What are the 3 types of power?

Recently, I was reminded that there are three types of influence in the workplace. You might not have all three, but you better have some. . . Positional, Relational, Expertise.

I first heard this on a manager-tools.com podcast, but please let me know if you heard of it somewhere else too. It’s a simple way to think through the problem, but perhaps the most elegant. This applies to each of us professionally, and also to the client project.

This is straight-forward. It is tops-down power. This power comes from the title, budget, headcount and the role that you hold. If it were a math formula it would look like this: COO > VP > Director > Mgr > Analyst.

Positional power does work, but it is like a hammer – blunt, short-term and tiresome. It is like telling your child to do something, and when asked “why”, you respond by saying “Because I am your father, and I said so.” It works, but not really the best parenting.

Relational Power

This is the primary currency in large organizations. People work together, help each other out, team-up for success, forgive mistakes, and generally stick together in the organization. People are inter-related. History is shared. In Influence (affiliate link), Robert Cialdini writes about reciprocity and other ways that people persuade each other. Simply put, we are social creatures and relationships matter.

Expertise Power

This is where the individual shines. This is where education, experience and real thinking come together to create expertise. The MBA would direct you to something called the resource-based view (RBV), which states that really competitive advantage comes from things that are: 1) rare, 2) valuable, 3) difficult to imitate. This is also true for people.

Another way to look at it is how Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers (affiliate link) at real expertise takes 10,000 hours of practice. This is based on fascinating research published in HBR called Making of an Expert. As they state, “Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence shows that experts are always made, not born.”

How do consultants accumulate influence?

Whether we know it or not, the consulting process is designed to help you accumulate influence at the client site. These are the three keys to getting leverage and being effective.

1. Kick-off meeting. (Positional)

It is customary to have a kick-off meeting where the executive sponsor formally introduces the consultants to her staff, thereby, “loaning” the consultants some of her authority. This allows the consultants to do work and create change. It’s like being a substitute teacher, it is a privilege and borrowed power.

2. Project plan. (Positional)

Consultants like to stay on the project plan. This serves many practical purposes such as organizing activities and scoping the work, but it also has a more subtle effect of giving control to the rhythm of the project. The due dates create momentum and pressure to finish the work. It’s like being the air traffic controller; you are not flying the planes, but have a lot of say on how the airport runs.

3. Best practices. (Expertise)

Consultants bring some objectivity because they benefit from working at multiple competitors, suppliers and customers. Clients like to have that “outside-in” perspective and know where they stand relatively in performance. “What is best practice?” is a common question from executives. Best practices, maturity models, benchmarks, and survey results are all examples of expertise power.

4. Data. (Expertise)

Many clients actually don’t know where they stand. They don’t know if they are running a 5 minute or a 12 minute mile. They have a “sense” (which is usually right), but are hard-pressed to show the data. Consultants love data for many reasons; it gives the consultants credibility and conviction.

5. Being on-site. (Relational)

Generally, consultants don’t have a lot of relational equity. They might know the “buyer” of the services, but often meet the stakeholders at the kick-off meeting. So, it is critically important to get to know the working-level stakeholders as soon as possible. Collaboration is a two-way street. Build rapport; be professional, friendly, and helpful. Yes, there is some tacit understanding that consultants can help (or sometimes hurt) career prospects.

In my mind, one of the main reasons that consultants are often at the client site Monday-Thursday is for relational reasons. The travel is a beast, but it is an effective way to work with the clients, get to know each other, share meals, and build relationships. The ex-CMO of Deloitte wrote a best-seller on building relationships called Never Eat Alone (affiliate link). Guess what the main point of the book is. . . . . never eat alone.

Caveat

All of this power and influence is temporary, borrowed, and sometimes fragile. The patriarch of McKinsey, Marvin Bower, demanded that his consultants have the highest level of professionalism, integrity, and candor. Agreed.

Define power and the three types of authority.
List Weber’s three types of authority.
Explain why charismatic authority may be unstable in the long run.

Politics refers to the distribution and exercise of power within a society, and polity refers to the political institution through which power is distributed and exercised. In any society, decisions must be made regarding the allocation of resources and other matters. Except perhaps in the simplest societies, specific people and often specific organizations make these decisions. Depending on the society, they sometimes make these decisions solely to benefit themselves and other times make these decisions to benefit the society as a whole. Regardless of who benefits, a central point is this: some individuals and groups have more power than others. Because power is so essential to an understanding of politics, we begin our discussion of politics with a discussion of power.

Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others. Most of us have seen a striking example of raw power when we are driving a car and see a police car in our rearview mirror. At that particular moment, the driver of that car has enormous power over us. We make sure we strictly obey the speed limit and all other driving rules. If, alas, the police car’s lights are flashing, we stop the car, as otherwise we may be in for even bigger trouble. When the officer approaches our car, we ordinarily try to be as polite as possible and pray we do not get a ticket. When you were 16 and your parents told you to be home by midnight or else, your arrival home by this curfew again illustrated the use of power, in this case parental power. If a child in middle school gives her lunch to a bully who threatens her, that again is an example of the use of power, or, in this case, the misuse of power.

These are all vivid examples of power, but the power that social scientists study is both grander and, often, more invisible (Wrong, 1996). Much of it occurs behind the scenes, and scholars continue to debate who is wielding it and for whose benefit they wield it. Many years ago Max Weber (1921/1978), one of the founders of sociology discussed in earlier chapters, distinguished legitimate authority as a special type of power. Legitimate authority (sometimes just called authority), Weber said, is power whose use is considered just and appropriate by those over whom the power is exercised. In short, if a society approves of the exercise of power in a particular way, then that power is also legitimate authority. The example of the police car in our rearview mirrors is an example of legitimate authority.

