, then we become important to them, or so the logic goes.

People with an exaggerated need to be needed scan the horizon for situations offering problems they can solve. They’re not happy unless they are helping someone solve a tough issue, and the harder it is, the more important they feel. Their motto is “You’ve got a tough problem … I’ve got a solution.” In a sense, they are professional scab-pickers (think “consultant”), examining people’s fresh wounds, getting them to bleed a bit more, and then telling them: “We’ve got the remedy!” Make no mistake, these people are often wonderful and make extraordinary contributions. Just be aware that part of what impels them to serve people is their need to matter. Kept in balance, the feeling that you’re on this earth for a reason generates meaning and caring, but this need can easily become a source of vulnerability. Imagine you are someone who needs too badly to be needed, and after coming into an ailing company you make one or two significant fixes. Your people say, “Wow, you’re terrific!” and proceed to latch onto you in a state of uncritical dependency—just what you want! The problem is, you may start to buy into their misperception, believing you’ve got all the answers and can fulfill all sorts of needs. If the people around you aren’t questioning you, and you’ve lost your capacity for self-criticism, an unconscious collusion begins to take place in which the blind lead the blind.

This collusion can potentially take a much more menacing turn. History is replete with charismatic authorities who, with their self-importance and air of certainty, galvanized people looking for answers. Cult figures Jim Jones, David Koresh, along with Osama bin Laden and his band of religious extremists, are but recent and tragic examples. Hitler is the archetype, representing on an almost unimaginable scale the dangerous dynamic in which a suffering and disoriented people, desperate for someone to “know the way,” collude with the grandiosity of a demagogue.

Most people who preach or teach know something of this appeal. There is a strong temptation to believe it when people say, “You’re the One.” Of course, you may indeed have valuable wisdom, but the need to be of special importance creates a dangerous condition, where leading can become misleading.

Some people are very lucky to have a bruising experience that serves to awaken them early in their career, before anyone else gets hurt. Tony Robinson, the senior minister at Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle, describes the experience of how he fell from his pedestal. “When I first started out, I moved to Honolulu to take over the ministry of a church where my predecessor had committed suicide. When I arrived, I asked myself, ‘What do I want to do with this?’ Like many folks who’ve gone to the ministry, however, we have ourselves confused with God. I thought I’d just fix it; instead it fixed me. My experience of this leadership failure led me to deeper clarity of who I was, what I was called to do and what I couldn’t do.” In the same vein, Pete Powell, another minister, quotes standard advice given to many young ministers during their training: “If you act like Christ, you’re going to end up like him.”⁵

Some people may never learn. When Ferdinand Marcos became president of the Philippines in 1965, the people hailed him as a savior. He promised to vanquish poverty and set his country right. But after two decades of political domination in which he continued to see himself as the indispensable source of wisdom and order, the people were still poor (and Mrs. Marcos had all the shoes). Their hungers were fully out of control, and the people finally threw them out of the country in 1986.

Grandiosity sets you up for failure because it isolates you from reality. In particular, you forget the creative role that doubt plays in getting your organization or community to improve. Doubt reveals the parts of reality that you missed. Once you lose your ability to doubt, you see only that which confirms your own competence.

Of course, the experience of going beyond your competence is also a necessary part of leadership. How can you possibly imagine yourself to have sufficient knowledge and skill to tackle the innumerable and ongoing adaptive challenges that will confront your business or community? Indeed, it’s in the nature of adaptive work to be on the frontier of new and complex realities. If all were within your competence, life would be a string of mere technical challenges. But boldness is not the same as bravado. You can move courageously into new terrain even if you’re not convinced that you know what you’re doing. Acknowledging the limits of your competence is a way to stay open to learning as you blaze a trail.

At its peak, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) rivaled IBM in the computer business, employing 120,000 people. Ken Olsen founded the company, but unlike many entrepreneurs, he also succeeded in building the company and leading it to a top position in the marketplace. A deeply generous man in his community, he treated his employees extraordinarily well and experimented with all sorts of personnel policies to increase the creativity, teamwork, and satisfaction of his workforce. Due to his outstanding success, top management looked to Ken to make the key business decisions. He seemed always to know the way and to “do the right thing.” He had gotten it right so many times before.

