What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.
Themes from Moses
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Influence
49 ratings
University of Pennsylvania
49 ratings
Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success
From the lesson
Module 1
In this module, we’ll begin by defining influence. You’ll weigh the pros and cons of proactivity and political ability, and find the right balance to get any job done within your organization. You’ll learn different models of power structures and dynamics, and discover the importance of flexibility, situational awareness, and agency. By the end of this module, you’ll be better able to analyze organizational structure, recognize processes within your organization that need improvement, and use your power of influence to optimize these processes.
Meet the Instructors
Cade MasseyPractice Professor
The Wharton School
So we've seen that Moses illustrates all five
of the bases of social power that French and Raven talk about.
But he is such a rich study in power and such an interesting character,
that we can understand other aspects of power through him as well.
He illustrates some issues we've already talked about and
some that we will talk about for the rest of the class.
So let's consider other factors that affected how much power and
influence he wielded.
So we'll talk about four performance, organizational process, agency, and
ethics.
First, performance, Moses had access to these levers that he pulled
only because of his reputation built over decades.
We drop you into a story that happens kind of mid-career for him.
But we're skipping over decades of work and reputation building that he had gone
through that earned him the confidence of legislators and mayors that allowed him to
secure the power and the processes that protected him for decades.
He was known as the man who got things done.
The newspapers talked about this, the man who got things done.
How would you like to have the reputation as the man or
the woman who gets things done?
What a fantastic thing, I'm emphasizing it here because it’s easy to look at
levers of influence and on topics like we're talking about in this course.
And think that they are alternatives to performance.
There is no alternative to performance, performance is the necessary part.
It is what you're levering with all of these tools of influence.
But without the performance you don't have anything to lever.
So Moses is actually a great example of that
despite how good he was with levers of influence, despite how he captured
organizational processes in ways that might feel pretty nefarious.
He had, first and foremost, performance.
There's a great quote from Jacob Lutsky who was a judge under four
mayors in New York.
This is elsewhere in Caro, I think it's worth seeing in full.
Lutsky says, you've got to understand every morning when a mayor comes to work,
there are a hundred problems that must be solved.
And a lot of them are so big and
complex that they just don't seem susceptible to solution.
And when he asks guys for solutions, what happens?
Most of them can't give him any.
And those that do come up with solutions, those solutions are unrealistic or
impractical, or just plain stupid.
But you give a problem to Moses and overnight he's back in front of you,
with a solution, all worked out down to the last detail, drafts of speeches you
can give to explain it to the public, drafts of press releases for
the newspapers, drafts of the state laws you'll need to get passed,
advice as to who should introduce the bills in the Legislature and
what committees they should go to, drafts of any City Council and Board of Estimate
resolutions you'll need; if there are constitutional questions involved, a list
of the relevant precedents and a complete method of financing are all spelled out.
He had solutions when no one else had solutions.
This is amazing, right?
How much would you give to be this kind of employee, this kind of leader,
this kind of manager?
This is the reputation he had, this was the basis of his power and
we shouldn't forget it.
Performance is the basis, performance is the necessary bit.
Second, organizational process, we talked about this earlier in this module
with Alison's models of power, this is the model to organizational process.
Jeff Pfeffer, the organizational scholar, puts it this way.
It is often the case that exercising power creates enemies who
constitute a threat to your long-term organizational survival.
Thus, in developing and exercising power it is important to use structural
mechanisms that institutionalize your power and diffuse responsibility for
decisions and actions.
This institutionalization is great, so it's not just you,
it's not just your ability to persuade people.
It is institutionalizing in the organizational processes,
your preferences and your goals.
So given the nature of rules and structure, what are the implications for
you as a manager?
One is to recognize, via Allison, as Allison talks about it, that
these processes are not always established in the best interest of the organization.
They can come about because of private agendas, competing interests,
they often just persist out of benign neglect.
So it's not like they're optimized, they are there for often haphazard reasons.
And so they are ripe for tweaking,
either towards the rational direction or your interests.
Hopefully the rational interest, but they can be your interest
within the organizations towards whatever goals you're trying to achieve.
The second implication should be apparent now from Moses,
in particular, is that you shouldn't accept these processes as a given.
They are essentially cards that are dealt and redealt continuously.
You can and should influence the dealing.
Why take these as passive?
This is going to be a theme that we pick up in a little more detail at Moses and
throughout the course.
Don't accept circumstances as fixed.
Don't be passive with regard to your environment.
And in particular, this thing that so many neglect, this thing that people don't
appreciate how influential they are, organizational processes, bureaucracy.
Don't neglect that as something that can be moved in the direction of your goal.
