Part 3/4

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Martin Luther King Jr

While I am writing this piece, Venezuela is facing a day of chaos and uprisings.

We cannot talk on leadership and peacebuilding without talking about power. We will need to leave our comfort zone for this conversation. Everyone would agree that power is an essential and inevitable element present in any society. But power is usually viewed with suspicion and conflicted feelings. That can lead to paralysis – an inability to act.

I was very inspired by the readings from A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation. Here are some of my reflections:

Power is a force! It is an individual, collective, and political force. Whether this force is positive or negative depends on its purpose. Power can undermine or empower people and organizations. Power can promote transformation and change.

“…many leaders understand power negatively, as being control and domination; something that cannot be shared without shaking its centre, rather than seeing it in a positive light as something that enables…”

Zimbabwean, 1991 (Quoted from “Harnessing the Creative Energies of Citizens” by Ezra Mbogori and Hope Chigudu, in A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation)

Power is dynamic and multidimensional. Its forms and expressions change with interests, context, and circumstances. Power can play out in domination and resistance or in collaboration and transformation.

• Power over people and resources perpetuates inequality, injustice, and poverty
• Power with people can find a common ground and build collective strength
• Individual power is the ability to act, make a difference, and shape one’s world
• Power within each person includes confidence, dignity, self-esteem, and the capacity to imagine with hope
• Power can be visible, hidden, and invisible. Formal power can be used to decide. Power behind-the-scenes influences agendas and decisions. Power can influence mindsets, beliefs, and the status quo.

Eric Liu, in his TED Talk Why Ordinary People Need to Understand Power, challenges people to understand power, who has it, how it operates, how it flows, what part of it is visible, what part of it is not, and why some people have it. I do not agree with Liu’s definition of power and would suggest a more inclusive word for “everyman” (you will understand when watching Liu’s talk!). But I agree that he raises relevant reflections on, for instance, how the city is a great arena for the practicing of power. One experiment in this realm is participatory budgeting –everyday citizens deciding upon the allocation of city funds– that spread out from Porto Alegre, Brazil to cities like New York and Chicago.

Power and self-assessment

Understanding power begins with a commitment to not only talk about it, but to explore our personal experiences of power and powerlessness.

At my very first class at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, I was challenged to undertake a self-assessment to identify my sources of power and how I use them. I asked myself:

• “What groups do I belong to that have more power than others, and how do they influence my culture?”

It was an uncomfortable, thought-provoking moment.

Have you deeply assessed your own sources of power and how you have used them?

Leaders committed to the discipline of self-awareness challenge themselves to acknowledge that their position of privilege and sources of power inform their choice-making. They also question how their acts and attitudes perpetrate just or unjust systems.

Our understandings and ideologies inform our worldviews. What our mind creates is tainted by our daily life experience, by the lenses with which we see human beings, and relate to each other. These lenses also define how we understand, experience, and practice power.

Isn’t it interesting that the way we understand leadership, conflict, and power define how we practice them?

In 2007, a study of 611 senior managers was conducted to understand pseudo-transformational leadership – the unethical facet of transformational leadership. The practice of power was a central differentiator between the pseudo and the genuine transformational leaders.

Power and Knowledge

“Knowledge and human power are synonymous.”

Francis Bacon

Those who have more power have a definitive role in spreading knowledge and influencing worldviews. This knowledge, which is produced and distributed in many ways, carries a narrative and perpetuates stereotypes. No field of knowledge is neutral or apolitical, because human beings are not neutral or apolitical. Patricia Collins, on her book Black Feminism Thought, discusses the connections between knowledge and power relations and asserts that knowledge validation reflects the interest of those who produce and control it.

How much does this relate to leadership? 100%.

• Have you pondered why you define leadership, power, and success the way you do?
• What other leadership practices have been invalidated by the models and theories we have adopted?
• What are these models saying, between the lines, about who can and who cannot be a leader?
• How do all these influence educational systems, recruiting and hiring processes, salaries, promotions, and career development?
• Do the leadership models built on a global perspective really apply to all contexts and cultures? Think global and act local?
• Are we perpetuating patterns of oppression, discrimination, segregation, and stereotypes?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sheds light on this in one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time – The Danger of a Single Story – (yes, I love TED Talks!). She says that it is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. How stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Chimamanda calls power the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

“The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, novelist

Let’s talk about dignity, leadership, and peacebuilding in the next piece…

References

Adichie, C. N. (n.d.). The Danger of a Single Story. TEDGlobal 2009. Retrieved May 1, 2019, from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?referrer=playlist-the_power_of_fiction_1#t-1101318

Barling, J., Christie, A., & Turner, N. (2007). Pseudo-Transformational Leadership: Towards the Development and Test of a Model. Journal of Business Ethics,81(4), 851-861. doi:10.1007/s10551-007-9552-8

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Liu, E. (2013, September). Why Ordinary People Need to Understand Power. TEDCity2.0. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_why_ordinary_people_need_to_understand_power?referrer=playlist-the_global_power_shift#t-11397

VeneKlasen, L. (2008). A new weave of power, people et politics: The action guide for advocacy and citizen participation. Bourton on Dunsmore: Practical Action Publ.