Employing Differences, Episode 106: Are our power dynamics serving us?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Are our power dynamics serving us?"

Karen: 0:29

So last week in Episode 105, we talked about power gradients and ways to think about whether you had power differentials, whether you had hierarchy, and how steep that power gradient was – how much difference there was between the power that one person had and the power that another person had. And we want to pick up that conversation this week by talking about how do we think about okay, so we figured out we have some power gradient? The next question is, is it serving us? Is it a thing we want? Is it a thing that works for us? And how do we determine that? How can we figure out whether this particular power differential is one that's useful to us? And I want to be clear that there may be an overall power differential that we're talking about... it also may be within some microcosm within our organization, or within some moment, or within some decision that those power dynamics will shift and change. So this could be a moment to moment or a circumstance to circumstance kind of skill. But ultimately, it's the same question, which is: We know we're going to have power differential, we know we're going to have power dynamics, and once we figured out what they are – which was last episode – how do we go about answering the question,"Are they good for us? Are they serving us? are they achieving what we're looking for?"

Paul: 1:56

I think an important part of that is recognizing that whatever that arrangement and that distribution of power is, in and of itself, that is neither good nor bad. Positional power and authority and things like that, are – in my view, they're morally neutral. How they get used, on the other hand, is a separate issue. And what we're really looking at for here is, for me, what I tend to do in any particular situation/group/things like that, I go, "Okay, if this is how power is currently distributed, how well is that helping us to achieve our aims and our purposes?" Is it arranged in a way that is useful for us? Or is it arranged in a way that is actually hindering us? When things we've talked about before is that sort of in any group, there's purpose, there's vision, there's reason why we're working together, that we're coming together to do something. And I think once we start to get a sense of what the power dynamics and the power distribution is, we can start to ask, Is that actually aligned with what it is we're trying to achieve? Both externally – what's the impact we want to have, what's the results we want to create – and internally – how do we want to be together, what's the relational space we want to have between us? Because power dynamics have an impact on both.

Karen: 3:25

Yeah, and I think that power dynamics come from both as well. There's structural power, somebody has a role, somebody has an assigned job that that we all understand. And you know, even in communities that want to be very egalitarian, you typically have a very small number of people, for example, who can sign checks on behalf of the community. And that works for us. That is a power differential. They have the power to sign checks, and everybody else doesn't. It's not equal power. But in fact, it works very well. Because you don't want to have a system where 40 people have to all sign the check. So we like that power differential in that sense of the word. The more interesting power - and frankly, the more influential power, I think, is what I would call the relational power. The ability to influence, the ability to convince other people to do the thing you want them to do. And that I think, can be hugely interesting in organizations of all kinds to look at. If there are differences in how much people are listened to, are they serving us?

Paul: 4:44

And I think there are ideas that are generalizable, things we actually know. One of the things we know is that if we're trying to create a space where we're generating new ideas, where we're trying to be innovative, where we're trying to solve problems that are ill-defined, that we don't really understand the edges of – we actually know that good ideas can come from anywhere, and that groups do have a tendency to under-use people's knowledge and experience. And so that's a case where I think it's useful to look at. When we're trying to figure out ideas for action and things that we might be doing, when we're in that generating-expanding-diverging phase, we actually want to have really flat power differentials. We really want to hear from everybody. We want everyone to be able to influence each other. Because that actually leads to better results. There's actually a lot sort of in there, in the research and in people. And I think in our experience about that, that the flatter the power dynamics, when we're generating ideas, and figuring out what options are, and when we're exploring, we're in that space of curiosity, then having having very flat power differentials is really useful. On the other hand, when we're actually trying to make decisions that same completely flat, we have to get everybody to sign on to absolutely everything can slow us down. And particularly, if we're trying to make good enough decisions quickly, we actually want to change that. We want to have a different arrangement to it. I've been working with some clients recently, where they actually have a very unclear decision process around things. But they value the idea that anybody can participate, and they sort of want to get everybody on board. And so in some ways, they have an extremely flat decision-making power dynamic. But as a result, they have great difficulty actually making a decision. Because there isn't someone who can make the call, or there aren't three people who could say, "Great, we're going to go synthesize this information and come back." And so as a result, the deciding part would benefit from a little bit more. And so those are actually kind of two situations where it can be useful to think about, what's the possible arrangement of those dynamics and do they serve us in those situations? And not all decisions need to be made quickly. When there are things that need to be quite deliberative, we actually probably want a flatter hierarchy there; we want a flatter decision-making power. And so not all decisions are created equal. So I think it's, it's useful to think about what are the constraints? What are the outcomes we're trying to create in these? And then how does power play into that process?