Weber’s keen insight lay in distinguishing different types of legitimate authority that characterize different types of societies, especially as they evolve from simple to more complex societies. He called these three types traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority. We turn to these now.

As the name implies, traditional authority is power that is rooted in traditional, or long-standing, beliefs and practices of a society. It exists and is assigned to particular individuals because of that society’s customs and traditions. Individuals enjoy traditional authority for at least one of two reasons. The first is inheritance, as certain individuals are granted traditional authority because they are the children or other relatives of people who already exercise traditional authority. The second reason individuals enjoy traditional authority is more religious: their societies believe they are anointed by God or the gods, depending on the society’s religious beliefs, to lead their society. Traditional authority is common in many preindustrial societies, where tradition and custom are so important, but also in more modern monarchies (discussed shortly), where a king, queen, or prince enjoys power because she or he comes from a royal family.

Traditional authority is granted to individuals regardless of their qualifications. They do not have to possess any special skills to receive and wield their authority, as their claim to it is based solely on their bloodline or supposed divine designation. An individual granted traditional authority can be intelligent or stupid, fair or arbitrary, and exciting or boring but receives the authority just the same because of custom and tradition. As not all individuals granted traditional authority are particularly well qualified to use it, societies governed by traditional authority sometimes find that individuals bestowed it are not always up to the job.

If traditional authority derives from custom and tradition, rational-legal authority derives from law and is based on a belief in the legitimacy of a society’s laws and rules and in the right of leaders to act under these rules to make decisions and set policy. This form of authority is a hallmark of modern democracies, where power is given to people elected by voters, and the rules for wielding that power are usually set forth in a constitution, a charter, or another written document. Whereas traditional authority resides in an individual because of inheritance or divine designation, rational-legal authority resides in the office that an individual fills, not in the individual per se. The authority of the president of the United States thus resides in the office of the presidency, not in the individual who happens to be president. When that individual leaves office, authority transfers to the next president. This transfer is usually smooth and stable, and one of the marvels of democracy is that officeholders are replaced in elections without revolutions having to be necessary. We might not have voted for the person who wins the presidency, but we accept that person’s authority as our president when he (so far it has always been a “he”) assumes office.

Rational-legal authority helps ensure an orderly transfer of power in a time of crisis. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as the next president. When Richard Nixon resigned his office in disgrace in 1974 because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Vice President Gerald Ford (who himself had become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned because of financial corruption) became president. Because the U.S. Constitution provided for the transfer of power when the presidency was vacant, and because U.S. leaders and members of the public accept the authority of the Constitution on these and so many other matters, the transfer of power in 1963 and 1974 was smooth and orderly.

Charismatic authority stems from an individual’s extraordinary personal qualities and from that individual’s hold over followers because of these qualities. Such charismatic individuals may exercise authority over a whole society or only a specific group within a larger society. They can exercise authority for good and for bad, as this brief list of charismatic leaders indicates: Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha. Each of these individuals had extraordinary personal qualities that led their followers to admire them and to follow their orders or requests for action.

Charismatic authority can reside in a person who came to a position of leadership because of traditional or rational-legal authority. Over the centuries, several kings and queens of England and other European nations were charismatic individuals as well (while some were far from charismatic). A few U.S. presidents—Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Reagan, and, for all his faults, even Clinton—also were charismatic, and much of their popularity stemmed from various personal qualities that attracted the public and sometimes even the press. Ronald Reagan, for example, was often called “the Teflon president,” because he was so loved by much of the public that accusations of ineptitude or malfeasance did not stick to him (Lanoue, 1988).

Weber emphasized that charismatic authority in its pure form (i.e., when authority resides in someone solely because of the person’s charisma and not because the person also has traditional or rational-legal authority) is less stable than traditional authority or rational-legal authority. The reason for this is simple: once charismatic leaders die, their authority dies as well. Although a charismatic leader’s example may continue to inspire people long after the leader dies, it is difficult for another leader to come along and command people’s devotion as intensely. After the deaths of all the charismatic leaders named in the preceding paragraph, no one came close to replacing them in the hearts and minds of their followers.

Because charismatic leaders recognize that their eventual death may well undermine the nation or cause they represent, they often designate a replacement leader, who they hope will also have charismatic qualities. This new leader may be a grown child of the charismatic leader or someone else the leader knows and trusts. The danger, of course, is that any new leaders will lack sufficient charisma to have their authority accepted by the followers of the original charismatic leader. For this reason, Weber recognized that charismatic authority ultimately becomes more stable when it is evolves into traditional or rational-legal authority. Transformation into traditional authority can happen when charismatic leaders’ authority becomes accepted as residing in their bloodlines, so that their authority passes to their children and then to their grandchildren. Transformation into rational-legal authority occurs when a society ruled by a charismatic leader develops the rules and bureaucratic structures that we associate with a government. Weber used the term routinization of charisma to refer to the transformation of charismatic authority in either of these ways.

Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others.
According to Max Weber, the three types of legitimate authority are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic.
Charismatic authority is relatively unstable because the authority held by a charismatic leader may not easily extend to anyone else after the leader dies.

References

Lanoue, D. J. (1988). From Camelot to the teflon president: Economics and presidential popularaity since 1960. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1921).

Wrong, D. H. (1996). Power: Its forms, bases, and uses. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.