Summary
Joe and Brett explore the critical distinction between power (control over others) and empowerment (being yourself despite consequences). They argue that everyone in any system is interdependent — even billionaires and CEOs have countless “bosses” — so no one truly has unilateral power. The seeking of power is always rooted in fear, and like any addiction, it provides only short-term relief. True empowerment comes from being willing to face consequences for your truth.
The conversation covers how this applies to relationships, companies, and social change. Joe explains that when people act empowered — being authentic despite potential consequences — 7-8 times out of 10 the feared consequence doesn’t materialize. Even when it does, acting from truth eventually creates a reality that matches your values. They discuss how the drama triangle (victim/savior/bully) maps to fear states (freeze/flight/fight), and how blame, shame, and guilt are reliable indicators of disempowerment.
The episode concludes with how empowerment works in organizations through elegant structure that creates safety while maximizing autonomy, and how living by internal principles is what frees us from the drama of seeking power. Empowerment and unconditional love are described as two sides of the same mountain — you can’t reach the peak without both.
Key Concepts
- Power can be taken away, empowerment cannot
- Seeking power is an expression of fear
- Acting empowered usually avoids the feared consequence
- Blame, shame, and guilt indicate disempowerment
- The drama triangle maps to fight, flight, and freeze
- Empowered organizations need elegant structure
- Internal principles create empowerment
- Feeling helplessness creates empowerment
Key Quotes
“Power is control over other people. Empowered means that you’re not looking for control of others — you’re just being you despite the consequences.”
“As long as you need to control to feel empowered, then you are subjugated.”
“When people act empowered, eight times out of ten the consequence that they’re scared of doesn’t come to pass.”
“The feeling of helplessness — going through the feeling of helplessness — is what creates oftentimes that sense of empowerment.”
“If you are in blame for another person or shame for yourself, then you are disempowered and you are trying to accumulate power.”
“Empowerment and unconditional love are two sides of the same mountain, and the peak — you can’t get to the peak without both sides.”
Transcript
Power is control over other people and empowered means that you’re not looking for control of others, you’re just being you despite the consequences. Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. The accumulation of power seems like a good idea at first, then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? And what if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free? Joe, what makes this distinction so important?
Yeah, the empowered over power distinction — I think there’s a deep confusion in us as a people and internally between the two, and that confusion is what creates the subjugation that we feel both in the relationship to ourselves and the relationship with the outside world. And to clarify that confusion, to actually see that we are always a choice and that choice is always empowered whether we want to admit it or not, is a way to set us free from that subjugation.
So power is real — there are people who really do have power over us and there are situations in which we have limited control. So that must be partially responsible for a situation?
Yes and no. The thing is we’re all interdependent. Everything is interdependent. It’s like a gigantic machine if you will, or a gigantic ecosystem. And so who has the power — the ants or the mountain lion or the rabbits? And if any of them go, the whole system changes. So the whole system is dependent on all the other parts of the system. And in that way, yes, there are things that have power over us. If you’re a deer, deer ticks have power over you and mountain lions have power over you. But if you’re a mountain lion, deer have power over you because if the deer disappear you’re screwed, you’re not eating. So there’s a way of looking at it that says, oh wow, everything that I’m interdependent on has power over me, and you can look at it that way and it’s absolutely true.
The other way to look at it is that our choice is ours. We get to choose. We might not like the consequences — we don’t always have control over the consequences — and I think when we don’t have control over the consequences, that’s when the mind wants to say, oh, somebody has power over me. But there’s nobody on this planet that isn’t dependent on somebody else or something else. Take the most powerful person in the world — if people stop buying their product, or if people rebel against them, or if the price of oil goes to twenty dollars a barrel and all of a sudden their money to control their society goes away — everybody has something like that.
