Power and Influence

career path, it requires that one move, over time, toward positions where one can help manage some strategic contingency for the organization. All professional, managerial, and technical people face situations each and every day where they can increase or decrease some of their power. Developing a power base in one’s early career requires that one

people can be taught to make a realistic self-assessment, to assess opportunities competently, and then to make intelligent choices.

One must actively lead those in all the relevant relationships, up, down, and laterally. One must be willing to deal with all the challenges these relationships present.

The problem here in many cases is that to make these programs work, the human resource staff must have a sufficient number of competent leaders in it.

if children hear nothing about their parents’ jobs, or if they are given only simplistic answers to their inquiries about “what mommy and daddy do at work,” they are going to be programmed with naive beliefs.

Doing this, in turn, requires that one take advantage of simple opportunities encountered each day for developing these sources of power. It also requires that one more strategically “invest” some power in longer-term projects on an ongoing basis in the hope of getting it back with “interest”

Everyone between the ages of twenty and forty could probably profit by periodically examining their own careers in terms of the development of a power base and a success syndrome. This means considering questions such as these: • Over the past twelve months, how much have I really learned about the products or services, the markets, the technologie

anti-Arab boycott laws.

A key part of this power-development strategy usually involves (as it did in this case) moving toward projects or jobs or departments that are strategically important to the organization.6