♥ Share this episode with someone you think will benefit from it. ♥
♥ Leave a review at Lovethepodcast.com/BusinessConfidential ♥
What You’ll Discover About Positional Power:
* How positional power can promote an us-vs-them mentality
* How emotional intelligence supplements and strengthens positional power
* The blind spots positional power creates that threaten high employee engagement
* Why leaders serious about high employee engagement can’t hide behind excuses of political correctness, wokeness and free speech
* Why it’s incumbent on those with positional power to keep the employee-employer relationship on track
* And much more.
Host Hanna Hasl-Kelchner
Hanna Hasl-Kelchner is a champion for fairness in the workplace. She helps organizations gain clarity to make more informed decisions by reducing complex concepts into sensible, bite size pieces. Hanna accomplishes this as a business strategist and through her writing, speaking, consulting, and popular syndicated podcast, Business Confidential Now.
Hanna brings a unique perspective to the table, growing up in an entrepreneurial family and running a business before age 30 and blending it with decades practicing business law. Those experiences enabled her to successfully bridge the gap between the two disciplines during her career as a trusted advisor to influential decision makers ranging from startups to the S&P 500, Big Tobacco, and the White House. She has also been on the faculty at two top-ranked MBA programs: The Duke University Fuqua School of Management and the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.
Contact Hanna and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Her new book Seeking Fairness at Work is now available on Amazon.
Part 1: Unveiling the Truth: Workplace Fairness Myths vs Reality
Part 2: The Key to Retaining Top Talent: A Fair Work Environment
Part 3: Why Low Employee Engagement is Not an Employee Problem
Part 4: 5 Toxic Leadership Trends that Kill High Employee Engagement
_____
How to Keep Positional Power From Being a Huge Achille’s Heel
Positional power is one of the most misunderstood and misused concepts in business. It’s also why positional power can be an organization’s Achilles heel. Sounds like heresy. Stay tuned. We’re going to talk about that.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential. Now I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. And today we’re going to continue with part five of my five part sneak preview of my new book, Seeking Fairness at Work Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention, and Satisfaction. If you missed the first four episodes of that series, no worries. I have links to them in the show notes, and I’m going to give you a quick recap.
In part one, Unveiling the Truth, I explained how fairness is not an unreasonable expectation, how even as children, we get it, and as adults, the ability to recognize unfairness or experience it never leaves us. We know it when we see it. It’s something we expect in all of our relationships, including the workplace, the employer employee relationship. Why? Because relationships are based on an implied social contract.
And that brought me to part two, because if we want more than a transactional relationship and want to build trust so that we have more cooperation and enthusiasm, we need good faith and fair dealing in our relationships. That’s not wishful thinking, because every contract, even implied social contracts, include the covenants of good faith and fair dealing, which basically mean we need to play nice. We’re obligated.
We have reasonable expectation of honesty and safety, as well as the need for reasonable support to achieve our relationship goals in the workplace. That means management supplying support that lets employees do their best work.
In part three, we talked about how even though managers have positional power to set the rules, employees still have expectations under the implied social contract. So when they don’t experience honesty, safety, or reasonable support, it negatively affects their motivation to go above and beyond and deliver that high engagement. In other words, low engagement is a reaction to the organization’s culture.
And finally, last week in part four, we talked about the five most common toxic leadership behaviors managers don’t even realize they’re doing most of the time, how those unwritten rules become cultural norms that nobody wants to talk about out loud, how organizations excuse uncivil conduct from certain people in power, or turn a blind eye to open secrets, creating double standards and treating those leaders as sacred cows.
Which, of course, brings us to the role of positional power in the employee engagement equation today. Power is one of those touchy subjects, but given its role in the norms, nobody wants to talk about, and those toxic leadership behaviors that tank employee engagement, we really don’t have much choice. Our understanding of fairness at work would be really incomplete if that role were ignored.
Unfortunately, research finds that our perceptions of power are dogged by three harmful fallacies that can quickly become a vulnerability and an Achilles heel if it’s not managed carefully. The first is the idea and belief that power, once it’s acquired, is somehow permanently owned. Second, the assumption that power is purely positional, exclusive to those with rank and formal authority, so that once you achieve that rank and authority, it’s yours forever. And third, the notion that power is somehow inherently dirty, acquired only through improper means.
