CONCLUSION
Wielding Your Personal Power
Honesty is a luxury owned by the powerful. Anyone who has ever watched a small child cower before an irritated parent or heard a junior employee tell a white lie to keep a demanding superior from getting testy realizes this. When you obscure your true intentions and your ability to be truthful feels compromised, it’s because you’ve sprung a power leak on some level.
As you continue to cycle through the four stages of the reconditioning process, you gradually cultivate the strength to own the truth about how your dormant and dominant power genes reflect your relationships with yourself. Whenever you experience a professional challenge, for example, whether it’s being overlooked because you don’t effectively promote yourself or it’s self-sabotage because you aren’t managing your stress, this theme reflects an imbalance of power within yourself. What we do is important, but asking the deeper question of why we are doing it is the gateway to gaining power in the future.
Over the years, I’ve taken some heat for asking people to take a deeper look at power patterns they’d prefer to ignore. People’s minds often engage in elaborate gymnastics to keep them in their comfort zones. An example that comes to mind is a presentation our team did for a prominent women’s networking organization. While most of the room was buzzing with positive energy, I spent the lunch break reassuring a hedge fund manager of Asian American descent that she could risk examining the link between her operating style as a leader and the way she had been conditioned to respond to her father. As we took some one-on-one time to explore the various ways that people reconciled their respect for authority figures with their right to question authority across cultures, she was able to realize that this work isn’t about blame; it’s about freedom.
Years later, I’m still getting e-mails from this successful investor about how understanding her power genes has helped her become a more thoughtful mentor, mother, and even daughter. A self-identified Commander, she shared with me a letter she decided to write to her deceased father. During his life, this man had ruled their family and their family business with an iron fist. In this letter, she praised what his power had accomplished in the international business community. Clarity starts with honesty, and she knew she had to be fair in her assessment of the strengths she had internalized from growing up in her father’s orbit before she could explore the habits she wanted to rework. She then went on write her own “declaration of independence” from the blind spots that had forced her to operate with such a perpetual sense of urgency that she had shut off her access to her women’s intuition. She explained that while she had learned to think fast under pressure, the sheer speed of her thoughts often sent her crashing into her blind spot. For years, she had impatiently terminated promising employees when their learning curve wasn’t fast enough for her. This hurt her business as many of her former research analysts went to work for her competitors. She also found that she was unable to stop obsessing about her work on the weekends, which was causing stress in her marriage. Through developing an awareness of how her power genes influenced her operating style on the job, she was able to gradually develop a more flexible approach to wielding power. As she did this, she stopped seeing herself through her father’s eyes and started tapping into her own feelings. She reported that the more she was able to do this, the more her pattern of oppressively controlling others was beginning to abate. By continuing this work, she told me that her goal was to ease into a more balanced flow between her work and her life.
We Teach What We Need to Learn
This woman’s breakthrough stuck with me because it brought me back to one of my own power turning points. As you will recall, a power turning point is one of those moments where a deeper understanding of what has shaped your power genes in past reactions helps snap you out of automatic pilot in the present.
In the late 1990s, I had received two Lipper Awards for having the top-performing short-term global income fund in the United States. Fueled by a nonstop rush of adrenaline and caffeine, I was working day and night. I was on the trading floor by 5:30 most mornings, and I didn’t head home until well after dark. We were running one of the first mutual funds in America to use derivatives as part of its currency hedging strategy, and my work was my mission.
One morning, as I was nervously pacing behind the traders, one of our brightest new research analysts tapped me on the shoulder and said politely, “Maggie, do you have a minute?”
Jumpy from way too many cups of coffee, I barked back at him, “If it isn’t going to make money for us in the next fifteen minutes, I don’t have the time!” Suddenly, silence descended across our part of the trading floor. Anyone who has ever been on a trading floor knows that silence is a rare occurrence, and when it does happen, it feels a little ominous.
A couple of the traders looked over their shoulders nervously and then hurriedly returned to their screens. I turned to face the analyst I’d just publicly slimed. His face was red, and he was fighting back the emotions welling up inside him. I felt mortified. As I started to apologize, he turned on his heel and raced off the floor so no one else could see that he was justifiably hurt. Much like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Octagon, the trading floor wasn’t the place for feelings in those days.
I tried apologizing, and he tried accepting, but the emotional damage was done. He left our firm six months later and went on to become a well-respected portfolio manager at another organization.