Something that I think about oftentimes when I’m thinking about CEOs and my experience in working with them is that they have more bosses than anybody. They have their key employees who they need to keep happy, their customers they need to keep happy, their shareholders they need to keep happy, their board of directors they need to keep happy. There’s so many people who they are dependent on or they need their approval or they need them to buy into their vision in some way. And so there’s nobody in the system that isn’t dependent on other people. And there’s nobody in this system that isn’t scared to change the system because of consequences. Just as one person is sitting there and saying, hey, if I stand up for myself I’ll lose my job, there’s a CEO that says, hey, if I don’t get to the quarterly numbers I’ll lose my job. And there’s a billionaire that’s like, wow, if I don’t keep on finding more oil I’m going to lose my fortune. There’s just something everywhere. Everybody’s got something.
And so in that aspect, absolutely, everybody has somebody who has power over them. I think we often think about the people who diversified — lots of customers or lots of people — as more powerful, meaning that they’re not dependent on one person, they’re not dependent on one customer, they feel more powerful in our system. But everybody’s dependent.
So it sounds like kind of what you’re pointing at in terms of power — when something has power over us it’s setting the constraints of our environment. And if we have power over someone else we have the power to set the constraints for the system in some way. But that doesn’t tell the whole story — there’s what we do within the constraints and which constraints we buy into or don’t.
That’s it. Yeah. So inside of the constraints you’re completely empowered. And the way that you show up inside the constraints, the constraints have to adjust. Meaning if you are scared of losing your job and you say, forget it, I’m going to show up the way that feels right for me and if I get fired I get fired — you will change the system. There’s no way for it not to change, even if you get fired. There’s no way for the system not to change. Because there’s no way that the way you interact with the system doesn’t affect it.
Yeah, even the structure of a company or even the interpersonal relations in your team will change if you’re not being the same cog in the ecosystem that was existing before.
That’s right. And you see this working with CEOs and working with billionaires — there’s a whole bunch of things that they want to affect change on that they can’t, they don’t know how to, or nobody knows how to, or it’s just beyond their control. It’s not like anybody in any situation doesn’t have something that they are not able to affect the change on. There’s billionaires that I know that if they could control everything they would have more billions. And there’s billionaires I know that if they could control everything, everybody would have social and economic equality. But they can’t, just like we can’t. You can’t, I can’t, nobody can. As long as you need to control to feel empowered, then you are subjugated.
Yeah, that’s not real empowerment.
That’s right. So where does this come from — where does this yearning for power arise from, if not empowerment?
Fear. If we’re making the distinction between power and empowered — and I think that even in our language, oftentimes when someone says “I feel powerful” they might mean empowered. And as far as the semantics we’re going to use, that means empowered. And then some people are like “I feel powerful” meaning I have control over you. And so people who want to feel power — control over situations — just fear. They just are scared on some level. We all are scared when we are looking to find power. Now power might come to us, and just because I have power doesn’t mean I’m scared. But if I’m looking for it, then I’m scared.
And then how does achieving some sense of power actually satiate or affect that fear — or does it?
It doesn’t. It’s like any addiction — there’s a short-term high that you get and then it’s over. I remember when I was in one of my poorest times in my life when I had the least amount of resources and my attitude towards money and power was just changing, and I was driving in my car and I was thinking, oh, I don’t have enough. And as it turned out at that time I knew several billionaires. And I kind of went through the list and I’m like, oh, they’re driving around right now thinking they don’t have enough either. I’m like, oh, I’m a billionaire — my situation, their situation is no different. They can affect some change in a way that I can’t, but I can affect some change in the way that they can’t. I could imagine a situation where a billionaire even feels more powerless because they realize they have all this money and they’re actually not able to change the world. So they don’t get to believe that money would solve that problem for them.
That’s right. Yeah. The thing is, one of the best investors I ever met said that if you see somebody who thinks that money’s going to solve their problems, don’t invest. And they’re dead right — capitalization doesn’t solve problems, it just makes them bigger often.
Yeah, problems and you end up with bigger problems that require money to sustain.
