Office Politics Lesson: Power Struggles

People think titles and professional position limit the amounts of power they have within the office. It’s a small, short-sighted way of thinking. If you believe having power is about being able to throw your weight around you end up disappointed. Or, if getting what you want despite the best interests of others (or the company) is powerful to you, you are doomed for failure.

Not to mention, having loads of body-related stress. Power is not also about how important you think you are. Or, how great you end up feeling because you were able to weasel something out of someone.

Power is not about making you feel better. It’s about being able to make everything else work better.

Power matches are more about people struggles. It’s about individuals grappling with how little or how much power they think they can wield (or want to wield). It ranges from something as simple as a woman trying to prove her professional worth to the insanity of idiots wanting to prove they’re smarter than they really are.

These events always originate from the type of relationship you have with yourself. So, if you are struggling only with yourself, you have very little power to wield. Most likely because you don’t like yourself anyway. People who don’t like themselves have a really hard time convincing others to like them as well.

Power is best translated into how much currency you have to spend in relationships with others. Do people trust you? Are you likeable? Those intangibles are built up through the greatest asset one can ever have: time. Truly powerful people don’t have to struggle with others because everything leans their way in the first place. The powerful have things handed to them, not snatched. People will give freely because they want to, not because they had to.

Finding your own power in the workplace has more to do with your personal arsenal of relationships. It’s not simply networking, because not all networkers are powerful. How great is the network when there is no relationship to give it context?

It’s a pittance in the grand spectrum of life. When is the last time you’ve spent time working on building up your relationship currency?

So, power struggles in the office are not actually about power at all. They’re about people trying to spend currency they don’t have. Likeability and trust. When you have neither, you always come up short. Therefore, when people find themselves with very little spending power in relationships, they opt in by using intimidation, fear, threats and a host of other really nasty things.

Such tactics may work, but you have to use up so much more to be totally effective. In short, it’s currency conversion is very high. You have to spend quite a lot to get the bare minimum in return.

Why waste time spending up so much in the first place? It makes you destitute in more ways than one. Your time is better spent building up a Fort Knox of good vibes, positivity, likeability and trust. Those things are much more worthy (and fun) to have. Inevitably, you create a workplace fraught with powerful people rather than paupers struggling within the hold.