But his success also led to his downfall. In the early 1980s he predicted, quite reasonably, that nobody would ever want to own a personal computer. There was simply no reason to have one. It would always be more cost effective, he argued, for people to use mainframe computers connected to terminals on their desks. Consequently, he kept DEC out of the personal computer market until it was too late.

Of course, everyone in business makes good and bad predictions and decisions. The vulnerability here was not in Olsen’s decision itself, but in the dependency that he had fostered around him, which meant his decisions remained unchallenged by his colleagues for too long. In contrast, a decade later, Bill Gates made the faulty decision to keep Microsoft out of the internet business, only to make a 180-degree turn shortly thereafter. Watching the rapidly changing computer industry and listening carefully to colleagues, he reversed himself with no permanent damage to his sense of pride, and probably an enhanced reputation due to his nimble change of course.

Finally, when we hunger for recognition and reward in our professional lives, we may put on blinders that can cause us to run roughshod over our personal commitments and values. A close colleague experienced this himself after writing his first book. Having invested ten years in it, he then promoted it around the country, telling people in a variety of ways how much they needed what he had to say. For six months, he taught classes two days a week, went on the road the other days, and gave interviews to newspapers, radio, and television, talking to whoever would listen.

One night he came home from a book promotion trip and his wife suggested that they take a bath together after the kids were in bed. “Oh, wow,” he thought, “a little pleasure after all my hard work running around pushing the book. Do I deserve that or what?”

The kids were washed, brushed, and read to. Husband and wife proceeded to the bathroom. They ran the water, added some wonderful smelling stuff, disrobed, and got in the tub. But his fantasies were dashed before his fanny hit bottom. It turned out, he now understood, that this was not some sensual celebration. This was a meeting.

They spent two hours in that tub, cooling his jets, so to speak. She pointed out to him what had been happening at home and in his office while he was so preoccupied and pleased with what he had done. The world is still spinning along, she said, and if he didn’t pay attention to it, it would be very changed when he decided to step back in.

He resisted her message in every way he knew how. He “listened.” He interpreted her “hypersensitivity to his absence.” He got angry. He acted sweet and seductive. He tried to reason and compromise. He even acted pathetic. His wife refused to get defensive or drawn in, and held steady. During the second hour of the meeting, while the water was getting cold, he began to learn. He began to comprehend what she meant when she said, “You’re really losing yourself. You’re flying around all the time; you’re on this radio program and complaining about not being on that one. You’re in the New York Times, but you complain about not yet getting into the Washington Post. Furthermore, you’re away so much, and so preoccupied with yourself, that you don’t seem really to be present to our young children; and I’m never going to finish my PhD!”

So he began to discover in that bathtub what he calls his “Zone of Insatiability,” that place in him where no matter how much he does and how good it is, it’s never enough. To someone with an exaggerated need to be needed, it was just awful for him to answer the question, “What’s precious and what’s expendable?” Of course, there were many conversations over many months. Our colleague had to choose between his espoused values as a father and a supportive husband, and aspects of his behavior that put his career ahead of those values. He wanted it all. Just as his business started to take off, as the phone began ringing with people saying they needed him, sometimes offering big fees, he was being asked to evaluate what truly mattered. Just as his plane got off the runway, his wife told him, in no uncertain terms, to cool his jets.

He pleaded, “How can you do this to my dream?” And then he realized that she was throwing him a life raft. Lost in his zone of insatiability, his never-ending need for importance and affirmation, he might gain the world and lose himself.

Intimacy and Sexual Pleasure

Human beings need intimacy. We need to be touched and held, emotionally and physically. But some of us are vulnerable in the way we experience this need. We may, for example, have a special sensitivity to loneliness from having lost a parent at an early age, scurrying for solace the moment we get anywhere near that feeling. Or we may be particularly susceptible to rejection, so that whenever we begin to feel forsaken, we suspend good judgment and run to anyone willing to provide acceptance, sometimes conflating sexual with other forms of intimacy.