Yes, that’s right. So it’s like this illusion — once you have the power then you got to worry about holding on to it. Another billionaire guy told me at one point, he said, everybody works, Joe. Everybody works. If you have a billion dollars you gotta work to maintain it. Everybody works.
Or even if you’re going for social capital — you have the billion dollars but you still have to work to maintain social capital and connections.
Right. Yeah. Or you’ve got 54 billion dollars and you can’t affect an election. One guy with maybe a billion dollars can beat another guy with 54 billion — who can both be beaten by somebody with less than a million. Power is accumulated by more power — it makes it easier in some level, in some forms of power. But sometimes having large amounts of power actually make it harder to accumulate power. Like in the current election cycle, trying to get elected as a billionaire takes you down a whole bunch of notches already. Or being a really big shot investor with a lot of power — on some level there’s some benefits to it and on other levels a lot of people follow you which creates complications as far as liquidity and other things. It’s the same thing with somebody who has the power of leadership in a small community. On one level there are certain things that they can affect change around that other people can’t, and on another level there are certain things they can’t. There’s a certain balance that is struck in any leadership position — some things can be taken away from you more readily and some things you can’t affect change on.
It’s something that I realized when I was on boards of directors — that sometimes in certain boards of directors I have more power being off the board than I did being on the board. Because being on the board I was part of the dynamic and I couldn’t help the leadership see through the dynamic. And my capacity to help people see through the dynamic was more powerful than having a vote. Having the unseen hand behind the curtain kind of thing.
The way that I define power is that power is a thing that can be taken away from you. Empowerment can’t be taken away from you. You’re just being you despite the consequences. Power is looking to find safety — it’s an expression of fear. Empowered is standing in the face of that fear and being truthful to yourself. And if you think about every story that we’ve ever heard, it’s always the story of the person who goes against the consequences for their truth. This is what we long for in ourselves — that I’m going to be empowered in a way that I will do the right thing despite the consequences, whether I’m saving somebody from a burning building or whether I’m risking my job to be authentic. That’s what empowered is.
Yeah, the burning building was a good example because running into a burning building to save somebody — the fire has power over you, there’s nothing anybody’s going to do to change that. But you are going into the burning building to do your truth, to try to save somebody regardless of the consequences. And you’re willing to experience and feel the consequences of coming up against something with much greater power than you.
Yeah, that’s right. And there’s the kind of material power like money or gun or fire, and then there’s also the power of influence over you or other people. And what I notice is that when people act empowered, eight times out of ten — maybe seven times out of ten — the consequence that they’re scared of doesn’t come to pass, even though the moment before they take that action they’re pretty sure it’s inevitable. If I’m saying I’m going to be true to my wife even though I might lose her, eight times out of ten I’m not gonna lose her. If I’m saying I’m going to be true to myself even if I might get fired, eight times out of ten I don’t get fired.
The other part of that is that even when you act empowered and things don’t go the way you want them to go, they end up going the way you want them to go eventually. Meaning yes, maybe your wife leaves you, but eventually you get in a relationship that works for you. As you act empowered, as you act in your truth, the world that can handle your truth surrounds you and that becomes your reality bubble. We’re all in these echo chambers — if I believe one political thing I’m gonna be in an echo chamber of verification of that. If I believe something else I’ll be in an echo chamber that verifies that. It’s how our consciousness works. And if we’re true to ourselves we end up in an echo chamber that is true to ourselves.
It seems there’s like a difference between the actual constraints that our environment places on us and then the predicted constraints that we are simulating — that we’re actually acting on, which are not exactly the real constraints of the environment. And if we start operating in a way that doesn’t fit the constraints of our immediate environment, we may end up losing the partnership, we may end up losing the job. But if we stick with operating as though the world had the constraints that we want, eventually we will only end up fitting into a system that fits those constraints.
