Clout

Finding and Using Power at Work

E. Bolland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137350589
• eBook ISBN: 9781137348210
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Matemáticas empresariales

There is one major factor that explains business actions that has thus far escaped thorough exploration. That factor is clout, or as it is more broadly understood, power. Those with clout in the business organizations make the decisions and influence what the business does. Yet the origins and uses of clout are hidden. Everyone wants to know more about this inner world as clout is still largely unrecognized in studies of corporate culture. With Clout, the first researched-based book on the topic, Bolland fills this void. He systematically analyses the subject and answers the many questions about this aspect of business life, including exploring what organization clout is, how it has evolved, how it is manifested, how it is used and how it relates to other aspects of business organizations. Readers will be able to apply findings to their own career, and students will gain a tested framework for understanding the importance of this subject.

CHAPTER 1

A Framework for Clout

One of the more understandable aspects of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a notoriously nonunderstandable work, is that it begins as it ends with “Finnegan begin again,” a memorable and melodic device. In much more prosaic terms, this book too starts with an ending. I have been in search of a richer, more accurate examination of power in the workplace. That examination included an Internet-based survey of over 700 staff and supervisory personnel, the incorporation of other survey research on power in different industries, interviews with seven executives, and other ways of learning about power. Together with about 30 years of “field work” as an observer and participant in the process of organizations and power, an experience without much nobility (since it was observational not participatory) but an exercise of bountiful diligence, I have woven a multicolored carpet from the subject. I will not claim to be a power figure, but I am a power observer and analyst. The analysis that derived from the research and personal participation helped complete the depiction of power. And the depiction becomes a model of power, developed over the course of the book and described in basic terms at its close. That is how our Finnegan begins again.

Modeling Power

Our start is with a model of power. Why a model? Why not just plunge into the subject itself? Why not be much more direct to pose these questions and enumerate the answers, one by one, instead of putting together a diagram? Doesn’t a model impede the delivery of the answers by taking up time? These are questions with merit and they deserve a response.

A model may, in fact, not be necessary There are situations that are quite simple, as in elementary mathematics where a single number is the only answer. A model may not be necessary if the solution or the result is not important, say, in sports among friends like a pick-up basketball game. As a point of fact, many of the games we play are more enjoyable if there is randomness to them and not a modeled outcome in which the results are predictable, as when two brothers have played tennis with one another over many years and the better player is always better.

By and large though, our habitation on Earth is marked by complex and highly socialized interactions that occur in circumstances of high uncertainty and the intrusion of new and disquieting facts we never realized. We live somewhere between chaos and Groundhog Day, the movie. We slog more in the direction of knowing our environment, but it is a slog, not a slingshot. Such is a condition of our effort.

Models help move us toward greater predictability if they are soundly constructed and are also, in the words of the scientist, “elegant” in their explanatory power, or in our consideration, their power to explain power. Something can be said for the artistry of elegant modeling when it leaps beyond equations and forms a constellation in the skies.

The answer to why a model is useful comes in many ways. First of all, a model allows us to organize the findings, to give weight and texture to them, and to make a pattern out of the discovery of the facts of workplace power, the specific study here. A model can show interrelationships among the findings, perhaps in the form of the following: if this happens, then this is the result.

Broadly defined, a model is a representation of reality. It can show how something works, at least under certain circumstances. Models that are verified through experimentation are taken as useful theory unless otherwise disproven. That is the approach of science and that approach is itself “modeled” by the social sciences.

In the social sciences, which is where this study of power in work setting dwells, there are special difficulties in building models. When humans and their activities are part of the model, complications are introduced. Variance in human populations is well known and accepted. Experimental results can then vary quite a bit and it is difficult to trace results back to a specific casual stream.

This is not the same in constructing models in the physical sciences. In the physical sciences, people are not there to introduce all kinds of variation in the formulation of models. The experiment that leads to the model can be planned and executed in more controlled settings, such as a laboratory where nuisance variables cannot easily intrude.

In spite of this, the social sciences embrace model building extensively. Psychology, sociology, and their progeny of subfields are but a few examples of disciplines that use model building. This happens because the scientific method and its attendant model building have led to a considerable understanding of the physical universe. The hope is that the same will be true in the social sciences.

