Unlock Your Leadership Power and Influence

Don’t be fooled. The new game is ‘power’.

We saw it in the American election and it’s spreading.

Harris clearly had plenty of power in her election campaign and has in her life to achieve the amazing things she has. In anyone’s books, she’s amazing, but she was still seen as lacking power and faced the most enormous power challenge of our time – TRUMP.

And the environment is ripe worldwide. The pressures of international turmoil bring a weight on people’s minds and although we don’t have the Australian statistics, we know that 8-in-10 Americans say they have less personal freedom and they have a bizarre grip on reality with nearly half (46 percent) agreeing that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. People look for power in others to solve their problems.

Power is never far from anyone’s agenda. Whether we recognise it or not, every week in Australia we are chocked with fresh power stories. Did Albanese ring Joyce for upgrades? Did Whyte use power for sex, or was the pandemic response a response to advice or a need for power?

So before our election begins, let’s think about power, that intoxicating elixir Henry Kissinger discerned as “the ultimate aphrodisian”.

Some powerful people exercise sexual prerogatives, some collect possessions, and some power seekers relish the psychological satisfaction suggested by novelist Amy Tan’s definition of power: “holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them.” This last outcome was Trump’s election strategy, but what of Albanese and Dutton? I’m guessing sex and possessions won’t work on our soil, so watch this space.

“Powerful people act with great daring and sometimes behave rather like gorillas,” said psychologist Cameron Anderson, assistant professor at UC Berkeley who has studied power dynamics. In academia, one local professor convened a session with lowly graduate students, who listened reverentially, while he hoisted his feet onto the conference table and commenced clipping his toenails.

“Disinhibition is the very root of power,” said Stanford Professor Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist who focuses on the study of power. “For most people, what we think of as ‘power plays’ aren’t calculated and Machiavellian — they happen at the subconscious level. Many of those internal regulators that hold most of us back from bold or bad behaviour diminish or disappear. When people feel powerful, they stop trying to ‘control themselves’.”

Personally, I can’t wait to see what unfolds here in Australia and faced with the Trump victory and our own upcoming election, rather than paint a dim picture, let’s remember the positive side of power: that the lowering of inhibitions frees the powerful to shake up organisations, fearlessly challenge the status quo, do the right thing regardless of unpopularity, and follow a more daring vision.

Let me know your thoughts.

Love, Dr Louise Mahler