How is the definition of power evolving in the workplace?
The workplace, especially the large corporation, is a fascinating petri dish of power. Historically, it has obviously been the arena of men; therefore, it has been shaped by men as much as it has shaped the generations of men who have lived within its walls.
At the top of the hierarchy, brawn is not a factor. CEOs don’t have to cut down trees or drag logs across a prairie to prove themselves. It’s a playing field where intelligence, relationship, and the invisible yet undeniable fact of personal power holds sway.
For almost 15 years, I worked as a producer and a programming executive in the television industry. The successful men and women I knew worked hard, were smart, and understood how to handle the politics. And the truly powerful people that I worked with, like Barry Diller or Geraldine Laybourne, weren’t powerful because of their gender but because of some other invisible yet undeniable quality.
There is a lot written about gender politics in the workplace, and yes, it’s true that more men than women are currently in charge of companies. But I rarely hear mention of the millions of men – far more than women – who never rise up the ranks and are emasculated on a daily basis. Just being a man doesn’t guarantee success.
Something else is essential and it is a quality that can be cultivated by either a man or a woman. Yes, more men have expressed it, perhaps because there have been more men to begin with in the workplace. But what is it?
The first official company (according to Wikipedia) was started in Japan and called Kongo Gumi. It was a family-owned construction business that opened its doors in 578. Ownership over the years moved from father to son.
Men held the overt power because this was the cultural norm and all you had to acquire power was being born the right gender at the right time. For the next 1500 years or so, companies were primarily pubs, inns, breweries, metalworks, and consisted mostly of artisans or families running enterprises using their personal resources and skills. Your place in the family line guaranteed or denied access to the corner office.
According to Martha Beck (www.marthabeck.com), life coach, the modern corporation, started around 300 years ago. Slowly, merit began to matter more. The fact that we connect masculine qualities with the workplace are by association. The modern workplace was obviously shaped by the men who were there, reflecting the stereotypically male impulses to hierarchy, order, and a certain type of power that was more about the ends and less about the means.
But, the organization also shaped the men within its walls as well. British researchers Nick Neave and Daryl B. O’Connor describe the complex inter-relationship of testosterone, behavior, and context.
We might think of the extremely aggressive power plays that we see in movies like The Big Short as testosterone-driven, but they found that “For one thing, hormones do not directly change behavior; they influence the expression of a behavior within appropriate environmental/ social contexts.”
How much does the man shape the company, and how much does the company shape the man? And as modern human beings, can we make a choice and operate differently beyond our biochemistry and our conditioning?
When women first entered the workplace, we had to follow suit. The rules were set, and to succeed, you had to follow them. But as Hanna Rosin in her book The End of Men pointed out, the qualities necessary for workplace success are changing. The more “feminine” skills of communication, empathy, and compassion are becoming more important and more closely aligned with success. The means are becoming as important as the ends.
As I explored this question of the changing face of power in the workplace, I reached out to Peter Bregman. As a Harvard Business Review writer, leadership consultant, and advisor to many top executives, he has seen power dynamics, power plays, and what works and doesn’t up close for both men and women.
In our conversation, Peter did for me what I imagine he does for the Fortune 100 companies he works with. He completely disrupted my thinking. I showed up to the interview with lots of questions, and he turned all my questions upside down. Almost immediately, he pulled gender completely out of the equation, refusing to fall into or rebel against the stereotypes. Instead, he focused on the core values and qualities underneath gender.
But first, as context, he shared about his own journey of becoming a man. Growing up with a strong mother gave him a deep respect for women and a little bit of shame too around his maleness and being a man.
It wasn’t until he had a son that he started to explore his masculinity. A big realization was that in his desire not to be identified with the negative aspects of masculinity he saw growing up, he had allowed the kind of men he didn’t respect to define what it meant to be a man.
In order to reclaim his masculinity, he had to come up with his own definition, and this definition became a key feature of the leadership training he does in the world.
“My definition has to do with strength and courage, and I don’t know if that’s so different from women, but I feel like for me becoming a man has very much to do with coming into my own and standing on my own and having the strength of emotional courage.
It’s a journey, and I’m in the process of it, and I think that it’s not that different. It’s about making decisions that are different from the people around me and being willing to stand apart without trashing, in some ways, without distancing myself, and what I mean by that is that I don’t have to distance myself from an opinion that I don’t agree with and I think there’s tremendous strength in knowing what you think and being able to stand powerfully in that without making everyone else wrong. I think that male power goes awry when you make yourself right at the exclusion of other perspectives, and I think that’s true for female power too. Ultimately, we don’t step into our power as men or women if our perspective to have validity requires us to put down others, I don’t believe that.”
What Peter offered was an evolution in my thinking about power in the workplace, and by pulling gender out of it, he gave me a new possibility.
“You’ll read what it means to be a man, and it’s so backward because that’s the opposite of stepping into your power. it’s how can I be whom someone wants me to be so they’ll like me and so I can feel like a man. And that’s losing all of our power and women have been struggling with this forever, and men are too. You’re still trying to please, and stepping into your power is really about pleasing yourself and, at the same time, having a deep respect and connection to the people around you. When I’m teaching leadership to men and women, what I’m teaching is how do you stand in connection with yourself and, at the same time, with the people around you? That’s hard for us to do. We either give ourselves away or we just care about ourselves. Traditionally, men worry about themselves, and women worry about others, but I’ve seen men and women do the opposite. But the real challenge is combining what has been traditionally masculine and feminine and doing both. That’s a hard skill and what I call leadership.
Something so evident in interviewing Peter is that he’s such a “man” in stereotypical terms. He’s strong, confident, and successful, but he’s also a modern man in an evolving world. What feels new about his personal expression of it is that there’s a quality of introspection and listening, a receptivity, that would normally be considered stereotypically “female.”
His work and life have been a practice of balancing the energies of masculine and feminine so that he and the men and women he trains can have the best of both worlds instead of operating within the limits of just one.
But the body is important too. Whether you are a man or woman, Peter talked about how leadership is physical. He told me that he didn’t believe that the male body has any advantage over the female body and that it’s more about how you inhabit yourself than how you look, embodying your leadership as opposed to acquiring it through techniques, certain communication styles, or other leadership tricks.
“If you are in your body, you can access your power. You can’t access your power if you’re not in your body. You need your feet on the ground and feeling comfortable in your body. That impacts your ability to stand powerfully in the world. I don’t think the male body or muscles or size of your body has anything to do with it. There isn’t a particular physical type that owns leadership in the world.
As someone who is on the cutting edge of leadership, I asked him what he thought was an essential skill in being successful in the future workplace, whether you are a man or a woman.
People who can do what we’ve been talking about – stand in leadership – these are going to be important skills in the next decade because we are no longer in jobs where people are telling us what to do. When we can be who we are and let others be who they are, no matter what happens in the work world, we’ll be prepared for it.
For more information about Peter Bregman, please visit his website at www.peterbregman.com.
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