“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?”

—Rabbi Hillel

You have power in your position no matter what position you're in. You want to enjoy the impact you can make by using it to its fullest.

We tend to think that the power we have in our position is defined by the responsibilities outlined in the job description and by the formal level of our position in the organization or community. But we generally have more power in any given position than we realize and are harnessing.

You want to go beyond a focus on performing the functions assigned to you and bring your own definition and creative use of power to any role. In the portal of Position, you will learn you have considerable latitude to support and uplift others, and that's true regardless of your spot within a company or community.

Bring Consciousness into the Use of Power in Your Position

If the term “position of power” is loaded for you, it's for good reason. Most of us have been subject to higher ups who lorded their power over us, so we think power is forceful or abusive. When we rise into positions of authority over others, we really don't want to be that person. (Yet a leader only acts in those ways if they are “in power,” but not “in their power.”)

And it's good to be mindful because research has found that when people get into positions of power, it can “go to our head” in a number of harmful ways. People in high‐power mental states generally display less mirroring and empathy to others’ distress. They tend to focus more on stereotypes rather than getting to know others as individuals. They are also prone to being less inclusive in their communication style, for example, more often interrupting others when they're speaking. In other words, they tend to pursue goals at others’ expense.¹

Bring consciousness into your position, and be a force for good. As a “power holder,” you can establish norms for a team or a whole organization, and model in your power behavior and approaches. Remember, expert on executive power Ron Carucci, found in his research that the biggest abuse of power among those who assume a leadership position is not using it!

Carucci highlights that a common reason those who move into a more powerful position sometimes fail to make good use of their new power is that “it scares us. When you get to a broader level of influence, your life is now on the jumbotron. That sometimes leads to worry about disappointing people or making a decision that doesn't go well.”²And the higher you go into leadership positions, the more lives you affect and the less opportunities you have for guidance. Now other people are looking to you for guidance. CEOs I coach benefit from a trusted sounding board because they can feel so alone in their power, without people to open up to about the questions they're wrestling with.

Focus on Your Why

Power is a sacred opportunity and responsibility. You want to sit with it and be intentional about how you use it. As talent executive Anne Gotte shared on my Power Shift podcast, “People on your team are likely talking about you over the dinner table with their families. What are they saying?”³

How do you get comfortable? You remember your why for wanting to be in the position. You've been wanting to call the shots so you wouldn't have to be put out of your power. What are the values you now have the chance to model in the culture? Enjoy the thrill of having resources to move the needle on that.

Take a little time now to think about all the ways you can leverage your position in pursuit of your vision and to empower and uplift others. Some of these will be types of power the job description of your position explicitly entails such as the power to hire team members, to direct resources as you believe they should be, to set the tone and strategy, to convene meetings, to promote people into roles they can flourish in, and to share information. But they also include other forms of power, of your choosing, that you can bring into your position by the style in which you lead, such as being an inclusive leader. The factors that will allow you to most successfully leverage your position are not necessarily those stressed in job descriptions.

Be Successful at Using Your Power

In a 10‐year study of professionals who rose into executive positions, Ron Carucci discovered four behaviors that distinguished leaders who used their power most successfully. You can use them to maximize the power of your position no matter what level you are at.⁴

Use the Leverage You Already Have but May Be Overlooking

One of my clients, Kathy, exemplified these success approaches when using her positional power to bring about a transformational change in her organization. She was a managing partner at a 150‐person engineering firm. In this firm with all male‐ownership, many of the highest revenue producers were women. In fact, from her earlier initiative to hire more women engineers, 50% of the top engineers were now women, well above industry average. But they held much less than 50% of the equity, which was majority owned by the two male owners of the firm. As she said: “Well, that's bullsh*t!”

She realized that this was not only unjust but a liability for the firm in terms of reputation and recruitment. She also noticed that the workplace culture was playing a role in attrition of their high performers and wanted to create a work environment in which their employees felt supported and thrived. And personally she needed to see some changes in order to feel good about her role at the firm and the impact the firm was having on the industry. Here’s the story of how she evolved to use her power over the course of 90 days:

At first, she didn't think she had much. Though she had a vision of a more equitable workplace, she didn't know how to implement it. When she shared her ideas with the CEO, he dismissed them, which caused her to second‐guess her vision and even take his remarks personally. “I brought things up, but nothing changed, so I brought it up louder (which didn't work either).”