That’s right. And you see this in great leadership. I would say that one of the ways that you know that you’re empowered is that you’re acting in a way as if your reality is already true — that your vision is already true. So if you’re a civil rights leader, you’re acting as if you are already equal and free and you’re showing, you’re being that example for everybody to follow. And you’re assuming that everybody will treat you that way, and it starts bending the world into that way of treating you. And if you feel like you’re less than, then your civil rights movement by its nature will have more friction in it — more people will treat you as less than.
It’s the same with anything — if you’re acting as a leader of a company and you’re like, of course we’re going to be successful, and you’re acting like you’re successful when you’re in the negotiations, you’re acting like you’re successful, then the world wants to bend towards that. It doesn’t mean it bends towards it all the time, but it wants to bend towards that. So that’s what being a visionary is. And if you’re empowered, then that visionary nature starts becoming more and more obvious — it just becomes something that starts happening.
So that brings up an interesting subtlety — the idea of acting as though you’re already successful. It seems like there could be ways of performing success that are not beneficial, but the actual belief that you are successful — how would you distinguish between those two things?
The way I would distinguish between those two things is — there’s a great story of an admiral in the Navy who got into a POW camp in Vietnam, and he was asked who made it, who didn’t make it. He said, well, who didn’t make it was easy — that was the optimists. And the interviewer is like, what do you mean, optimists? And he said, it means that they thought they were going to get out by Christmas or by the next season or whatever it was. They didn’t make it because when that timetable came and left, they became defeated in it. They said, well, who did make it? He said, that’s clear — the people who thought that they would get out. The people who maintained that vision of their own freedom.
So in that sense, the people that are performing — if we find ourselves performing successfulness, and then signs of failure come, that can completely break down and we’ll actually just believe we’re a failure and that’ll be the end. Whereas realizing that this business can entirely fail and I still feel empowered as a successful — as the person who can be successful — correct, and will be. It might be the next business.
Right. Yeah. And you see this all the time when people are transforming, when they’re changing. They have this massive breakthrough and then they feel disempowered because of the power of the pattern, and they’re like, how do I keep it? How do I keep this breakthrough? And as soon as you see that — as soon as you see somebody start wrestling with how do I keep it — you know that it’s going to be in flux, that it’s going to pendulate back and forth for a while. But when the person sees it so clearly that they’re like, of course this is what’s happening, then it’s over. Even if it comes back a little bit, it’s over — the whole process is quicker.
So if somebody’s been getting angry a ton in their world and then all of a sudden they have this breakthrough of, oh my gosh, it’s not that I’m angry, it’s that I’m hurt, and they start crying and they see this new reality and they’re like, yeah, of course — they don’t need to hold on to it. Then you know that that change is going to be smooth and quick. And if they are like, oh my God I see it, how do I keep it, you know that they’re not fully empowered.
Yeah, there’s a belief that’s fragile then, and that they don’t really have it.
Exactly. And in that belief system they still feel like this thing has power over them. And what’s interesting is of course it has power over you. And it’s exactly that that you need to enter into — it’s exactly that helplessness that helps us become empowered. So what I mean by that specifically, because that can be incredibly confusing, is that the feeling of helplessness — going through the feeling of helplessness — is what creates oftentimes that sense of empowerment.
Yeah, that’s important. Because what you were saying earlier is that the power itself, or the seeking of power, is a deep expression of fear. And it seems like that would be the fear of feeling the helplessness — the fear of being helpless. If you just move through that helplessness, then you end up on the other side feeling empowered.
That’s it. You just said it better than I could.
So is there anything else you want to add to the definition of empowered?
Empowered really is a feeling, it’s a state. It’s not a life condition, meaning you can be a billionaire and feel empowered and you can be in poverty and feel empowered. It’s not really about how many resources you have — it’s about your resourcefulness. It’s knowing that you have the courage to do what’s true for you. And the other thing about empoweredness is that you can’t really love without it. If you look at all the people who we see as beacons of love, there is a deep sense of empowerment to them. And if you close your eyes and you go inside and you feel what it is to be unconditionally loving and then you feel what it is to be unconditionally empowered, you’ll notice that they’re two sides of the same mountain — and the peak, you can’t get to the peak without both sides of the mountain.