Karen: 7:44

I think another thing to think about is, how much the ability of individual group members or the knowledge or the skills is equal, and how relevant that is to the thing you're trying to do. So I mean, an extreme case – and one that we may have other concerns about, but an extreme case – would be like a religious cult. If the objective of being together is to be more and more like a leader that we have identified that we all like and respect... like, the reason you joined the group is because you want to be more like that person, well, probably you don't want a flat power dynamic. You don't want the other person who joined next to me that I actually didn't know very well to have the same influence over the space as the leader that I joined to be influenced by. That was the goal. Similarly, in a classroom, if everybody signed up to come and learn things from a teacher, you probably want that teacher running the classroom. You probably don't want everybody else who signed up having equal say in what happens in the classroom. On the other hand, learning gets turned on when we're more participatory, and when we feel safe, and when we have influence, and so there's some balancing act there. But there are a number of circumstances in which the person who knows the most ought to have the most influence – and in fact, our goals are best met, when influence is very different, very disproportionate between who's in the room. And usually, you see that within the structure of the role, but not necessarily. You can absolutely be in a circumstance where theoretically, we all have equal decision making power, but it turns out, one of us has done this 10 times before, and, and nine of us are brand new to it, and you want a very unequal power differential. You want that one person who knows more to be speaking more than anybody else, and so on.

Paul: 9:39

Yeah, and I think that that differential around the difference in knowledge can be tricky to navigate. Because I see this a bunch in software development teams that I work with. There are people who are new to the team, who are very junior, and they often hold back in discussions because they don't think that they have anything to contribute. And it is true that there are people who are who are involved in those discussions, who are very knowledgeable and have a lot of experience, but aren't working on this particular thing. And so I think this is one of those places where that discounting of knowledge can be problematic. To go to your specific situation, I think it can be really useful for for us to have, when we're exploring what's happening, you want to give preference to the people who have the most experience with what is actually occurring right now. The people who are who are actually in the happening, because that knowledge is actually the most relevant thing. There may be other people who have knowledge with that type of thing. They have expertise, but their expertise is not in the current situation. Their experience is with other situations. I think it can be really useful to then to defer to that knowledge around useful questions to be asking or things that you might try. But then it goes back to – if we think about how the decision making power is distributed – does the person who has that expert knowledge but is not involved in the situation gets to decide? Do the people who are going to have to live with the consequences of the decision have to think? This is the thing that shows up actually, a lot of my consulting work, where one of things I very specifically tell people is,"I'm not going to tell you who you should fire. Because you have to live with the consequences of any of your staffing decisions." I'm an external consultant. I might see a lot and know a lot, but you know way more about your situation, and you have to live with the results. And so I think the factors that we have to use when we're weighting how the power dynamics would be useful for us and who we should defer to and things like that can be way more complicated than it appears on first glance.

Karen: 12:02

I think that's reliably the case. That the power dynamics are way more complicated. Because we want to point to the one thing, that there's this one power dynamic in the room. And in fact, power comes from all kinds of places. We tend to know that power can come from speaking a lot. Power can also be exercised by being silent. And so there's just a lot of nuance to what's going on. And I think what we like to have is an awful lot of relational influence. So in the example you were talking about, where there is this outside expert, what we'd like is that the relationship is solid enough that they come in, and they give their opinion and their knowledge, and they share it and they make their recommendation. And then it's not because they have an overt structural power to say, "You have to do it my way," because they're not going to get the buy in, as you say, and the people have to live with it aren't bought into the decision. But we might ideally be in a situation where the people hearing it are influenced–meaning they go, "Oh, that actually was a thing I hadn't thought about," or "That makes sense," or "That makes sense, but I think Paul isn't seeing this thing. And so having really listened to that, we're still going to go a different way." For whatever the reasons are. We're going to ask him another question, or we're going to work in that space. But that the power that the outsider or that the non-worker or non-involved person has in that situation is very much based on their relationships with those people. And so we're getting a tangle in here of power dynamics and relationships and trust and a sense of safety. And of course, those things all interrelate all the time every day. But I think you want to be tracking all of