The reality, however, is that power is neither inherently good or bad. It’s simply the ability to affect change. The more powerful someone is, the more they can achieve. But we all only have 24 hours in a day, and we can’t be experts in everything. We expand our influence and reach by successfully engaging and working through others.
When we talk about influence, we just can’t begin and end the conversation with positional power because power really can’t be permanently owned. Think about it. Employees are never more engaged than on their first day at a new job. It’s only after the new hires discover those norms nobody wants to talk about that their enthusiasm drops faster than a new car depreciates, leaving the dealership.
Management’s positional power during that time hasn’t changed, but their influence has because of the norms they’ve enabled and condoned that turn people off because they’re unfair. They somehow violate the covenants of good faith and fair dealing that we talked about last week.
Even the phrase low employee engagement frames the problem in a way that respects the privilege of power by putting the burden on employees to shape up and obey. It reminds me of those bumper stickers that I’ve seen that say, the beatings will continue until morale improves. The focus is always on fixing employees, because deference to power automatically gives leaders the benefit of the doubt.
I remember one vice president told me that she knew she had “made it” when she discovered senior management would take her word over her direct reports’. If the goal is really higher employee engagement, that’s a serious problem, because embracing this power paradigm means you’re separating the workforce into us versus them groups.
It lionizes the powerful and it discourages honest communication by those who have less power because their desire for belonging and job security promotes conformance. They bow down. If you’re in charge, that may make you happy, but you’re not going to get their best work and best thinking if they’re being diminished. We need bridges of cooperation, of respect and a sense of belonging, not ostracism, not making them “other.”
What all of this means for executives, managers and entrepreneurs is that how power is recognized, appreciated and exercised is pivotal to whether the promise of high employee engagement is achievable, and why a deeper understanding of power is critical to demystifying unfairness at work.
Now, look, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting managers give up power to make things equal. Their status and privilege associated with positional power. And I respect the sacrifices you made to climb the corporate ladder or launch a business. It’s a lot of work. It’s hard work.
But things change once you get more positional power. And if you want a highly engaged workforce, it’s important to be aware of them. New managers whose careers, up until their promotion, were focused solely on managing up the chain of command. You now have a new constituency: the people who report to you.
Despite your good intentions, managing direct reports requires different competencies than scrambling up the organizational chart or posting an open for business sign. It calls for soft skills or emotional intelligence to supplement your existing industry and business expertise.
Those soft skills are vitally important because the ability to honestly connect with people expands rather than diminishes a leader’s sphere of influence and overall power, because you’re able to get more work successfully done through others.
Best of all, when that authority stems from robust workplace relationships grounded in mutual respect, and healthy boundaries exist, that authority and power is more enduring than positional power –those command and control power plays because it builds trust, and trust is what makes saying “I’m sorry” or “I didn’t mean that’s how it sounded” believable when hiccups happen. And they will happen because we’re all human and we all make mistakes.
At some point in time, positional power becomes an Achilles heel when managers assume trust is part of their positional power, that it’s a package deal, that it doesn’t need to be earned or maintained. And that’s simply not true. It does. Trust needs to be demonstrated. It is not a fixed commodity. It’s an emotional connection based on perceptions of honesty, safety, and respect.
Employees can, for example, respect a title that’s associated with positional power. But if the person holding that title doesn’t act fairly, they won’t trust the person in that seat. There’s simply no trust without fairness. And the less trust you have, the less employee engagement and productivity.
Earning trust is all about connection, how we communicate. And it’s powerful in a real bottom line kind of way. Stephen M.R. Covey quantified how communications can generate a trust dividend or tax in his book The Speed of Trust. If the name Covey sounds familiar, you’ve probably heard of the book Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. That’s Stephen Covey too. But The Speed of Trust was written by his son.
Anyhow, the younger Covey found that positive, collaborative, and uplifting communications actually accelerate business strategy and generate a 20% productivity dividend. He also found that world class communications boosted that dividend to 40%, thanks to the energy of highly engaged employees.
But in contrast, organizations that had guarded communications in other words, low trust or intense micromanagement, verbal, emotional, physical abuse, in other words, zero trust (think about different degrees of the norms nobody wants to talk about), when those factors exist organizations experience a 60 to 80% trust tax. It illustrates just how hard it is to get things done when trust runs dry, and why organizations with such cultures complain about low employee engagement.