So I’m curious about what are some of the different ways that we allow ourselves to have power taken over us — what are some of the types of power? There could be economic power, emotional power. And I think a lot of this could allude to the victim-savior-bully stuff that we’ve discussed in some of the other episodes.
So when we’re in fear — which is often when we’re seeking power over another person — we’re often in a victim, savior, or bully role. And so that is a good sign that you’re in the power-over. And you can have power over somebody by being a bully — that we know really well. Our society agrees with that one — oh yeah, that person’s a bully, they want power over. But you can get power over people as a victim too. So I was watching a television show about magic and for whatever reason they had this group of moms and they were all talking about guilt and they were all laughing and smiling over how guilt was a good way to control their kids. And it’s like, right — that is how people can control through the victim. “I’m so fragile that you can’t tell me your truth.” If there’s somebody in your life that you can’t tell your truth to because you’re scared of hurting them, then somebody is controlling through victimhood.
And it’s the same way with a savior — you can control people by saving them. You see this in very wealthy families all the time. They maintain control over their children by making sure that their money is there to save them. Or the Al-Anon saving the alcoholic — it happens all the time. So there’s all sorts of ways in which we are trying to have power over people, and they mostly fit into three categories: victim, savior, and bully.
The example with the rich people with the money doing the savior thing — I think that there’s many ways that could apply to philanthropy as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Philanthropy can be done in a way that is entirely disempowering and it can be done in a way that is empowering. And I think a lot of that would come from the mindset of the people involved on all sides of it in the system.
That’s right. When I did a lot of philanthropy with schools and with kids, I would stay away from working with anybody who’s coming from a place of guilt — that they were doing it because they felt guilty — because their philanthropy just didn’t work. And if they were trying to help people I would also stay away from it. But if they were working with people so that both they and the people they were there to serve were being helped, then those were effective.
What’s an example of how that would work — philanthropy failing because it came from a place of guilt?
I was in Nicaragua at one point and there was a group of Canadians there that brought a whole bunch of clothing for this village, and they all felt really great about themselves. And when I asked them why they did it they were all like, oh I just feel bad that we have so much and I wanted to spread it. There’s nothing wrong with it but it just isn’t successful. And I remember sitting with them and saying, hey, you know, there’s all these turtles here that are going extinct and all these people could be saving the turtles. What if they earned the clothing by helping the turtles? How does that change this whole system? And what it does change is it makes people have an equal exchange, and so they feel empowered. And if somebody’s just giving them stuff without an exchange, then it is actually quite disempowering because now you have power over them because they need you to give them stuff.
You saw in the 70s in Africa where food drops would happen and then when the people who had the walkie-talkies that helped the food drops happen went away, the native people tried to build fake walkie-talkies and act like the person with the walkie-talkies to get the food to drop. It’s like you’re not teaching the person how to fish, you’re giving them fish. And that’s usually how when people act out of guilt, that’s usually how it works, because they feel like they have to give. And good philanthropy is an exchange — it’s not a gift. It’s a recognition that you’re getting as much from it as you’re giving.
That’s sideways to another interesting thing from earlier in the conversation about — your empowerment is something that you have to give up. You choose to give up your empowerment.
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. So there’s a choice that you make. And every time that you feel like you’ve been disempowered or that someone has power over you and you can’t be true to yourself, what’s actually happening is that you are choosing to avoid a potential bad consequence. And that’s a choice that you’re making. So you have to choose that for it to be the case. Mandela had everything taken from him except his life. He was crushing rocks, he was beaten — it was not pretty for him. And yet he stayed empowered. He continued to make choices and knew the choices that he was making despite the consequences.