When we thought through a strategic influencing campaign, she saw she had so much power she had been overlooking. She started with the power of her position: “I found that things kicked into gear when I actually just started doing the work.” Along with her collaborator, the head of marketing, who was also the mother of young children, they brought in a consultant to run analyses comparing current firm ownership with the last several years of sales data for the female engineers, showing an imbalance of contribution to ownership. They pulled together DEI data to make a strong analytical case.

She started to leverage the relational power she had. She convened a meeting with the other partners to increase communication among them and initiate thoughtful workplace culture and workflow approaches—not waiting for permission but rather being the one to start leading change.

She reached out to deepen relationships with board members: “We were able to catalyze a number of conversations with key stakeholders including at the board level who were willing to engage. It started exploratory, like, ‘What are you seeing?’ We shared our fact‐based understanding, and framed our business case in terms of the board's WIIFT such as growing the current reputation of the firm and increasing the company's future value. Then we got more specific about the outcome we sought: What's the succession plan?”

She shared her powerful truth by connecting the dots: “While keeping a premium for the founders who got the firm off the ground, how are we making sure that our agents for growth feel they have a real stake in the in the future of the company, which for me is the whole reason I joined the firm? Otherwise I would have started my own firm. I want to own and be a part of it.”

Then she used the ultimate leverage she had, namely her own value and that of her colleagues. She had spent years cultivating strong relationships with other partners and the members of the women’s network she founded, and she was able to make clear that if the majority owners didn't see the opportunity they laid out, she and her collaborators would plan an exit. “We basically said, ‘This is what we're going to build; let me know if it should be here or somewhere else!’”

Not only did the two major shareholders agree to wind down 30% of their equity to create a more equitable ownership, but Kathy had so impressed the board with her vision of an energizing and inclusive future that she was catapulted into the CEO position. And what was among her biggest thrills? “When the female employees were so inspired, saying: ‘Thank you for creating one more crack in the glass ceiling!’”

She used the power she had been overlooking to create the world as she thought it should be. This is what it looks like when you use the power you already have to raise everyone around you!

Leverage Your Power

You want to think through the power you do have even when you don't think you have much. You can think first of relational power—Who is within your organization that can partner with you to accomplish a goal? Who can you text or call in order to advance a project or to get introduced to the person who can? Who's in your network who can help you understand the scoop on why a disempowering person is acting as such? Who can you pull in as a resource to reduce overwhelm? Who owes you a favor?

You also leverage your power when you show the value you can add to the goals of others or the consequences you can effect. This ability is available to you in any role, you don't need to be a senior executive to have the power of your position.

Marsha headed a team of nurses in a pharmaceutical company, and she believed her team was not being shown the respect they deserved or being given appropriate input into how the company was serving patients. Her requests repeatedly went unheard. We strategized to find her leverage, always starting with asking, “Where's my Power?” Look for all the ways you and/or your team has something that is valuable to other people. We considered that the nurses are the ones who have the most interaction with patients, helping to monitor their symptoms, and they have a lot of say in patients’ decisions to renew medications for chronic diseases. We reframed the nurse team's power by tying it to the revenue they could influence.

This time she approached her manager quantifying how much revenue was at stake (his WIIFT) concerning medication renewals and advocating that the nursing team be included in sales discussions rather than only those about patient care. Her boss agreed, and her input became so valuable that she was then invited to a set of cross‐functional meetings to explore other ways the company could elevate the nurses’ contributions. She used her power to grow the respect of her team and grew her influence in the process.

You also have leverage when you can influence someone to act because there are enforcement mechanisms or consequences to their behavior. In addition to your position, power includes any contractual or legal leverage you have, whether that pertains to a client, a business partner, a job, or a roommate/tenant.⁵ An important lever for Mary, the financial advisor, was revisiting their initial partnership agreement. Seeking advice from an attorney emboldened her because their contract had equal pay in its language but had not been enforced.

Business owners often get out of their power in sticky situations with clients, subcontractors, and team members. You have considerable power to negotiate terms of these contracts up‐front, including how disputes will be resolved, and to be the steward who keeps everyone in their power for the greater good.

Create the Weather on Your Team

The best thing you can use your position for as a leader is creating psychological safety among your team, it's the factor with the biggest impact on team performance.⁶ Harvard professor Amy Edmonson coined this term, which means “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up … a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”⁷ This allows team members to speak up without fear (and perhaps even give you feedback you need to do better).