Through your own experience, you may indeed have become extraordinarily good at providing a holding environment for people, containing the tensions during a process of organizational, political, or social change. You may have developed the great emotional and mental energy required to unite people in the midst of conflicting views and values. Indeed, like the walls of a pressure cooker, the holding environment requires strength and resilience.

But who’s holding you; who’s holding the holder? When you are completely exhausted from being the containing vessel, who will provide you with a place to meet your need for intimacy and release?

In response to our various ways of feeling emotionally strung out, exhausted, “wired,” or simply weary, we sometimes do self-destructive things. Take sex, for example. There’s no question that being the repository of people’s hopes can be arousing, and that this sometimes brings people to behave self-destructively in their sexual lives. Obviously, this may be different for men than for women. When people look to a man as someone special, it sometimes inflates appetite as well as ego. So some men, in this needy state, end up engaging in sexual activity that crosses boundaries inappropriately, doing damage to women (or men), and to themselves, their issues, and the workplace.

Bill Clinton is perhaps the most public example of this in American history. But he’s not in any way unique. We know many similar cases. For just a minute, forget Clinton the president, his policies and positions. Look at him as just another middle-aged guy with a lot of power in a large and important organization. Let’s try to understand him, and his situation at the time, in the terms we have been discussing: a man who hurt a woman, his family, and himself, and almost took down his presidency because he was unable to manage his own hungers.

Bill Clinton spent a good thirty years, through all of his adult life, dreaming about the presidency. And so here he is, in January 1993, entering the White House as president, with a level of personal excitement that would be difficult for most of us to fathom.

Not only is he excited, Clinton has an ambitious agenda: economic recovery, overhauling the health care system, reducing crime, controlling the deficit, reforming the federal government, passing NAFTA, protecting the environment, and more. He is a man of big appetites, and like some other presidents, he makes the mistake of trying to do too much too fast. He treats adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems, overestimates his authority, and miscalculates the strategy and the pacing of change.

After eighteen months, he hits bottom. In the 1994 elections, voters throw enough Democrats out of office to give Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America an extraordinary mandate as well as control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1995, Gingrich seizes the public imagination, and Clinton tries to recover. He insists that as president, he still has “relevance” to public policy. But he can barely get his message out because all eyes are fixed on Gingrich and the Republicans. Clinton’s hopes and dreams are nearly dashed. He just tries to keep from disappearing altogether.

After twelve months of being shunned and ignored by the press and public, Clinton, toward the end of 1995, tries a last-ditch, desperate, all-cards-on-the-table political gamble. He engages with the Republicans in a game of chicken that ends up closing down the government. This is a high-wire act. Clinton cannot know when he places his bet that he can maneuver the Republicans into looking like the bad guys and taking the blame for the shutdown. This is either the end of the line for him, or the beginning of a comeback.

The government shuts down in November 1995, with an unintended side effect. Many of Clinton’s staff, allies, and confidants who serve to keep him disciplined cannot come to work. So, after twelve months at an extreme low in his presidency, staking whatever political capital he has left, Clinton finds himself without the daily anchoring provided by his full complement of colleagues in the West Wing of the White House. Moreover, his primary confidant, his anchor of discipline, Hillary Clinton, happens to be out of town. To keep functioning, the White House, operating with a skeleton crew, brings interns (whose stipends are unaffected by the shutdown) to work in the Oval Office.

Now, try to put yourself in Clinton’s shoes. You’re near the end of your rope, taking the ultimate gamble of your career, with the welfare of many thousands, perhaps even millions, of people at stake. On top of that, there’s nobody around; your guardians are missing. It’s just you, holding this enterprise together in a time of great risk. And your wife, your most important confidant, is out of town.