Second, models compete against one another, and this is a benefit. Running the prospective models (and this can range from a few to a multitude) through the gauntlet of scrutiny results in only a few entering the realm of plausibility. The final competitors, like Watson and Crick versus Pauling on the structure of DNA have had some level of experimental verification. The other models have been left far behind. It is a kind of Spenserian survival-of-the-fittest process that goes on as investigators find deficiencies or validations of the competitors. The benefit is that we are mostly exposed to only the plausible, not the wildly possible theories.

Third, without a model, we are at a loss to explain, even in the simplest terms, the way something works. With it, we at least have the basis for affirmation or refutation. We have something to pass judgment on with a model. In this way, the model is a kind of straw horse, a picture of reality that is subject to affirmation, refutation, or modification. As an example of the last of these results, the model of atomic structure was vastly modified and made much more complex by the discoveries of high energy physics.

Stephan Hawking has said that, at least at the conceptual level, many people other than physicists could understand the essence of cosmology as they are presented as models without understanding the equations that tie the model together. That statement by Hawking demonstrates the value of a model as a means of communicating concepts. It is something we may be able to picture ourselves and then transfer that picture to others. To maximize the popularization of a model, it should be simple, but not too simple. If it is too simple, it is suspect. Then you have the problem of singular and absolute causation, for example, religion has an answer but a nonverifiable one. Science as a whole heads to discovery on the basis of observation and experimentation. Social science emulates this approach and is relentless in its rigor, but has not found the Keys to the Kingdom. Nonetheless, those social scientists who practice modeling are determined and sometimes destined to find the truth.

Fourth, the model, in this case the model of how power works at work, can be depicted in graphic form. Simple diagrams help us as we learn, and what we seem to retain the most are depictions like the Venn diagram in set theory or the double helix structure of the DNA. The model appeals to visually oriented thinkers by adding another dimension to words and equations.

Fifth, a model, such as a model of workplace power, affords us the opportunity to look from the outside in, to take a holistic look at the place where work happens. Under this condition, we are as expert watchmen, taking in not just the inner movement but the face and encasement. We see the watch as it is being worn, where it is being taken, and how it is being used. Then, we can see the watch not just at the tinker’s level but the designer’s level.

Sixth, the model can result in risk reduction. All major aircraft firms now model performance on prospective aircraft before building flying prototypes. The Boeing 767 was almost entirely designed on computer before the first prototype left the ground at Everett Field in Washington. Flight conditions that were created by the computer were applied to the computer-modeled aircraft, and the resulting performance was assessed without breaking an actual wing in an actual flying situation. Risk was reduced and costs avoided with this kind of modeling.

Seventh, and most importantly, the model can lay the path to a solution instead of impeding a solution. The model can mobilize intellectual energy to form a depiction of reality that is based on multidisciplinary input, all directed at a shared and agreed upon model. The model is something that can be tinkered with by others. It can be passed on to other work groups with different specialties in the same way as sculptors model their artistic vision in clay and then pass it to bronze foundry specialists who, in turn, make a mold, then a thin wax form in which other specialists pour molten bronze. The final cast piece, having gone through two metamorphoses, then becomes the finished statue that resides in perpetuity. All along the route, the specialists have made corrections to conform to the original vision.

For these reasons, it is entirely appropriate to create a model of power where we work. This is a subject that has not been studied in depth. It is also important because we spend about one-sixth of our conscious life at work generating the means to support the other five-sixths. It affects nearly all from early adulthood to retirement, a span of two generations. Very few people avoid working with others. Those unable to work and those unwilling do so, but even the sole owner of a small firm deals with others.

Going through the modeling process is not a waste of time if the model gets us closer to understanding this subject. A simple enumeration of findings is insufficient to show the complexities of power. The model may take time to develop but the time investment is minor compared to the gain in understanding. The models presented here only took a few hours each after the background research was done.