But to really understand how the Achilles heel of positional power gets so calloused, it’s helpful to look at how power changes people who acquire positional authority.
And no, I’m not talking about that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” saying. I truly believe that that only applies to a small group of people, and that most folks with positional power are good people who really do want to do the right thing. But research shows power changes people in ways they may not realize.
People in authority are often unaware of how their position impacts what employees here and take away from a conversation, and how employees give meaning to even innocent comments. That’s how rumors get started, right?
You know, a supervisor might say, oh, isn’t that great? Somebody brought donuts in. And next thing you know, those things are popping up all over the place, and all they wanted to do was to acknowledge somebody’s generosity, not encourage these calorie bombs. Things get misconstrued when they’re spoken by somebody higher up.
Connecting with an audience is the responsibility of the speaker, not the listener. According to Alan Alda, you might know him as the Emmy Award winning actor in his famous role as Hawkeye Pierce in the classic TV show M*A*S*H. Well, what you may not know about him is his passionate dedication to the art and science of relating and communicating. He founded the center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, and the primary mission there is to help scientists explain their work in a way the public can easily grasp and understand.
He wrote a wonderful book called if I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on My Face? And he writes that communications happen when the listener “gets it,” not merely hears it. And I just love the name of that book. I mean, you could almost hear his voice and see his face saying, I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on My Face? It’s great.
But a key point he makes in this book is that it’s up to us to make sure our message is truly heard, and doing that means watching and interpreting our audience’s reaction. It requires empathy and awareness.
Unfortunately, research shows that even when somebody has the best of intentions, positional power can literally go to their head. It can translate into confidence that magnifies and amplifies the thoughts of the people more powerful, confirming their belief in being more right than anyone else we probably all encountered. You know that phenomenon in some form or another, usually the person who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they’re really not.
That kind of confidence contributes to narratives of exceptionalism according to the author of The Power Paradox, giving managers permission to collaborate less with others. And add to that, another downside is that it makes people less inhibited. It activates their drive, energy and emotion, giving them freedom to express themselves in ways that are less attuned to how their behavior impacts or hurts others.
That unbridled freedom of expression is particularly troublesome because it creates that anything goes spirit that contributes to incivility and disrespect, that trickles down into workplace norms nobody wants to talk about, because it also reveals internal biases and values that betray good faith and fair dealing. It represents an empathy deficit that can also send moral compasses spinning out of control. When management reduces everything to numbers and focuses exclusively on the bottom line.
Now, some people who condone that type of corrosive conduct in the name of authenticity say, “well, that’s just the way so and so is.” They normalize polarizing behavior and they embed it in the workplace culture when they do that. It’s a tactic that’s usually used to preserve selfishness and the right to say whatever somebody wants, regardless of whether it insults, offends, or intimidates anyone. And most important, to be able to say it without accountability.
When it’s allowed to happen without consequence, those excuses become entitlements that eclipse every other value in the organization’s mission statement. It is so misdirected if the goal is to increase employee engagement. And that’s why I want to take a few minutes to expose the political correctness, wokeness, and free speech excuses that people use to defend and rationalize such disrespectful behavior. I want to expose them for the little fig leaves they are. Because we see you.
Words matter, and I appreciate how easy it is to get defensive when somebody challenges our self-awareness of what employees see and hear. Most of us think we’re already communicating pretty good. We are in our own head about why we do certain things our words, our actions. They’re our friends. We love our friends. We don’t want to believe they could hurt anyone because we mean well. Besides, it’s our truth and nobody wants to be censored.
Take that controversy over Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays. The political correctness police would have you believe that one phrase is better than another. Say the wrong thing and we’re horrible people. It ticks us off. And when we’re angry or annoyed, it lowers our ability to trust regardless of where we stand in that debate. When it comes to attacking political correctness or wokeness, each side views the other as being unreasonable and maybe even “the enemy.”
Now add to that the belief that we’re right, doubling down instead of backing down, and the situation just spirals out of control. So that when we use political correctness or wokeness as an excuse to say whatever we want we’re really creating a no win scenario that only drives us further apart. So please, let’s stop for a minute and set that emotional baggage down and clear the air once and for all.