You likely feel a kind of light-headed unreal excitement, and perhaps below the surface, some nervous desperation. At least you are back in the game, having demonstrated enormous power in holding the Congress of the United States to a standoff. In such a moment, anyone might need the protection Odysseus gave himself. Odysseus knew that his strength would fail him if he heard the alluring call of the Sirens, and that like so many sailors before him, he would plunge into the water to his destruction. He knew that left alone, he would give way to his hungers. So he prepared himself by having his crew strap him tightly to the mast, and then he put wax in their ears so they would not be tempted either. He ordered them to ignore him when he screamed for them to cut him loose. And then he sailed through those waters, heard the sirens singing their amazing song, went berserk as he anticipated he would, ordered his own release, and was saved by his preparation because his crew ignored his gestures and could not hear him yelling. Perhaps Clinton, too, needed to know himself well enough to ask someone to lash him to the mast.

In the next chapter we explore a variety of anchors to keep you from being swept away in uncharted and risky waters. For now, the point is simply to understand more compassionately our hungers and vulnerabilities. In the midst of an intensely exciting and desperate political gamble, with neither his wife nor his closest colleagues around to keep him tied to the mast, Monica Lewinsky walks in and is smitten with the president. He loses whatever discipline he had, gives in to his appetite, and for a moment’s intimacy and delight does incredible damage.

Lewinsky’s behavior, too, is an unmanaged hunger. There are few human dynamics more predictable than the attraction of men and women to someone with power, fame, or status. Nearly all of us feel excitement when we get near someone extraordinary. You don’t need to work near the Oval Office to know how aggressively people vie to be close to someone in a high position.

We know this hunger firsthand, too. We’ve both made fools of ourselves by following the urge to get close to men and women in high places, thus sacrificing some measure of integrity, or at least dignity. Indeed, our guess is that many people know the vulnerability that Monica Lewinsky may have felt: the illusion that our self-worth would be enhanced or confirmed by being close to someone “special.” In its most blatant form, some men bolster their self-esteem by treating women as trophies, and some women do the same. And we all keep souvenirs of those moments with the Big One, whether photos, autographs, or stained dresses. The shelf above Marty’s desk is full of pictures showing him alongside famous people, taken when he was in politics and government. In fact, he remained an autograph hound well into his 60s.

Of course, it’s a mirage. No one’s worth can be defined by the people they know. Yet many people live so deeply embedded in this illusion that they become lost, without a real sense of their own identity. Talk to anyone in their later years who has been there, done that, and they will tell you it was fun and interesting to get close to “special” people, but it cannot fill any emptiness inside.

These dynamics will not change anytime soon. Temptations will continue to challenge our inner discipline and put our anchors to the test. We need to know better the sexually provocative nature of leadership and authority. Clinton is no rarity. Many men in positions of authority, formal and informal, have trouble containing their heightened sexual impluses. It is no accident that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and numerous senators and congressmen in the United States have risked their entire careers on sexual escapades of one sort or another. Mohandas Gandhi was quite open and explicit about his prodigious efforts to control his sexual appetites. The same is likely to be true among many businessmen. The struggle for that inner discipline is a responsibility of leadership and authority. Although it may be that men and women with strong sexual drives seek positions of power, it is probably also true that, as Henry Kissinger put it, power is also a great aphrodisiac. But giving in to the hunger is as sure an indication as any that you are out of control, taking advantage of people, and abusing your position.

Not all men and women have this vulnerability, but we have seen some basic patterns in the stories people have told us. Uncontrolled, the arousal has two basic expressions. People respond to your authority by making advances toward you, or you abuse your power and demand sexual “favors” from them. The advances people make toward you are deceptive, for they are not as sexually attracted to you as they are drawn to your role and power. If you don’t believe us, step out of that role and see if they still find you irresistible. In making sexual demands, you not only violate a trust and destroy a productive working environment, but you also often sideline yourself and your issues. Even if you manage to keep your affairs secret, the workplace will never be the same.

Women have described to us different sexual dynamics. Some women lose themselves in the illusion that being with a man in power confirms their worth. And sometimes, to be near him, they will use their seductive strengths. Yet giving in to these seductions leaves emptiness, damage, and disappointment in their wake.

