Article (6.06): 97 Ways to Get What You Want
A chief executive can control the budget, the strategy or who gets promoted, yet still be unable to get one direct report to say what is actually going wrong on a project. That gap, between the power someone holds and the compliance they can actually draw out of a room, sits at the middle of this episode of Leadership Decanted, because power and influence, despite getting treated as synonyms in everyday use, turn out to be two quite different things.
That distinction belongs to Jen Overbeck, a professor of management at Melbourne Business School who researches power, negotiation and influence, and her definition of power carries more precision than the word usually does: control of resources that someone else needs. Power travels with the person who holds it. Influence, she argues, does not, because influence is the willingness of another person to be moved, and that willingness belongs to them rather than to whoever wants it.
The mechanism she offers for why some people get listened to at all draws on a decades-old piece of social psychology called “idiosyncrasy credits”¹: people extend influence to whoever they have decided counts as one of their own, and the definition of one of their own turns out to be remarkably elastic. Overbeck’s example is the family friend who has no blood relation at all and is still, in every way that matters, an aunt. Being seen as part of the tribe, rather than rank or proximity, seems to be the actual gatekeeper of whether anyone follows you anywhere.
Her practical advice starts with an audit: name the six kinds of capital you are already carrying – financial, material, social, intellectual, human and psychological, and notice which ones you have never once used on purpose. The last of those carries an edge she names plainly rather than glossing over: understanding what makes someone tick is also, in less careful hands, the basic material of manipulation.² It seems an unusually candid admission for someone teaching a room full of executives, and rather more honest than most leadership advice manages.
None of it works unless someone genuinely depends on what you are holding. A chief executive who can restructure an entire division might still end up picking up rubbish in the office car park because nobody else feels obliged to, and might go home to find their own kids ignoring a direct request to tidy a room. A parent’s authority and an executive’s authority draw on entirely different kinds of credit, and one rarely converts into the other.
One consequence Overbeck draws from years of watching this play out in practice: expect to be told ‘No’ at least four times before anyone shows even tentative willingness to shift, rather than treating the first knockback as proof the argument failed. Most people, she says, give up right around there, or swing straight into something closer to coercion, which is often just impatience dressed up as authority.
Endnotes:
- Edwin P. Hollander, “Conformity, Status, and Idiosyncrasy Credit,” Psychological Review, 1958.
- Adam Grant, “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence,” The Atlantic, 2014.