How can you foster psychological safety? Amy Edmonson offers three guidelines. First, convey that making mistakes is an opportunity to learn from them, all together. Second, role‐model by acknowledging you are also fallible. Third, regularly and genuinely ask your team questions, not only about how their work is going but about their well‐being and improvements they see for the team. Be aware of and constantly challenge personal and organizational biases, and be curious to understand and empathize with those who have other perspectives and experiences.⁸ If you've been a person in a lower‐power position at any time, you might have a heightened ability for empathy toward others; this is an asset you can leverage for psychological safety.

As the leader, you create the weather on the team. You can't do it alone, but you can set the tone. For example, you can decide the motto that people will rally around. For Jackie Frank, leader of a fast‐growing mortgage originator team, it was “Excellence without the Drama,” which everyone related to and wanted. As the leader, you get to share not only your vision for the team but also the metrics on which everyone would be evaluated. For her it wasn't just about getting the loan done but the customer satisfaction evaluations—her reputation was built on making clients happy. She shared with her team what she stands for, why it matters to her, and asks them why it matters to them. She made that metric concrete, for example, by sharing thank‐you notes from clients. When you share your vision and what's in your heart, your team can care about it, too. You're not becoming exhausted by trying to get people to follow you, they want to.

And if you have been thoughtful and respectful in your approach, and Impeccable for your 50% using strategies in the portal of Partnership … and still someone on your team doesn’t align with the culture you are creating, you can use the power of your position. Invite them to stay and be a part of the culture, or choose to not be a part of it. You stay in your power when you lay out choices you can stand behind and have non‐attachment to the outcome.

How can you be the thermostat and set the tone for your team culture? What can you do starting today to ensure or increase the psychological safety on your team?

Growing Power in Others Grows Your Power

“One of the greatest human longings we have is to grow,” says Whitney Johnson, best‐selling author of Smart Growth. Growing power in others is good for them, and it's good for you. “When you help other people grow, you are saying to them, ‘I see you.’ If you create the conditions whereby they can respond to their own longings to grow, you're giving them the power they need. It's a predictor of whether or not people are going to stay with you.”⁹

Growing power in others might sound good, but when it comes down to actually doing it, let's get real, isn't that giving up power you have? Charlene Li, expert on disruption and best‐selling author of The Disruption Mindset¹⁰ shared this on the Power Shift podcast: “Leaders say, ‘Well I can't give up control,’ believing they have to do all the thinking themselves, which is totally exhausting, and then lack of implementation makes things feel out of their control.” She challenges leaders: “Tell me, What do you actually have control over?” Better she says to give people a container within which they are empowered to do whatever they need to do in order to accomplish the intent.”¹¹

She shared: “One of my favorite examples is from Comcast. They encouraged people on the front lines—in the call centers—to meet on a regular basis and talk about trends they were seeing. In typical organizational hierarchies, people on the front lines get everything dumped onto them and have no power. But they were encouraged to put together a brief telegram if they noticed something a department leader should know. The executive team looked at these escalations and responded. The power shifted to the front lines, where there is infinite untapped potential and energy.”

You can think of this shift, as she says, “not giving power away but growing it in others,” which then leads to innovation and better implementation toward goals. Don't think about how much power you want but rather about what gives the people you're leading a sense of agency to accomplish your vision.” As the Buddha is quoted as saying: “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

Become a Sponsor

As a mentor you are co‐conspirator in someone else's career ambitions, both encouraging and championing them. As a sponsor you use the power of your relationships and position and talk about the person you're sponsoring in rooms where they are not present. You will actively advocate for and introduce them to people in your network and use your professional capital on their behalf.

You can sponsor others. You have the power to spark a life course to unleash an important voice. Think of paying forward the sponsorship you've gotten. Who is already in your network that you could sponsor or mentor?

Engage in Allyship

“Allyship” is term used to describe efforts by members of a privileged in‐group to advance the interests of marginalized groups. You can be an ally in interpersonal situations, by saying something, for example, when there has been a gender‐, racial‐, or identity‐based discrimination or decision, and by showing your willingness to be open to understanding and supporting those whose life experience is different from yours and may lack the advantages you enjoy. You can also be an ally in ways that are more public and systemic—raising issues, questioning traditions, and endorsing new ideas and new talent. As an ally you play an important role because your voice is sometimes heard and accepted when the same message by a messenger who is “othered” may not.

Dave Smith and Brad Johnson, authors of Good Guys,¹² like to exemplify drawing from a slogan of pride from the gay community to be “loud and proud’ as an ally. An example they give is if you are a working father, don't slink out the back door to go to your daughter's soccer game while the working mothers have the trepidation of announcing they have to leave at 5 p.m. to pick their kids up. Rather, normalize the challenges of working fathers as much as those of working mothers who have to fight career penalties.