The definition of political correctness is really nothing more than the avoidance of expressions or actions that insult, exclude, or disadvantage people who are already experiencing social difficulty or discrimination.
Has that phrase been misused? Absolutely. But the objective is to do no harm, to not make things worse by compounding someone else’s existing social burden or minimizing their lived experiences by making them an object of disrespect. The essence of political correctness dovetails with our need for inclusion and belonging, our shared humanity.
Unfortunately, it’s often been used as a power play to exclude and demonize others. We see it all over the news every day, and it’s exhausting. And when that happens in the workplace, that’s exhausting too.
Now, wokeness is another phrase that’s heavily misused and politicized as a rallying cry in culture wars. I have three words for that: Cut. It. Out.
Wokeness is about awareness, plain and simple, and more specifically about awareness of racism and inequality. It’s similar to political correctness in that it comes from a place of empathy and tolerance for people who are not like us. The goal is to promote respect and sidestep conflicts based on stereotypes and other false assumptions that contribute to bias. The unifying concept is empathy for our shared humanity.
Some people blur the concept of empathy and sympathy. They’re really different and important ways. Empathy is about seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes, about reading their emotions, and walking a mile in their shoes as Elvis Presley would say, it’s about being open minded. Sympathy, on the other hand, is viewing their situation only through our own lens.
Now, I appreciate how Happy Holidays sounds more inclusive than Merry Christmas, which only refers to a Christian tradition. Being more encompassing conveys a sense of belonging and kinship for the joy of these celebrations, regardless of how someone personally observes them.
But if you know your audience is Christian, they may prefer Merry Christmas the same way someone who’s Jewish would prefer Happy Hanukkah and so forth. Isn’t that just a touch kinder, more thoughtful, respectful because you’re acknowledging and respecting that person’s faith? You’re saying, I see you, I hear you, I respect you.
Now, of course, Happy Holidays is an easy default, but one size solutions are rarely as satisfying as customized ones. If you ever tried on one of those one size fits all shirts, yeah, they’re functional, but they’re not flattering. Tailoring improves the fit the same way awareness and thoughtfulness improves relationships. If we’re tone deaf, we get it wrong. We can look pretty stupid and out of touch. Little things mean a lot, and they can tarnish our reputation, even if we think we’re only exercising our right to free speech.
Oh yeah, what about free speech? That gets tossed around a lot these days, and I’m so glad you’re going there, because I want to go there with you. Free speech is another one of those emotionally charged topics that jams our awareness radar and contributes to suboptimal exchanges and connections.
Let me explain. The First Amendment right to free speech in the US is not an absolute right. It does not protect the speaker from all retaliation or criticism. It only protects the speaker in the United States from US government retaliation. Some countries don’t even provide that much protection.
The distinction between government retaliation and all retaliation is often misunderstood. Many people assume that free speech shields them from all consequences. That free means there’s no cost associated with it, giving them sort of an all purpose pass to say whatever they want. But I’m here to tell you those folks are dead wrong. Free speech is always a calculated risk.
I appreciate that managers are entitled to their opinions, and they have a right to express them, and when they use poor judgment in doing it, they’re also entitled to all of the consequences. Management does not get to uncouple the two. Nobody does. Free speech is never free. There’s always a price to be paid, and it’s better to determine those costs with foresight instead of hindsight. You get to decide whether it builds relationships or tears them down, and what you have to gain from that.
Words that strike negative emotional chords can have a radioactive shelf life. It doesn’t matter whether those words are careless, intentional, or total lies flying under the flag of free speech. Those statements can be used against the speaker in a court of law and open the person to attack on social media. It can also be used as the basis for severing employment or creating separate legal liability for the organization. In some cases, low employment engagement is the least of your problems.
I guarantee you that a lot of statements that I saw as a practicing lawyer were written or said in the heat of the moment, with false assumptions about privacy and without a clue about how they could be interpreted negatively or the consequences they could unleash. But once it’s written, once it’s said it’s too late, the damage is done. Feelings are bruised, workplace relationships are injured, and trust is trampled.
When incivility breeds anger that boils over into lawsuits, those same free speech communications get a lot more expensive. They’re now witness statements and potential smoking gun documents. They are evidence they’re exhibit A.
