I suspect many people, if asked to name the most powerful person in the world, would probably suggest the president of the United States of America (he is certainly top of Forbes list of the most powerful people of 2012). That suggestion is based on an understanding of what constitutes power and what constitutes a powerful person. An understanding that says power is based on position, access to resources, personality, charisma and before Barak Obama was elected, perhaps race.
Money
In the film Scarface, the character Tony Santana says:
In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.
Buzzie Bavasi, a baseball executive in the US expresses a similar sentiment:
We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules.
There is no doubt that money makes the world go around and those with money get to spin it. The question is does money equal power or putting it in reverse, does poverty equal powerlessness? I guess in many ways the answer is yes, which is why the distribution of wealth matters.
I’m not advocating any particular political philosophy but I am suggesting in a culture where everyone gets to be powerful those who have will think about those who have not.
Personality
Throughout my career I have always been fascinated by the concept of personality profiling and I should also say, greatly helped by it. Understanding that not everyone hears the way I hear, sees the way I see, thinks the way I think has helped me to understand others and to be understood, enabling me to modify the way I communicate and am communicated to. It seems to me there are as many ways to profile personalities as there are personality types and not everyone sees value in personality profiling but like most things you get what you expect. My favourite and the one I have found most useful in working in and with teams is Myers Briggs.
Anyway lest I digress, the point of mentioning personality profiling here is that in my experience certain personality types are more “powerful” than others. By powerful I mean more likely to guide, direct and even dominate others. For example, in group situations, extroverted thinkers, unaware or unmanaged, tend to dominate because they do all the talking or more accurately, all their thinking out loud. Many years ago I realised if I was going to be powerful as a business leader I was going to have to train my extroverted thinking colleagues to make room for me and I was also going to have to learn how to be a less introverted thinker!
Over the years I’ve learned that creating a team where everyone gets to be powerful involves paying attention to the different personalities in the room and that the strongest teams are the most diverse. In my experience most leadership teams tend to be dominated by extroverted thinkers. The danger here is that everyone is talking but no one is listening! That’s why I’d encourage any leadership team that wants to be a high performing team to pay attention to and value the different personality types in the room.
Charisma
More often than not the people we think of as being the most powerful are often the most charismatic. Charisma can be defined in many ways but for now I’m going to suggest that it is closely related to the ability to communicate because whatever else is true about charismatic people the one thing they all have in common is the ability to communicate. By this I don’t mean make great speeches or create amazing PowerPoint presentations although that is often the case. I mean communicate powerfully in whatever form that takes.
The extent to which charisma is nurture or nature is debatable. Personally I think you can learn communication techniques which dramatically improve perceived charisma e.g. Steve Jobs. But ultimately I think charisma, as its name suggests is something of the divine spark that lives in everyone but burns more brightly in some than others.
This leaves me thinking that in a culture where everyone gets to be powerful those with charisma should use it to fan into flame the spark in the lives of those around them as opposed to dazzling those around them with their own gifts and abilities. Charisma used in this way in effect turns down the brightness and contrast on everyone else so that it outshines the rest. The end result is a personality based culture that doesn’t scale and won’t last.