Rather than shy away from being seen as an ally because you think people blame you for benefitting from the system in a way they don't, step into your power as an ally. Move beyond labels and be known for your actions.

Jennifer Brown, best‐selling author of How to Be an Inclusive Leader and creator of the popular podcast The Will to Change, suggests an exercise to practice being an ally. “Put yourself in the position of ally (even if you feel that you are marginalized in the system). In certain situations you are an insider or in the majority, in others you are an outsider or in the minority. No matter who you are, in this way you have ‘privilege.’ This ‘privilege’ isn't a bad thing. It's something to accept and be utilized.”¹³

Think about what power you have that you could share with others and what changes you could effect. Ask yourself, ‘What power do I have in this system? What do I have access to that others don't? What rooms am I in that I can invite others into?’ Going through the paces of this exercise can help you leverage your advantages to share power and empower others. It can also help you pinpoint where an ally has power you don't and then give you an idea of specific ways you can ask allies to support you.”

Staying the course as an ally requires you to be in your power. Rather than have a scarcity mentality, consider the 3D perspective and how you can co‐create a shared new vision of the workplace. Jennifer Brown advises: “Because of years of lip service, everyone's BS meter is high, so being authentic and talking ‘real’—beyond public relations talking points—will be a welcome part of your power.” Especially if it's the case that your team/organization/community is not at the point of equity, you want to “own your 50%.” Say: “We are not where we need to be yet. Here's what I am personally doing, here's what our executive team has committed to do, here's how you can hold us accountable.” This kind of candor and taking responsibility breeds others’ trust in you, and it reduces the out‐of‐power reaction others have when lip service makes them feel unseen and unheard.

An Ally includes being an “upstander”—someone who is not the direct target of a microaggression or exclusion but recognizes that something is wrong and speaks or acts to make it right. If you witness bullying (or related disrespectful behavior) and don't do anything about it, it means you were out of your power feeling unsafe to speak up. Not speaking up can have a negative effect on you, parallel to how it can be traumatic for the target.

When I facilitated a panel on gender inclusion at one of the big tech companies, a panel member shared that when he was a junior manager one of the senior engineers on his team made some sexist comments in a team meeting, which made him uncomfortable. He was an upstander, speaking his powerful truth that the comments were inappropriate, suggesting that's “not how we do things here; we're trying to make a culture for all of us.”

Where can you use your power to be an ally or upstander?

Leverage the Power of Platform

Even if you don't have a lot of leverage now, you can create the means to have power. There are abundant examples of this, a notable one being Reese Witherspoon, an American actress who a decade ago said she wasn't getting roles that portrayed strong women characters. So she started her own production company to showcase stories with powerful women.¹⁴ Similarly with Shonda Rhimes, who didn't see women of color represented on TV in powerful roles, so she created shows and scripts that featured them in hit TV series.¹⁵

If you are a solo coach, consultant, business owner, entrepreneur, or an individual working in an organization, you might be thinking, What power do I have? Lots! It's the greatest time in history to get your story and your message out via existing platforms. We are living in a creator and influencer economy—your authentic documentation of how you alchemized your “mess into your message” is inspiration people are hungry for. A video of someone sharing a powerful truth can go viral, reaching 100,000 views within a few days or weeks. You can steadily build an audience from scratch by regularly posting authentic content. This could be you …

You can also use existing channels to become a leading voice. Minda Harts started by owning her story about the invisibility and microaggressions she faced as a Black woman in predominately white culture and corporate life. She used the power of existing channels by putting her story into a form that could go viral—a book, her first one titled The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table. Standing for her end users, she and many other women of color have become important voices of conscience and healing in our media and organizations. You can use your own experience to create a movement that grows power in others as well as in yourself.

Or simply start like Greta Thunberg, stand outside with a sign. When you are in your power, you will find a way. You've had a vision of how things should be, use the leverage you have with your position and make it come to life. Look in every nook and cranny for the power you are overlooking, be creative in harnessing the power that is available to you. #Nowisyourtime.

Personally, I've loved the power of the position I have as author of this book—whispering in your ear to be in your power, feeding your brain with power potions, and cheering you on to use your power for the good of all.

Let's now bring together all the portals on using your power. On the next page you'll find a cheat sheet of reminders to help you remember which portal doors to open as you think through how to use your power. I'll also share two case studies of how one person used multiple strategies to resolve their scenario. Then we'll come up with a plan on how you can live your life in your power.