How does that work in daily life — with a job, or with a receiver of philanthropy who tries to become empowered but finds that the moment they become empowered they stop receiving gifts, and so it’s easier not to?
It’s true. Yeah, it’s really true. It’s harder to raise money for something that’s deeply empowered too. It’s interesting that way. But then again the people who truly feel empowered don’t need to raise as much money — they have other ways of making things happen. Yeah, it’s a good question — how does it happen in daily life?
One of the ways that I work with my clients on this that makes it really acute — I’ll use a different example — it’s like a husband that’s deeply unhappy in his marriage and I’ll ask the question: well, what if you act exactly how you want to act and see if they leave you? See if the divorce occurs. That’s an empowered act. It’s like, I’m not going to compromise my authenticity, my truth, to keep your love. I’m not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to keep the job. I’m not gonna compromise my authenticity and my truth to avoid the conflict. And that’s when people feel disempowered — when they don’t make that choice. And that’s when people complain about somebody having power over them.
Like believing that we’re not going to be able to find another job if we leave this job, or believing we’re never going to find another partner if things don’t work out with this one and we don’t conform to this structure we’re in.
Right. Yeah. And then that becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you’re dealing with one-on-one relationships. But then when it comes to being in a company or being in a country or being part of a geopolitical system, it becomes a little bit harder to see, because the change that you’re creating is just less palpable. It’s a numbers game and so it becomes harder for people to see in that way. But that’s an intellectual thing — on an emotional and a gut level you feel it right away. You know it right away when you are acting empowered in those situations.
And I see it all the time — if you look at the people who are breaking the social norms in a way that is liberating for them, that are the front runners or the trailblazers, those folks are the ones who are not buying into the consequences. And it’s contagious — if you’re looking for a social change, it requires empowerment on a population level. And it might feel from a disempowered place that if you’re the only person who becomes empowered you’re just going to get steamrolled by the system. And yet you look at examples like MLK and it’s one person who was empowered enough to have a halo around them creating more empowerment.
And he died — so there was somebody who had a gun and that’s real power. And it affected change. And he had real power and it affected change. And both of them — the man who shot and the man who got shot — both affected massive change. The difference between the two is one felt empowered and one felt disempowered. And so the change that we affect when we feel disempowered usually doesn’t serve ourselves or humanity.
That reminds me of the archetype of the rebel — somebody who, feeling what they think is power, ends up destroying their life and others in the name of their truth. Whoever shot MLK felt like they were following their truth.
You see this all the time. Let’s talk about that. It’s really hard to see the difference sometimes, especially when you’re in the middle of it. And it’s subtle until you see it, and when you see it it’s clear. If you are in blame for another person or shame for yourself, then you are disempowered and you are trying to accumulate power. If you are not in blame for others or shame for yourself, then that is empowered. That’s the emotional way to know where you’re at. Or guilt — guilt and shame can be distinguished as well a little bit.
Yes, guilt and shame — we’ll put them together. Those are semantically very interesting and it’s very culturally based, but yes — guilt, shame, blame — all that stuff is the good indicator that you’re disempowered.
So earlier we were talking about the drama triangle with a bully and the victim and the savior, and how that’s based in fear. Can you relate that to blame and shame?
So oftentimes that fear is based on the sense of helplessness. And that sense of helplessness is because we believe the story of blame and shame in our head. When you feel like someone else is making your life X, Y, and Z way, then you’re in blame and there’s a helplessness and there’s a fear that you will lose complete control — and therefore you need to have control over. Or there’s a shame like I’m inherently bad and there’s no way out of that. It’s a deep feeling of helplessness. And we’re scared of feeling that helplessness, so we then move into the drama triangle or the fear triangle.