That takes us to agency, a third theme in the Moses example.
This notion that rule-breakers are especially influential.
Rodrigo Canales,
a sociologist at Yale, talks about how essential they are for innovation.
He studies it in the micro-credit environment and
it's been talked about more broadly.
Pfeffer again says, if you have all the power you want or need,
by all means not only follow the rules but encourage everyone else to do so too.
But if you are still traversing your path to power, take all
this conventional wisdom and quote, rule following, with a big grain of salt.
Pfeffer's saying, great, for
those in power of course you want for people to live by the rules.
But if your not in power you've got to challenge the rules because in general
the rules are built to protect those in power.
So as you are traversing your path in power as Pfeffer says,
you almost necessarily have to challenge the rules.
And there's some optimal amount of rule breaking that has to be done.
So the definition of agency is to act: to exert control over ones environment.
And we find that this is a vital characteristic for powerful people.
They actively shape the situations they face,
rather than passively accepting what they find.
This is stacking the deck, this is not playing the cards you're dealt.
There's a time and place to play the cards you're dealt.
There's a certain philosophy there that is helpful in some situations, but
we're actively encouraging stacking the deck here.
This is exercising agency in your environment.
Now, hopefully you see that the cultivation and
use of power is inextricably linked up with ethics.
You can't read the Moses example, you can't hear about the Moses example without
worrying a little bit about, okay, was that okay?
In a lot of ways that wasn't okay and
that's going to come up with every exercise of power.
We've just talked about agency.
How did you react when we talked about agency in that way?
Do you blanch a little bit, are you uncomfortable?
I hope you are uncomfortable because it shouldn't
be okay to go crashing through every wall and breaking every rule.
That's not probably the best course of action for you or your organization.
So there's always going to be this tension between exercising that much agency,
between capturing, influencing, bending organizational processes and ethics.
And we're raising it now,
we'll continue to discuss it through the rest of the course.
And if you're not a little uncomfortable we want you to be a little uncomfortable.
Something I like about Moses, one of the reasons we use the Moses examples
is that it provokes us to think more deeply about what is okay and
what is not okay as we cultivate and use power.
So an example from Moses' own life was a proposal that he made late in his career.
This kind of proposal came from a conviction that he had.
Carol puts it this way,
Robert Moses himself was certain he held the keys to the city’s future.
That’s amazing conviction, right?
When you are certain you hold the keys to the city’s future,
license is pretty much whatever you want to do.
One of the things he wanted to do and one of the first big projects he wasn’t
able to do was the Cross Manhattan Arterial.
So this road runs, we’re looking from west to east across lower Manhattan here,
from the Hudson to the East River, and that four, five,
six lane elevated expressway is about where Houston Street is now.
So basically he wanted to divide lower Manhattan, about where Houston is,
which would have separated Soho,
Tribeca, the financial districts from the rest of the island.
And Happily, most people feel happily, he wasn't able to do this.
But this is what he wanted to do, this was his conviction.
This was the agency he wanted to exert.
How does that sit ethically?
How did he know, how does anyone know that, that was the right thing to do?
So this raises the question about ends and means.
And this is going to be something we want you to always grapple with around
power and we'll continue to talk about it.
The author Aldous Huxley put it this way, the end can not justify the means, for
the simple and
obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends.
So Huxley clearly had a position on this.
Moses had a different position.
Moses put it this way, if the end doesn't justify the means, what does?
So we want you to struggle.
What is your position on this?
How do you reconcile ends versus means?
This is something you're going to have to grapple with as you cultivate
and use power.
President Obama in his first inaugural address put it this way.
He said, power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.
Instead our power grows through its prudent use,
emanates from the justness of our cause,
the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
So this is one approach to the use of power.
But these are some considerations to the cultivation and
use of power that helps you navigate these ethical questions.
But you're going to have to come up with your own.
We don't want to just take in what Moses did or what Huxley says or
what Obama says.
These are inputs for you developing your own ethical framework.
One closing thought, a quote from a former colleague of mine at Yale,
Jonathan Koppell.
Koppell says, people often worry about politics as a substitute for merit.
But if manipulating rules and working within rules are keys to success, and
doing so is considered politics, perhaps political ability is merit.
This is really turning the concerns about politics on it's head.
Not only is politics not an alternative to performance,
it is a source of performance.
You can't have performance without some degree of political maneuvering.
We see the consequences of high end political maneuvering in Moses.
It raises issues for us that in some cases are inspiring, in some cases are worrying.
But these are issues that we're going to navigate for the rest of our careers
hopefully And for the rest of the course we'll be talking about how to do that.
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