Harvard Business School Confidential by Emily Chan

Author:Emily Chan [Chan, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780470822395
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

This is another form of informal power. It comes from your relations with others in the organization. Key sources of relational power include mentorship, coalition, dependencies, and reciprocity.

Mentorship is a source of relational power. Mentors can use their relational power to influence the behavior of their protégés. I still remember many years ago when Mr. A, my mentor and my boss at BCG, asked me to take on an assignment that required stationing at a very remote area for many months. He could have used his positional power and simply told me to go. But instead, he used his relational power and said to me, “Hey Emster (a nickname he made up), will you do it for me, please? I need you there.” Of course, I could not say no.

On the flip side, protégés can also leverage relational power with their mentors. I have often gone to Mr. A to ask him for information that I had no right to get—such as “am I getting a good reputation among the seniors?” I have also gone to Mr. A to get him to use his positional and other powers to help obtain high-profile assignments for me.

Being part of a coalition within the company can give you relational power. As described in Power, Influence, and Persuasion,14 there are two types of coalitions: a natural coalition or a single-issue coalition. The former endure for a long time, and are developed based on shared fundamentals over a range of issues. For example, at my property investment client, the head of strategy had a natural coalition with the head of property management. Both had business school training, made decisions based on data and analysis, and were very execution-oriented. At my consumer electronics client, the marketing team, sales team, and engineering team had a shared interest to push the R&D team for faster, better, and lower-cost products. They also had a shared interest against the finance team, which was always looking for cost-cutting maneuvers. They formed a natural coalition on these issues.

Single-issue coalitions develop as parties come together for one goal. Their relational power does not extend beyond that issue. For example, many traditional Hong Kong companies work half the day on Saturdays. I have seen coalitions forming in many such companies to lobby for eliminating Saturdays as a workday. Individuals in the coalition do not have positional or personal power to lobby for the change. But appropriate coalitions can bring the issue to management’s attention. Such a coalition may include many who are adversaries on other issues but are allies on this one.

Having dependents will give you relational power. Dependencies exist when your colleagues depend on you for information, services, assignments, or anything else. At my property investment client, for example, the sales VP, who was also on the Board of Directors, had very limited control over some of her general managers. The VP, for a variety of reasons, stopped focusing on getting involved with many of the tenant negotiation and relationshipbuilding issues. She delegated most of this to her general managers.

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