What It Really Takes to Succeed | LSW#37
7 personal qualities that build power
Summary
Most “success” recipes are either too simplistic or simply lack scientific evidence. There are as many formulas as there are writers. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford is a notable exception. He’s researched and studied evidence-based strategies to acquire power spanning multiple decades. In this edition, I share a key framework from his extensive body of work.
If you’re attempting anything worthwhile — career climb, entrepreneurship, get into leadership roles — use this framework as a checklist to figure out what you might be missing, and where to shore up efforts. I typically recommend clients to revisit this list every 6 months and steadily working towards developing each aspect.
Let’s jump in.
The problem with “success” theories
Success literature typically suffers from the following problems:
Hindsight and survivorship biases
Hidden role of chance
Too small a sample size (one person’s opinion)
Not enough systematic research or empirical evidence
Causal relationships that are hard to identify
And lastly, too many hucksters selling the easy fix. It’s hard to discern the signal from the noise.
7 qualities essential for success
As noted, Jeffery Pfeffer is an exception in this regard. In his 2010 treatise Power, there’s a section I reference regularly. It stands out due to its clarity and simplicity, and is based on solid evidence. Pfeffer calls it “seven personal qualities to build power” but it’s equally applicable as a general framework for succeeding at anything we’re attempting.
He identifies the two personal dimensions of WILL and SKILL, each with its set of characteristics. This creates a 7 element framework:
Will (the drive to take on big challenges)
Ambition
Energy
Focus
Skill (the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment)
Self-knowledge (reflective mindset)
Confidence (self-assurance)
Empathy (ability to read others)
Capacity to tolerate conflict
Points worth noting:
Intelligence is not on this list. Too often we use it as an excuse, or attribute too much of it when accounting for others’ successes. Pfeffer outright dismisses it as a causal factor, and also highlights that in many cases, too much of it is a liability. The same can be said of innate talent. It helps, but beyond a certain level it’s a more level playing field.
There’s nothing extraordinary or surprising. As with many things that actually work, it’s the consistent execution that matters not the method used.
These are all attributes we can develop and in our control (personal).
Let’s look at each element.
Ambition
Study any successful person and you’ll find many years of consistent hard work coupled with persistence and patience. Clichéd? Yes. But knowing it and doing it are two entirely different things.
A counter-intuitive reason why this is hard is because doing it long enough is often just plain boring. We simply lack the psychological capacity to stay with the mundane long enough. I call it thinking in “movie time” instead of “human time”.
Organizational absurdity is another factor:
Organizational life can be irritating and frustrating and can divert people’s effort and attention. Ambition—a focus on achieving influence—can help people overcome the temptation to give up or to give in to the irritations.
Without a burning ambition to overcome these strong headwinds, you simply won’t put up with the BS long enough to bear fruit.
Energy
I know of almost no powerful people who do not have boundless energy. That’s because energy does three things that help build influence.
First, energy, like many emotional states such as anger or happiness, is contagious. Therefore, energy inspires more effort on the part of others.
… Second, energy and the long hours it permits provide an advantage in getting things accomplished. Research on genius or talent—exceptional accomplishment achieved in a wide range of fields—consistently finds that “laborious preparation” plays an important role.
…Third, people often promote those with energy because of the importance of being able to work hard and also because expending great energy signals a high degree of organizational commitment and, presumably, loyalty.
The brutal reality is that achieving anything off the beaten path requires off the chart efforts.
Most of the hacks out there promise the “secret” to bypass this natural law. And there’s always exceptions to this. Those are the very ones that grab our attention. Meanwhile, the slow, boring, often multi-decade trek to success doesn’t show up on our radar. The latter is what’s actually more doable.
Energy, and health in general, clearly plays a key role in whether we can sustain this level of effort. Note that this is not necessarily hustle culture but instead engaging with work differently. I covered this here: Forget work-life balance, imbalance works better.
Focus
Put some dried grass out in the sun and nothing happens, even on the hottest day. Put the dried grass under a magnifying glass and the grass catches on fire. The sun’s rays, focused, are much more powerful than they are without focus. The same is true for people seeking power.
Pfeffer highlights three elements of focus:
One is specialization in a particular industry or company, providing depth of understanding and a more substantial web of focused relationships.