Paul: 14:00

Yeah, I think if we back up just a little bit – which it. maybe it would have been useful to do a few minutes ago, but we're here now – if we think about power, power in the physics world is the ability to get things done. It's the ability to accomplish work. And as you point out, there are lots of different ways, there are different sources of power and different types of power. There's positional power that's invested in us by a position, by the office that we hold in an organization. There is that expert, authority-based power, which people grant to us because of the knowledge they perceive we have. There's the relational power, the ability to influence each other that comes from the relationship we have, and our ability to actually relate to other people. There's there's a lot of different things out there about these different types of power. And to come back around to the question of are,"Our power dynamics serving us?" I think we have to become aware of how those are being used. Are we always relying on one particular type? Because that's generally an indication that they're not serving us. If we're always using one hammer, that probably means that they're not serving us. That we're not fluidly sort of moving between those where it makes sense. When we're having that sort of exploring conversation that is much more about the the relational, the "Can I understand your perspective?" Am I allowing you to have the power to influence me, even if I have the positional authority, for example, if I'm in a decision-making role. And so looking at that power dynamic, it may be that in our organization, I cannot give up the positional power that says I am the one that has to make the decision. I'm going to be held accountable for this decision. I can't give that up. I have to hold on to it. But what I can do is I can ask whether or not me not being able to be influenced by you is useful. And probably go, "Oh, that doesn't seem very good, because you're going to have to live with the result of the decision that I have to make. And I want to continue to work together effectively with you." So if I noticed that the default is I'm just always making these decisions by myself and informing you of them later, that's a dynamic that probably isn't working. We're probably building up resentment. We're probably not getting the results that we want. So its both that piece of the external results we want aren't happening. And the internal results, the way we want to be together, isn't working. So I think that's really looking at how the different types of power exist within that system and what effect are they having on those two things? Because they think that really helps us to answer that question of are they serving us?

Karen: 16:58

I think some of what you're pointing to is that one of the ways that we figure out if they're serving us is to figure out where they're coming from. It'll also help us figure out what we're going to talk about next, which is then what do we do about it if it's not serving us, and that's another episode. But if we can pause and think about, we've got a power gradient – so that was last episode. We figured out we've got one. Where is it coming from? And you know, in this day and age, I think most of us could figure out pretty quickly that if we have a power gradient that's coming from sexism or racism or other kinds of discrimination, discriminatory kinds of biases, we're pretty clear those are not serving us. But that doesn't mean they aren't there. If we're not willing to look for and ask the question, "Could it be coming from here? we're not going to see it, and then we don't know how to change it or can't decide that we want to change it. On the other hand, what if it's coming from different speaking modalities? What if the people who speak the most and are most comfortable speaking out in a group are having the most power? Is that serving us? Might be might not be? And it will really depend on the situation? Or is it coming from just different abilities, which we said often is? Or is it coming from roles and structures, which maybe we can change, maybe we can't. But if we can't and they're not serving us, what do we do about that? But knowing where they're coming from, I think, is one of the clues about are they serving us, just as a way to think about it.

Paul: 18:39

Yeah. And then when we get to that idea of we notice that they're not, then we can start to do something about that, which we're gonna get into in a future episode. But just to kind of track where we've been here today. We said, Look, in any group, they are always going to be power differences and power dynamics. And the fact that those exist is neither good nor bad. It simply is. But what we do want to get curious about is where do those come from and what are we using them for? And are we using them in ways that actually help the group to achieve its aims externally? And are we actually using them in a way that allows the group to continue to work together in the long term? That creates the type of relational space that the group either explicitly said they wanted or implicitly wants? Are we creating the atmosphere and the culture that we want to have together to allow us to keep keep working together? So really looking at how we are trying to get things done? What are the tools at our disposal that we're using, whether that be positional, whether that be maybe expert authority, whether that may be relational. How we are both influencing and being influenced by each other and looking at whether or not that is creating the results that we want, both internally and externally. So that if we notice that there is not a match there, we could maybe start to do something about that.

Karen: 20:13

And that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 20:17

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.