Last week I delivered a keynote about power and ethics in tech. During the Q&A, someone asked how a leader espousing liberal values could do something like implode their own company by publishing a public blog prohibiting employees from speaking about societal issues and concerns. To answer this question, I find it helpful to consider the three types of power commonly discussed in management theory: power-over, power-with, and power-to. These three types of power were first identified by the Mother of Modern Management, Mary Parker Follett. You may also recognize her as the person who coined the term “win-win.” Here are the three types of power:
Power-over is extractive. Power-over is extracted from other people, the natural world, etc. Power-over means getting more of the pie.
Power-with is gained when we work together, i.e, collective action. Power-with means making the pie bigger as a result of all of us making pie together.
Power-to is productive and generative. Power-to is the power we have to create new things. Power-to means making the pie bigger in some new way or even making a new and different pie.
Through the lens of these three types of power, we can see It is perfectly possible (and indeed quite common) to espouse liberal values while still aligning with power-over. A combination of liberalism and power-over looks like teaching everyone to reach their fullest possible potential within the game...rather than changing the rules of the game to benefit all people.
Are you, like me, a woman who has been sent to executive presence training that taught you to lean in and act more like a man? You’ve experienced liberal ideologies combined with power-over. This means we do not fix the system to be more equitable. Instead we “fix the women” to excel in the current system (Harquail 2019). When liberal ideologies are combined with power-over, everyone is encouraged to be the best they can be...within the existing (extractive) structure.
While power-with and power-to play pretty nicely with each other, power-over is threatened by the other types of power. If, for example, you were an executive aligned with power-over and your employees decided to organize together into a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) council, this would be a very threatening situation. In that situation, the power-over executive(s) would likely be willing to watch their company implode rather than yielding any power. People aligned with power-over will not be able to recognize a power-with or power-to effort for what it is, an effort to grow the total amount of power available rather than a grab for a greater percentage of a fixed power pool.
If we truly want to fix the system, we must let go of power-over. We must use collective action to bring something new into being. If for example, an executive shut down an employee-led DEI effort and had a complete meltdown via blogs and Twitter, it might feel really good to call out that executive. But rejecting power-over is only (a small) part of creating change. In that situation, it would be of primary importance to validate the lived experience of those people who were victimized and/or marginalized. It would be important to let those marginalized folks know that their critique of power-over is valid and not an overreaction. We must imagine, “What kind of system would help all people flourish today?”