Personal Power for Technical Leaders

A few weeks back we covered some of the reasons that your stakeholders (or your audience in general) may not be listening to what you say. This is despite whatever technical credentials you might have or whatever position you might hold in your organization.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it, we suggest you get through it first since the rest of this post refers back at several points. You can find it here.

While positional authority is where technical experts may be naturally drawn to as a first choice for getting things done (literally anything and everything) it’s not always effective and furthermore it’s rarely your best choice. Where is it a good choice? Often when personal safety is a factor or there is some other great urgency. For example, evacuation during fire.

Outside of those very rare times, Personal Power is the better way to achieve your goal and get results.

What is personal power?

There’s some confusion in the term Personal Power. In some fields, personal power relates to your personal control over yourself, your emotions and your actions. When it comes to Leadership, Personal Power means something else. It's the power you exercise to get things done or to implement change. Personal Power is not derived from a title or position. It is power that is yours, by virtue of your credibility, competence and emotional intelligence.

What are the components of Personal Power?

There are 3 parts to Personal Power:

Informational Power: Comes from not only having information or knowledge, but by being able to share that knowledge to help others reach their goals and objectives. If you don’t share it with others, then it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you hoard, it doesn’t count.

Expert Power: Based on your skills and abilities that you use to help others achieve their goals and objectives. It’s what you know how to do to help solve problems or overcome obstacles. As with Information power, if you don’t use it to help others, it doesn’t exist.

Referent Power: Some people think this is purely charisma or charm; it’s more than that. It’s more than your ability to network. It’s tied to your Emotional Intelligence and it corresponds to the degree that people choose to follow you; the degree to which they try to emulate your leadership example.

What is the difference when you use Personal Power?

• Your credibility comes from a track record of using your information and knowledge to help solve problems or help other people achieve their goals. You don’t have to tell people how smart or knowledgeable you are.
• It speaks to your competence as well as your intentions; these are things that you’ve followed through on, not just promised.
• People choose to follow you, not because they have to. You’ll see this when they try to do things the way they think you want them done, rather than whatever is easiest for them.

How will you know it’s working/what kinds of things will you get?

• People will start to listen, not because they have to, but because you have established your credibility (not credentials) with them
• You are seen to be able to solve problems

There’s a mind-set shift that needs to happen.

It goes from What do I need from people?, to What can I offer to people?

It’s one of the first questions you are challenged to answer whenever you read or hear about effective networking. What do you bring to the table? It’s a funny thing, but half of the answer is being able to articulate what you can do for others. The other half is the fact that your intention is to do things to help others…

You’ll hear about this mindset, and why good leaders need to adopt it, if you read about the Servant Leadership model. Peter Drucker sums up the first half of the mindset shift saying, “Rank does not confer privilege or give power, it imposes responsibility.”  As a leader, your perception shift is based on two key realizations:

1. As the leader/manager, your team members are the ones that will produce the results that you are responsible for, not you, and
2. If you work on providing what they need to do an excellent job, they will deliver excellence in what you are responsible for

This brings us back around to where we started. How do you get people to listen to you? How is Personal Power the answer?

The first thing is to seek out and understand what others need. If you’re looking inward at your team, taking time to understand what they need from you is key for to great results. If it’s other stakeholders in your organization, then understanding their part of the business, the problems they’re trying to solve and how that adds value to the business is your top priority.

Without that knowledge, of your team needs or your stakeholder needs, you’re guessing on how your skills and expertise can be brought to bear. You may occasionally guess right, but they way you’re likely to fumble on your way there certainly won’t improve your credibility in anyone else’s eyes.

If the first part was to understand the needs and what your stakeholders’ objectives or goals are, then the second part is to demonstrate your understanding to them. You do this through what you talk about and how you talk about it. Where do you focus?

We’ve watched countless technical experts focus the conversation on what they know, how great the technology is, or what they personally find interesting. None of this helps. Your goal is to focus the conversation on what matters to your stakeholder. The technology and its implementation? That’s how you’re going to solve their problem. If you need answers to figure out what you need to make the technology do, then ask business- and process-based questions so you can figure out the technical requirements. Don’t ask your business stakeholders about the technology and expect them to have answers.  

Once you’ve mastered everything this far, where you understand your stakeholder’s business and can focus the conversation on that business in order to get the technical requirements you need to work with, then you can move on to a more advanced application. This is where your Personal Power gets a big boost.

There’s a difference between understanding your stakeholder’s part of the business and being able to focus in on their personal perspectives on the goals. The piece that you need here is to understand, at least at a high level, what your stakeholder’s motivations are.

Stakeholder analysis can help you get in the right mindset, if it’s done right. By done right, we mean the analysis has to touch on the things that will help you determine or estimate what your stakeholders’ priorities and motivations are. When your stakeholder behaves in a way that seems irrational or illogical to you, that’s a good sign you don’t understand their values, priorities and motivations. If that’s where you’re stuck right now, you can find the answers you need in the course.

To be clear, we’re not saying there is no place for Positional Authority. As a leader with a management role, you’ll often find yourself using a blend of Positional Authority and Personal Power. Your goal is to do this in a way that allows you to build your Personal Power. Eventually you’ll be able to let go of your deliberate use of Positional Authority. You want to do this for two reasons:

• The most powerful leaders may have Positional Authority but do not need to use it; they have enough Personal Power to accomplish what they want*
• When it comes time to take on the next role you want, that Positional Authority stays with the role; your Personal Power comes with you

* We’ll talk about some of the major limitations of Positional Authority in a future post

Earlier in this post we wrote about how your Emotional Intelligence has a direct impact on your ability to generate Referent Power. It does much more than that, however. Not only does your awareness of self and awareness of others make it easier to analyze your stakeholders more quickly and accurately, but your social management skills are what help you adjust your communications with your stakeholders quickly and seamlessly. That can boost your credibility faster than you could imagine. [For those of you who are interested, it’s not out yet, but our Emotional Intelligence for Technical Experts course is on the way. Sign up here to get on the mailing list and take advantage of early bird specials!]

Remember: One of your steps to building your Personal Power is to frame your communications (what you know, and what you know how to do) in a way that solves problems that your stakeholders care about.

If you want to build your Personal Power, don’t forget to download 3 Strategies for Building Your Personal Power.

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