So that’s how it works — it is the feeling of that blame and shame felt all the way through that we don’t want to feel. And that’s the amazing thing about feeling helplessness — feeling helplessness doesn’t make you more helpless. Feeling helpless makes you more capable. And it’s so counter-intuitive, but if you do it you know it. Because so much of our decision-making process is based on trying to avoid an emotional state — the emotional state of helplessness is one of the ones underlying most of our avoidance.
All right, so what are some of the indicators for each of these particular roles? If all of them are fear states being set into place with blame and shame, and we need to feel helplessness to get through them, what are some of the indicators for these particular roles of victim, bully, and savior?
The reason I don’t call it the drama triangle very often and I’m more prone to call it the fear triangle is because the victim, bullying, and savior correspond with fight, flight, or freeze, which are the states of fear. And fight is pretty obviously bully — when I’m scared I fight. When I’m scared I freeze — that’s more victim. And when I’m scared I fly — that’s savior. That’s the harder one to understand, but what happens is I run away from myself and my own experience and I try to fix you so that I can feel safe. If I can make it so you don’t get drunk, I’ll feel safe. If I can make it that you are happy, then I’ll feel safe. And so I’m running away from myself going into you to try to fix my issues. And so that’s why I call it the fear triangle.
And there’s a feeling for each one of them that is kind of the indicator. The indicator is — if I am feeling all alone in it, that’s the bully. If I feel obligation, that’s the savior. And if I feel stuck, that’s the victim. And in actuality we’ll feel all three of these things. If you really slow it down for a minute, you’ll notice that you’ll feel all three of these things in a moment of fear.
My wife comes home, she’s in a horrible mood, and I feel helpless that now my mood is going to be screwed up, the house is going to be screwed up, the kids are going to be messed up — I can’t do anything. I might feel alone — oh God, I’m the only one who has to fix this thing. And then I feel, oh my God, I got to do something for her so that she feels better. And then I’m like, I’m stuck with this thing. All three of them can happen slowly or quickly, but there’s one that usually we dominate in situations that are dominating us. Most people tend towards fight, flight, or freeze most of the time.
Yeah, I personally tend towards the savior.
I have tended towards both savior and bully. Those are the two places I’ll go depending on the circumstance.
And often in quick succession.
Right. Let’s talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in teams. It works in a number of ways. The first is you see this happening all the time in companies and teams — somebody’s acting like the victim, or some group is acting like the victim, so I’m acting as the savior. There’s different ways that they’re trying to create control. The less empowered the team feels, the more drama. And that’s a great litmus test — as soon as you walk into a team, if it’s super political, it’s just like, well, everybody feels disempowered. You just know it. And if everybody feels empowered and they feel like they can affect change, there’s so little politics going on.
So it’s a great litmus test, because politics is that control mechanism?
Correct. Yeah, it’s that fear. Drama. And that’s the thing that you see in politics everywhere — and I don’t mean people running countries, I mean being political. It’s a deep expression of fear and people trying to capture power. And it’s because everybody feels helpless and feels like they’re not actually able to affect change in a way that’s meaningful.
So how do you affect this kind of change in a company, whether you’re leading the company or within the company or at the bottom of some ladder?
Well, this is the tricky bit. Because as a leader of a company you want your people to be empowered, and you also often out of fear want to limit their capacity to affect change. I don’t want the new mail clerk to decide what my initial public offering price is going to be. So it’s this constant balance of people feeling empowered, you wanting people to feel empowered, and at the same time a fear of having that power run away or this lack of control.
This is the balance and the subtle war that’s happening often with leaders. And you’ll hear it all the time because they’ll say something like, “I wish everybody would act like the owner of the company.” And they mean that to a point — they want everyone to take responsibility like that, but they don’t want everybody to have all the benefits and they don’t want everybody to have all the choice that they have. So it’s this very interesting balance.
What’s happening in those companies is that the empowerment and the roles have gotten confused. If everybody can feel empowered in their role, and their role is defined, and how decisions are made is defined, then people feeling deeply empowered is incredibly good for a company. And as soon as those roles aren’t defined well, as soon as people don’t know what they have to do to be successful, then a whole bunch of empowered people just creates a lot of mess.