Restricting this exploration of power to work lets us grab ahold of it, but there are still problems with such a broad concept. One difficulty in posing a model of power is that power itself is a term of forced singularity. It is a singular noun. It is a single word itself, not linked to any particular context; it is something vague in its semantic isolation. We will refer to power in various contexts, such as the “use of power,” the “types of power,” to render meaning to the word, but it still remains a word, subject to the vagaries of interpretation. I have found that there is a reluctance to even use the word “power,” chiefly among higher-level executives who talk about “influence” as a substitute term. Hiding a term enhances its mystique but detracts from it commonality and acceptance. As we go on, there will be an attempt to clarify the term of power and the context in which it is used.

For our purposes, the model of power offered here is both generalized and constrained. It is generalized in the sense that it encompasses the forms of personal power at work in very different settings, from single proprietorships to Fortune 500 companies and constrained in the sense that it does not go beyond work. This does pose difficulties. The unit of analysis in this book is people at work, but power does not happen just at work. It happens within families, in government, in education, in churches, in clubs, in organizations, in sports, and among friends. In fact, in this larger sphere, the exercise and consequences of power are patently manifest and utterly pervasive.

Limiting this exploration to our workaday life makes this a more modest exercise than looking at personal power as a whole. On the other hand, it lets us control the subject. The regimen of work gives us the gift (as a researcher) of accessing most of the adult population engaged in a collective effort to produce valued products and services under usually ordered policies, procedures, goals, and strategies. At least we have a proven beaker to swirl around and observe what happens to the power concoction. The hope is that the methodologies employed in this effort and the findings from it may be able to be employed in broader-based examinations of power in other areas of life. But that is something beyond these pages.

Evolution of Models of Power

This book mainly connects the concepts of power and work. In doing so, it delves into territory not well explored. There is no omnibus history of power itself, but there is a history of work and it is from this history that power will be extracted as a subject.

Let’s go back to the Paleolithic Age, to a cave where pale yellow flames and pulsating orange embers cast shadows on cold walls. On these walls, visions of a world abundant with game were painted. Cave walls were both protection and inspiration. The shadows likely inspired a vision of something better for Stone Age humanity. Certainly some saw, in Tennyson’s terms, a world of what ought to be not a world of what is. Surely, some looked beyond the food that was gathered and imagined a world of cultivation. Because they did, humanity prevailed.

We know now that humans originated in Africa and ventured in all directions, learning about changing climates and other stunning realities of the world. Think about life moving from the sub-Saharan plains to the Alps. Already armed with the concepts of seasonality, varied land conditions, and the growing of edible plants, they adapted to their changing environment. Since travel was not possible without food and there was risk that the unknown would provide neither food nor water, sustenance had to be carried. So food had to be planned ahead. In that planning lurk the elements of vision for the future. And vision itself is a form of power. Those with the vision prompted the move to new territory, to plant instead of harvest.

If your world is a struggle for survival, then seeing anything beyond that immediate world is being a visionary. The time available for visioning was scant because of all the tasks needed for survival, yet it was done. It had to be.

Among early people, the surviving adults had influence over others because of their seniority, a source of power, described in chapter 3 along with the other forms of power. Seniority also meant, for early man, acquisition of skills that could be utilized and passed on to children. This too, is described in chapter 3 as a power along with the other, more modern forms of power.

Early civilizations had other forms of power too. For social groups so fixed on survival, the invention of anything useful could have been a source of power. Anthropology itself is the study of the human being and our evolution. This evolution and the lesser-known but growing manifestations of power pave the way for an ordered and very socialized world. Some of the forms, like political power, emerged later and other forms, such a magic, emerged early and then died out.

Magic itself was a power. We don’t know when that started but practitioners with superior observational powers over human reactions could watch audience eyes closely and divert attention away from the source of the deception to some innocuous hand play and then return to the source to claim magic, not clever manipulation was at work. There was also magic in prediction. The magic maker could say what would happen (or simply produce an unexpected result) and cause onlookers to think that that individual had the power to make it happen alone. That is especially ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   A Framework for Clout
• 2   Evidence from the Trenches and Uncovering Power
• 3   The Eight Bases of Power
• 4   Frontline Views on Power
• 5   Executives on Power
• 6   Problematic, Disruptive Power and Ethics
• 7   Your Path to Power
• 8   Conclusions
• 9   Future of Power
• Index