But the truth is, nobody really wins a lawsuit. One side loses less. And I say that because the cost of suing or getting sued in today’s world is higher for all involved. And it’s an emotional roller coaster. One minute you have high hopes, then there’s procedural delays. You get a big down, reputations get lost, careers get tarnished. There’s a financial drain of endless legal bills while the case grinds slowly through the system. It’s not like those TV courtroom dramas that reach a verdict in an hour, including commercials.
The litigation process can take years, especially when it gets drawn out by lengthy and expensive appeals. It consumes multiple budget cycles, and it ticks you off all over again. Each time a new court deadline floats to the top of your inbox. In the meantime, the employees are attacked or disrespected in the name of free speech are going to disengage to varying degrees and take less ownership in their work. Do they still care about their job? Sure, but not that much. Their withdrawal is a form of self-preservation.
Over time, that steady drip, drip, drip of disrespect in any shape or form, whether through politically incorrect statements or uninhibited free speech, weakens relationship bonds. By eroding trust and goodwill, connections get more stressed and frayed with every uncivil interaction, injecting more fear and resentment over being treated unfairly into the business ecosystem. And when that happens, it usually takes more than one act of kindness for employees to have a reason to do more than show up at work.
One tech manager, I’ll never forget this, he confessed that his department head had a habit of taking the whole team to a fancy restaurant for a year-end holiday luncheon during business hours, which, you know, it’s nice. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “It was a great gesture, but it didn’t make up for the rest of the year when he was a total jerk.” No surprise there. One token gesture does not restore trust or goodwill when the emotional bank account is overdrawn because of the norms nobody wants to talk about.
By the time an organization recognizes they have an engagement problem, trust has probably been squandered and it can’t be force fed with a required retreat or artificial team building exercise. Yes, those are good first steps, don’t get me wrong, but they have their limits and they should never be viewed as a total solution any more than the annual IT luncheon I talked about.
Employees are smart. They recognize the difference between disguising and remedying unfairness, the unspoken questions they have and they want answered when those things happen is: What’s really changed? Why should I believe this now?
The economic imbalance of power that’s represented by positional power requires management to really take the lead in keeping the employee employer relationship on track. When left unchecked, the belief of those in the driver’s seat that they’re more right than anyone else, more exceptional, more entitled to uninhibited expression, creates an even bigger hurdle by amplifying that imbalance. And it’s an organizational Achilles heel because it generates a material disconnect with workers, and it has a massive consequence for employee engagement and retention.
Yes, workplace observations can differ dramatically depending on the box we occupy on the organizational chart, but it’s the exercise of management power that determines whether the connections on that chart inspire self-motivation and discretionary effort or discourage it.
And that’s why I wrote Seeking Fairness at Work. Besides recognizing the nature of the problem underlying low employee engagement, I wanted to identify a system of checks and balances to help executives, managers, and entrepreneurs infuse more fairness into their organizational culture to support better engagement and retention and assist them in addressing the norms nobody wants to talk about, so that it strengthens the organization’s culture by demonstrating more fairness.
According to Gallup the best performing companies have an engagement rate of 70% and on average experienced 23% higher profits than those with actively disengaged employees. Imagine the untapped treasure trove of talent already on the payroll and the amazing potential it represents.
Thanks so much for listening today. A transcript of this episode can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. And I am so excited to announce that my new book, Seeking Fairness at Work, is now available wherever books are sold, including on Amazon.
When you buy the book you can also claim your free bonus chapter by going to. SeekingFairnessatWork.com/BonusChapter.
If you found today’s episode thought provoking, please be sure to tell your friends, share a link and leave a positive review. Today wraps up the five part sneak preview of my new book, Seeking Fairness at Work. I’ll be back next week with another guest interview to help you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
Join, Rate and Review:
Rating and reviewing the show helps us grow our audience and allows us to bring you more of the rich information you need to succeed from our high powered guests. Leave a review at Lovethepodcast.com/BusinessConfidential.
Joining the Business Confidential Now family is easy and lets you have instant access to the latest tactics, strategies and tips to make your business more successful.
Follow on your favorite podcast app here as well as on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Download ♥ Follow ♥ Listen ♥ Learn ♥ Share ♥ Review ♥ Comment ♥ Enjoy
Disclosure:
This post may contain links to products to products on Amazon.com with which I have an affiliate relationship. I may receive commissions or bonuses from your actions on such links, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU.