Privilege and power

27 Oct

In this five part mini series we’re going to take a look at how you can become an inclusive leader. We’re going to go deeper into each of the topics covered in my talk at Product Tank London. Each article in this mini series will contain self coaching exercises that you can use to understand and develop your own style of leadership.

What topics are we covering in this mini series?

Becoming an inclusive leader
Understanding your values
Beliefs and cognitive biases
Defining your principles
Privilege and power (this article)

If you would like to watch my talk that was the inspiration for this mini series, it’s available now on YouTube.

Introduction

In this fifth article in the mini series, we’re going to dive into privilege and power.

This article contains the following sections:

Understanding your privilege
Different types of power
How to use your privilege and power to create inclusion
Self coaching exercise: understanding your privilege and power

By the end of this article you will understand what privilege and power is and their relationship to each other, and how to use your privilege and power to drive inclusion.

“People in positions of privilege and power have a duty to perform at a higher level. If not them, then who?” - Kathleen Parker, columnist on politics and culture for the Washington Post, Pullitzer Prize winner.

Let’s dive in!

Understanding your privilege

To become an inclusive leader you must first understand your privilege. Privilege is a special right, advantage or immunity granted or available only to one person or group. Your privilege comes from the perceived value of your social identity, which comes from the groups you belong to.

In our society today, some groups are favoured more than others. This creates advantages for those who are favoured, and disadvantages for those who are not. A good illustration of how privilege manifests is the Academic Wheel of Privilege. This highlights different aspects of social identity (the outside ring) and the degree of privilege conferred on those groups depending on the qualities of that social identity, and its value in society.

For instance, we can look at gender:

If you are a cis-man your social identity is highly valued in our patriarchal society, and therefore you have the highest amount of privilege.
If you are a trans, intersex or non binary person your social identity is low value, and therefore you do not have privilege. In this case, you may also experience discrimination as a minority out-group.
If you are a cis-woman, your social identity is valued less than men but more than trans, intersex or non binary people. You have some privilege. Yet despite making up ~50% of the population, you may experience discrimination as an out-group.

The self coaching exercise at the end of this article walks you though understanding your own privilege. This is a valuable exercise to complete as it increases self awareness. In addition, you begin to understand that other people you work with have different levels of privilege. The question is, knowing this how can you create inclusivity where everybody can feel a sense of belonging?

Before we get to answering that question, we need to understand how power manifests, and it’s relationship to privilege.

Different types of power

As we begin to explore power we shift from a focus on the relationship to your self, to your relationship with other people. This is the next level in my relational model outlined in the first article in this series.

Let’s start with a definition of power: the ability to act or influence another person’s behaviour. We all have power, in different forms and degrees. I have the ability to choose my career: that power rests with me and not any employer I choose to work with. But that power can be constrained by the amount of privilege I possess: being an autistic woman (low-medium privilege) may reduce the opportunities I have to work with companies I would like to, because of factors including perceptions around my social identity, biases, or lack of access or accommodations.

French and Raven (1959) researched different types of power, and this provides a useful view on how power manifests and is used. The nine types of power are:

Legitimate - comes from holding a position of authority, e.g. being the CEO
Reward - comes from being able to give rewards to people, e.g. managers making hiring and promotion decisions
Coercive - comes from being able to punish people, e.g. managers being able to demote or fire people
Informational - comes from information you hold that others don’t
Expert - comes from being knowledgeable about a subject area
Referent - comes from liking and respecting each other, e.g. your followers grant you referent power
Connection - comes from networking with others who hold power, e.g. building relationships with senior leaders
Person - comes from your gender, height, nationality
Presence - comes from your ability to be seen or noticed by other people, e.g. everybody looks sharp when they CEO walks into the office

It’s important that you identify what kinds of power you have with the people you lead. For example, product managers operating in a matrix management structure may not have reward or coercive power to encourage their teams to act as they would like, as they do not directly manage them. However, instead they can focus on developing their referent and expert power: build the relationship with the team, and gain a deep understanding of the customer and their problems.

Now let’s look at how to combine your privilege and power to create inclusion.

How to use your privilege and power to create inclusion

To effectively use your power when leading others you need to focus on building trust. Trust comes from vulnerability, which is only possible when there is psychological safety. A quick note on vulnerability: it can help to build trust to share some personal aspects at appropriate moments. Trust building is a choreographed dance of gently increasing personal disclosure - I share something about myself, you share something about yourself, and with every round we get a little more personal. However, be careful of oversharing, or sharing things that are still raw and unprocessed: share the scar, not the wound.

You create psychological safety by being respectful of how your privilege and lived experiences are different to other people’s. In practice, this means listening. And I don’t mean hearing what someone is saying and waiting until they have stopped speaking to then start sharing what has been in your mind all along! I mean deep, active, global listening: focusing your attention on the person in front of you, noticing what they say and don’t say, noticing what their body, face and voice give away in terms of emotional state, listening without judgement. Empathise with the person, which is to acknowledge their experience and how it impacted them, see it from their perspective. Show compassion, care and support, even if you haven’t had that experience or don’t fully understand it. Your lack of experience or inability to understand does not negate that this happened for the other person. If you disregard this, you are abusing your privilege and misusing your power.

If you have privilege you have power, and a big part of inclusive leadership is advocacy, allyship and courage. That means you must say the thing that people with less privilege can’t.

As a leader you belong to the social group of ‘leaders’, which in itself confers privilege and power. Neglecting to recognise this and use them wisely is a leading cause of leadership failure, evidenced by people losing trust, becoming disengaged and ultimately parting ways.

A final note on this topic before moving to the self coaching exercise: leadership is lonely. This is precisely why you need to do the work on yourself, because you need to understand who you are, how you react in stressful situations, and what you stand for. Your values, beliefs and principles are what you fall back on when the going gets tough (and you better believe it will get tough at times!). Weak leadership arises when these aspects of your relationship with your self aren’t there, or are under developed. That’s why I strongly recommend revisiting the articles earlier in the series to get a solid grounding before moving forwards.

Self coaching exercise: understanding your privilege and power

I recommend completing this self coaching exercise when you have 30-60 minutes to yourself, free from distractions. Grab a notebook and a pen, and your drink of choice, and spend some time journalling your answers to these prompts:

What is your level of privilege?
How is your social identity valued in society?
What power do you have?
Where do you give away your power?
How can you reclaim that power?

You can ask yourself these same questions for each team member you work with - what is their privilege, social identity and power?

How does your privilege differ from other people's?
How can you use your privilege to support others with less?
How can you use your power to lift others?
What can you do to create an inclusive culture?

Wrap up

And that draws our exploration of privilege and power to a close, and this mini series. Please let me know if any of this resonated with you, and what you are going to do differently as a result of reading.