Power is to be taken

A recent WSJ article gives great suggestions on how to gain power at work even when you have no leverage. What to do when you are judged on your team’s performance but you lack actual authority or resources? 3 ways to gain power:

1. Build a strong network. How? Ask questions. Show respect, interest, and enthusiasm. Create positive energy (e.g., by praising good work), and help others reach a goal. When you positively influence others, managers see you as a role model and a high performer. (A 2016 study cited in the Harvard Business Review found employees with strong internal networks were judged to be high performers.) Indeed, a senior legal executive at a leading company told me a key factor in deciding whether to promote is how highly peers regard him or her.
2. Build expertise in a growing area. Look for an area lacking experts and/or resources, and volunteer to help solve the problem. I know a junior lawyer who did exactly this and was promoted within a year.
3. Learn to be charismatic. The article insists it’s learnable — be the best version of yourself, and focus on others. Show warmth and empathy.

The above sounds great conceptually but it’s too abstract. I wanted to break it down into actionable steps to allow you to put yourself in a position to win at the professional game. I had a call with a CEO recently around the topic of getting power at a company and from our chat we arrived at there being 2 pathways: you either are given power or you take it.

The former is self-explanatory and I won’t cover it as I assume you are like and come from a working-class background and do not have connections or relationships to lean into to be given power. If this I the case you have had to fight tooth and nail for every inch and without knowing it you have taken power. When I use the term ‘taking power’ I am not referring to professional sabotage as sexy as that sounds but in fact identifying small tasks and opportunities or strategic bets that you can own and manage which compound into larger opportunities where now you are uniquely positioned to handle these due to domain expertise.

I’ll share some tips and give a real-life example.

The most important element of this I being a problem solver. You may have ideas already but if you do not, I would suggest you reflect on areas of inefficiencies in your current ways of working and ways you can improve. Rather than ask for permission to fix these problems, go out and fix them in your circle of influence. Noe, once you have the results run it by your line manager in your next 1:1 and they’ll be impressed since you have led on this initiative as long as you are currently performing your normal scope of work to a high standard led on the idea that you can and should continue to focus on this new initiative as you are uniquely positioned to do this. This may result in you upskilling your team on what you are doing and when the results compound the credit will be given to your line manager by her higher-ups and you have now hacked the game. You have made your manager look good to her manager and she may not tell you but this is a great position to be in and you have built trust and made her life easier. You may now find she is willing to delegate to you more frequently and if not you simply run back to the initial play and do it again. The upside of this is the results will compound, you will have exposure to different areas of your work, you became the de facto leader and your team come to you through changing your dynamic within the team all the while you become the de facto right hand of your manager.

If you are solving problems super quietly in the background, it’s like a tree falling in the forest when no one is around (Did the tree make a sound? Who knows?)