As I tried to come to terms with what had happened that morning, I asked myself, What were you thinking! Guess what I realized? I wasn’t thinking. My mind was running on fear, and brains that run on fear don’t think—they recycle. The only thing happening above my neck that morning was an endless litany of What if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong? I wasn’t aware of anyone else around me that morning, which was why I popped off like a jerk. Computers may be more powerful when they work faster, but that’s not always the case with the human mind. Often, to operate more powerfully, we have to know when to slow down as well as when to speed up.
While this power turning point on the trading floor felt like a career “speed bump” at the time, it taught me numerous lessons about power. One that I hope adds value for you when it comes to understanding our power genes is that what we do under pressure often isn’t as important as why we do it. To the outside observer, and to several of the traders on that morning, I probably appeared to be reacting like a Commander who needed to switch to decaf. However, people who know me well realize that this incident isn’t reflective of my dominant power style. I’m a Pleaser, and on that morning, I was a Pleaser who snapped.
Sometimes a Pleaser will bark like a Commander, and sometimes Commanders roll over and play dead when the people around them don’t expect them to. The key to understanding your power genes comes from grasping how your emotional history plays into your spontaneous reactions. That morning, I was concerned that my investors, my bosses, and everyone else on the planet would withdraw their approval and decide I simply didn’t have the “right stuff” to run that fund. My outburst wasn’t driven by the sense of entitlement we associate with a Commander; it was driven by insecurity. Frankly, if I had been a Commander, I might not have shocked myself and everyone around me by breaking my pattern of being easily approachable.
As you work with the Power Grid, you will learn that it’s important not to make snap judgments about others or about yourself. You can evaluate your power style simply by identifying your dominant behavioral patterns. However, to improve your power patterns, you have to dig deeper to get at the roots of why you systematically operate a certain way under pressure and how this understanding can inform constructive change.
Power Is Contagious
One thing the Power Grid teaches us all is that when you undermine yourself, people around you suffer. As children, we often didn’t have the luxury of choice when dealing with our caregivers. Many of us felt compelled to bury uncomfortable feelings, to please, placate, or even protect the authority figures who raised us. Obediently, many of us suppressed our messier emotions—even from ourselves. The problem is, when we bury uncomfortable feelings, we bury our power of choice right along with them. From that initial moment, we start to establish the power patterns we need to survive emotionally in the first system we have ever known. And we carry these patterns and behaviors with us into adulthood.
As adults, when we are anxious or exhausted, we often feel just as cornered and desperate as we did when we were little kids. This is when automatic pilot takes over. Whether it’s a Pleaser placating a bully or a Commander acting like one, when any of us fall into the grip of our blind spots we often trigger similarly unconscious patterns from those around us.
Fortunately, the process of consciously learning to play to the strengths inherent in your power genes also has a ripple effect. By taking a few seconds to reflect on our first thought before our reactions kick in, we give those around us the room they need to do the same thing. What’s more, as we learn to set a more powerful tone with those around us, we gain the respect of someone far more important than our top clients or even our latest boss. We gain respect for ourselves. If there’s one opinion you want to learn to respect under pressure on the job, it’s your own.
A Deeper Dialogue Around Power
What’s brought you to your current point in your professional journey, and where do you go from here? As you reflect on how your power genes have shaped your professional legacy thus far, it’s important to consider how developing a fuller understanding of your personal history can strengthen your most important business relationship. That, of course, is your relationship with yourself.
Having had the unique opportunity to listen to the personal hopes, dreams, and challenges of people from all levels of the professional spectrum, I’ve had the good fortune to witness many variations on a consistent theme: when you stop trusting yourself, you start losing power. “I knew that was a bad idea, but I did it anyway because . . .” is a common refrain from people who have experienced a power setback. Being able to have a deeper dialogue with others about power can make you a compelling conversationalist. However, being able to have a deeper dialogue with yourself about power can help you chart your own professional destiny rather than waiting for someone else to call the shots for you.
Your career is one of your most prized possessions. As you become increasingly aware of how your power genes influence your operating style on the job, it’s also one of your greatest gifts to others. As you develop a deeper dialogue with yourself around power, your professional tone will begin to empower everyone around you. When we tap into the power that comes from inner acceptance, in a myriad of verbal and nonverbal ways we give those around us the room they need to operate more powerfully as well.
My work with clients around the world has taught me that your power genes shape your behavior, and, over time, your behavior sculpts your overall character on the job and off. My hope is that the Power Grid will help you continue to ask yourself the questions that will empower you to lead with courage, collaborate with clarity, and fortify the self-confidence you need to realize your dreams.