…A second dimension of focus is concentration on a limited set of activities or functional skills. If, as much research suggests, genius requires a large number of hours to achieve outstanding levels of competence, it is true, by definition, that you can acquire those hours in less elapsed time if you focus your attention more narrowly.
…A third aspect to focus is to concentrate on those activities within your particular job or position that are the most critical—that have the most impact on getting work done and on others’ perceptions of you and your effectiveness.
Couple of pointers:
Most folks are in a hurry. The very fact that you can patiently play the long game is a competitive advantage.
Same is true for focus — most people are spread thin in their efforts — because focus means making choices and tradeoffs. And choice is tricky — often keeping options open results in a loss of power. Owning it outright, and reducing available choices, paradoxically increases power.
Self-knowledge
While highlighting the importance of self-awareness and self-knowledge Pfeffer gives the example of a relatively young CEO who regularly engaged in self-reflection:
After every significant meeting or interaction, he would make notes in a small notebook. He would write down what had gone well and what hadn’t, what people had said and done, and the outcome of the meeting. That notebook captured his thoughts about what had transpired so that he could make future interactions more effective; and the discipline of writing fostered reflection and also imprinted the insights more forcefully into his consciousness.
…Structured reflection takes time. It also requires the discipline to concentrate, make notes, and think about what you are doing. But it is very useful in building a path to power.
Self-reflection is probably the single most transformational “technology” available to us, except mostly we don’t use it or simply don’t know how. A big part of what makes coaching effective is the enforced cadence of structured reflection over time.
I’ve written extensively on this:
Confidence
Formal job titles and positions can provide influence and power. But in many situations, you will be working with peers or with outsiders who may not know your formal status. And in any case, observers are going to try and figure out if they should take you seriously or not. Consequently, you need to seize control of the situation.
In making decisions about how much power and deference to accord others, people are naturally going to look to the other’s behavior for cues. Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers will associate confident behavior with actually having power. Coming across as confident and knowledgeable helps you build influence
If you aren’t confident about what you deserve and what you want, you will be reluctant to ask or to push, and therefore you will be less successful in obtaining money or influence compared to those who are bolder than you.
Posts that build on this idea:
You can act your way into the right mindset.
Confidence comes from doing hard things and doesn’t have to be a causal criteria.
Acting confidently doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of doubt either.
Empathy
Training in negotiation often includes advice to negotiate over “interests” rather than “positions.” Through a process of mutual concessions, both parties may end up better off, but in order to succeed at such an approach, you need to understand where the other is coming from. This ability to put yourself in another’s place is also useful for acquiring power.
Most treatment of empathy on social media dwells on the mistaken notion of simply being nice. What gets missed is that it’s equally effective at progressing your own agenda. Understanding the other person’s position helps you make a stronger case and better inform your decisions.
Balancing advocacy with inquiry is a key skill is doing so. Most folks do too much advocacy and not enough inquiry. Here’s my LinkedIn post on it. (future article to follow.)
Empathetically accurate perceivers are those who are consistently good at “reading” other people’s thoughts and feelings. All else being equal, they are likely to be the most tactful advisors, the most diplomatic officials, the most effective negotiators, the most electable politicians, the most productive salespersons, the most successful teachers, and the most insightful therapists.
— William Ickes
Capacity for conflict (courage)
Because most people are conflict-averse, they avoid difficult situations and difficult people, frequently acceding to requests or changing their positions rather than paying the emotional price of standing up for themselves and their views. If you can handle difficult conflict-and stress-filled situations effectively, you have an advantage over most people.
Pfeffer calls this conflict and cites several examples and darker aspects of pugilistic leaders.
But this capacity is also a form of courage. What kind of courage? It’s existential (different from physical or moral) in nature because it requires you to confront: your own doubts, others’ opinions, gatekeepers and distractors, amongst other factors.
Most folks will avoid going in that direction particularly in organizational setups. If you can strengthen your skill in engaging productively without getting carried away or shirking from it, you have an advantage.
Check out my article on existential courage where I go deeper and explore nuances. Negative capability is another construct that runs parallel to Pfeffer’s notion of being comfortable with conflict.
I hope you find Pfeffer’s formulation as useful as I did. If any of this resonated, I highly recommend his 2010 book Power, and the more recent 7 Rules of Power.
That does it for this edition. If you found this useful, forward it to someone who might benefit. Thank you for reading!
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Love the validation that organizational absurdity is real, and we have to find ways to navigate it. Well said!