Friday Reflection (No.40): Motives and Decision-Making Part 4 - Power
September 30, 2022
When you hear the phrase “I Have the Power!” what comes to mind?
For most Gen Xers and older millennials, there is only one right answer:
That’s right - He-Man!1
While this phrase evokes 80’s cartoons and more recently, a Kanye West track2, it is also a representative mantra for one of the three core acquired needs - power.
This week’s reflection is the final entry of a 4-part series on motives and decision-making. So far, we’ve looked at affiliation- and achievement-dominant leaders.
Let’s wrap up by exploring decision-making watchouts for power dominant leaders.
McClelland defines the power motive as the desire to have an impact as well as be strong and influential.3
This motive comes in two flavors - socialized and personalized. Socialized power is the desire to have an impact for the benefit of others, the organization and/or society. Personalized power is the desire to have an impact to further one’s own status.4
My experience would suggest that the watchouts below are often more acute with a dominant personalized power profile. That said, they can show up with socialized power leaders as well.5
Watchout #1: Short-termism. The more certain path to impact is often the one that will show results more immediately. As a result, power-dominant leaders can sometimes be too quick to choose the option that gets quick results vs. making investments that will pay dividends in the long run.6
Technique #1: Long-term opportunity costs and risks. Task someone on your team or carve out dedicated time (if you don’t have a team) to ask the following questions:
By making this decision today, what long-term investments/initiatives are we saying “no” to or deferring? What will be the cost of saying “no” or deferring these long-term investments/initiatives?
If we make this decision today, what might we look back on three years from now and regret?
From a time horizon standpoint, what does our “portfolio” of initiatives/ investments look like today? What percentage are helping to drive near-term vs. long-term benefits?
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Watchout #2: Personal sphere of influence vs. the whole enterprise. Particularly in large organizations, there are often decisions that may be sub-optimal for one part of the organization, but bring the most benefit to the overall organization. Power-dominant leaders can sometimes fall into the trap of advocating for the opposite. In other words, they tend to make decisions that are best for their team or their part of the organization, even when it comes at the expense of overall organizational goals.
Technique #2: Observers’ perspective. While I’ve written about this concept in other places, there are three personas that can help to take more of a whole enterprise perspective on decisions:
Solomon: What would a wise, dispassionate advisor recommend in this situation?
Successor: What would my successor do in this situation?7
Rival: What would my rival (or counterpart) in another part of the organization do in this situation?
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Watchout #3: More, more, more. Power-dominant leaders can have a bias towards decisions that have potential to increase scale of impact. After all, greater impact and influence is fundamentally what motivates them. That said, bigger isn’t always better. Growth at all costs can have unintended consequences. Consider the example of acquisitions. Many CEOs pursue acquisitions with vigor in their attempts to grow the size of the company or expand the type of products and services a company offers. However, most acquisitions end up being “value killers” vs. “value creators.”8
Technique #3: Experiment with subtraction. Gabrielle Adams and her co-authors make a compelling case for the value of subtraction. One practical tip they recommend is to assign a “subtractor in chief” to each leadership team or project team. Their role is to push the team to do less and remove work. They can hold you accountable for when a decision is pointing towards “more” vs. “less.,” and compel you to wrestle with the tradeoffs.
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My hope is that this series helps bring greater awareness to the interplay between motives and decision-making. I also hope that some of the techniques can help to provide additional perspective when you or one of your team members is making a decision where they may fall victim to one of the watchouts. That said, since none of us is actually He-Man or She-Ra, we also have to be gracious with ourselves when we do make the wrong decision and where possible, use it as an opportunity to learn.
Some questions I reflected on this week:
How can I “automate” some of the techniques from this series to avoid some of the decision-making watchouts?
What is an example where I was unable to overcome one of these watchouts and ended up making the wrong decision? What can I learn from it?
If you want to listen to an epically bad and yet terrifyingly catchy jingle, check out the “I Have the Power” official musical video from He-Man.
His song “Power” also was on the soundtrack for the movie Social Network. That background chanting of “Ohoh eehheh, ohoh eeheh ohoh ehheh eheheheh eheheheh” still hypes me up.
See first post in the series for more background on McClelland and his acquired needs theory - motives and decision-making.
This is the one place I can get a bit stuck when it comes to McClelland’s motive profiles. These two flavors of power seem VERY different and so on the surface, it is odd why they are grouped together. What McClelland argues (I think) is that the desire for impact shows up differently, because socialized power leaders have a greater degree of self-control and inhibition and therefore direct their desire for impact towards the benefit of others. In other words, early experiences taught them to value being influential; however, how they interpret the utility of being influential, either for themselves or for others, is shaped by several other personality and environmental factors. Just another reminder of the mantra I repeat over and over - “No model is perfect. Some models are useful.”
Another important nuance for the power dominant profile is the interplay of some of the other motives. For example, a leader with high socialized power motive and low affiliation motive may need to worry less about the second watchout I mention below in particular.
I talk about this in my post on making digital investments.
This great question comes from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive, which I’ve referenced several times in this series. The benefit is that it creates distance and that enables us to see things in a more clear-eyed way.