Power can be a potent aphrodisiac and source of attraction for women just as it is for men. But due to gender norms in our culture, women often feel more threatened than men as they rise to positions of authority. In our still-male-dominated world, promiscuity is viewed differently for each sex: For men, it is frequently seen as a mark of prowess and power; for women, a mark of shame and weakness. Would Clinton have survived if he were a woman? We doubt it. Women in power know that engaging in sexual affairs carries the high risk of undermining their credibility and authority, even if the activity remains a private matter. If a woman lets a man cross that boundary, the authority boundary, she knows she may have lost her authority with that man even if no one else knows about it. And if it becomes common knowledge, she risks losing her authority over others as well. In a primitive sense, if she lets herself “be taken,” her authority among women and men will be discounted.

Consequently, women work hard to maintain the boundary. Every day many professional women devote some of their attention, consciously and unconsciously, to staying mindful and a bit wary of who is coming at them and why. After a while, it becomes part of a woman’s intuition, and she may not even know that she is on guard.

To keep that boundary intact, women have to manage not only how they behave around men, but also how they feel. Men’s and women’s hungers can be aroused when they work intensively together in close quarters. In order to keep their own feelings in check and contain intense relationships at work, women sometimes desexualize themselves. They may take on the role of a daughter, sister, or mother figure, which is safer than being a three-dimensional woman. Other women create a “bubble,” or shell, closing themselves off even from their own feelings, to stay safe.

So, largely as a product of our cultural history and norms, women and men may have mirror images of the same problem. Men more often have the problem of being uncontained. Their hungers, amplified in the workplace, get acted out. Until recently, that harmed women, and a man’s soul and family, but it had few consequences to his position of authority at work, and may even have enhanced his reputation in some quarters.

In contrast, women are rarely rewarded for crossing that line. In response, many women have told us that they become overcontained. Because they expend a bit of energy all day long being mindful and wary, some women find it difficult to disengage from their professional role at the end of the day and let themselves relax into emotional and sexual intimacy.

We know we are treading on turf that, as men, is not our own. Moreover, this terrain is fraught with stereotypes. However, we mention the patterns as women have described them so that perhaps men and women can better understand aspects of our lives generally rendered undiscussable. To allow herself to be touched deeply, emotionally or sexually, a woman has to allow herself to trust. But it is challenging to open up your body and soul if you’ve just spent the whole day on guard. So, many women find it difficult to allow their human needs to be met, to be restored to themselves, even after they leave work and get home.

Many women, when they enter positions of authority and experience being the center of attention, have the same visceral response as many men. Being looked to in a special way, a woman’s hunger for intimacy and sexual pleasure may increase. And just as people are attracted to men in power, people are attracted to women in power. Temptations abound. Some men, in the grip of their own desires, will sense her hungers and act seductively. But though she may find it arousing, the feelings are also a danger signal. Most women heed the warning. Some do not and, by crossing that threshold, damage themselves.

For example, remember our friend Paula in chapter 3, who did not survive her effort at reforming the state agency? The pressure and the position made her vulnerable to her desire for companionship. She took the job at a time in her life when she had significant unmet personal needs for affirmation and intimacy. Life at home was not easy: Her marriage seemed fragile and she felt stressed by the demands of raising two very young children. She also had nagging self-doubts about her professional life, wondering whether she had what it takes to handle a senior position of authority, where “the buck stops here.”

She was not consciously aware of those needs. At least, she certainly was not aware of how those hungers would make her vulnerable. Inadvertently, by trying to meet her needs in inappropriate ways, by creating a too-personal relationship with a professional colleague, she colluded with her opponents, making herself a target for personal criticism. Once she became the issue, the conversation shifted to the nature of her appetites, and away from the important issues she wanted to address.

What Can You Do about It?

How do you learn to manage such visceral hungers? First, know yourself, tell yourself the truth about what you need, and then appropriately honor those human needs. Every human being needs power and control, affirmation and importance, intimacy and sexual pleasure. You cannot lead and stay alive by simply putting a silencer on yourself. Managing your hungers requires knowing your vulnerabilities and taking action to compensate for them. This begins with respecting your hungers. Here are two ideas that may be useful in regard to the need for sexual intimacy. We focus on this particular need because it’s a very common, yet unspoken, area of vulnerability.