So it sounds like there’s a bit of a paradox here where having well-defined roles and well-defined processes is structure, and that could be something that people feel has power over them. But then also what you want is them to feel empowered to push back and change that structure, or work fully within the structure and also perhaps challenge it. But if you don’t have structure — like clear goals, criteria for success, loving accountability, transparency — then what happens?
There’s a powerlessness in having no structure.
That’s right. If there’s no way to affect change or make decisions, then what you’ll have is this crazy politics with people trying to get power so that they can feel safe. So yes, you want to have some sort of structure that allows itself to change, and a structure that doesn’t change without very specific things happening, so that people can feel safe — that they know what to do, that they know what success means. And this doesn’t matter if it’s AA or Enron. In AA there’s a very particular structure — there’s 12 steps and there’s the way that the meetings get run, and that structure is important or people can’t feel safe in those environments. In Uber there’s very particular structures in place — I’m going to rate you five stars or not, and there’s another structure of making sure that drivers don’t rip other people off by tracking them on maps. Those structures are incredibly critical or people don’t feel safe.
Will those structures need to change over time? Absolutely. But you need the structure for people to feel safe and know what their roles are, and there needs to be room for people to grow and change their roles. The Constitution of the United States does a pretty good job of it too.
Sure, yeah. So that’s the balance that you’re constantly looking for — how do I create the amount of structure that makes people feel safe but also gives them autonomy and gives them the capacity to feel as empowered as possible, and includes mechanisms for that structure itself to be updated to match reality?
Absolutely. That’s it. And what you see typically is the more transparency and the less structure that creates safety — the more elegant the structure is that creates safety — the more successful the company. Taxi cabs becoming Uber is an example of this — less structure, less infrastructure, but creates actually more safety. It’s the same thing that happened with GM and Toyota — Toyota became more decentralized than GM, which was at the time the most centralized company. So that decentralization but still maintaining the structure is what usually gives those companies a competitive advantage. And the reason is because it creates more empowerment with the employees.
It seems like this would also promote scalability for a company — because if you have 100 empowered decision makers instead of three, more decisions can be made and more information can be processed.
That’s exactly right. There’s a — I can’t remember, it was one of the Malcolm Gladwell books — it talked about how in this war game that the Pentagon does, this small band of people beat the US Army because their decision making was happening at the bottom, but there was some set of principles, some set of structure that they could all operate within. And that’s basically how you do it. I think it was David and Goliath.
You see that all the time. And you see it in business books as well, like Reinventing Organizations where the same principle is there.
Another war example would be when Rommel first encountered U.S. troops in Northern Africa. He was like, oh wow, these guys are totally green and completely disorganized, it’ll be a cinch. And then not long after he was writing letters back to Germany: wait, don’t underestimate these people. You can cut off an entire unit from their command and somehow they’ll still figure out how to fight.
But this isn’t just an external thing — this is an internal thing as well. When you become more empowered, you start operating on a set of principles, and that set of principles you’re going to operate on whether it’s comfortable or not. So if I have a principle that says I am not going to work with X, and somebody says here’s a billion dollars to work with X, I’m going to say no. It’s a set of principles — I’m not going to operate any differently than that. If I have a set of principles and it’s like, I’m going to be transparent with people and tell them my truth despite the consequences, that’s my set of principles. I’m going to do it no matter what.
And that’s when all the drama in me starts disappearing. And that’s when I feel empowered — I’ve given myself a structure that doesn’t change very readily. It takes some time to change that set of principles, but I’m going to operate in that way no matter what. And that helps me feel deeply empowered. Which is strange — it’s like a set of criteria that I live by that actually makes me feel empowered.
Yeah, as though this entire process of inquiry into values is to create a more and more consolidated, elegant structure by which we live our lives, so that we don’t have to think about the complicated consequences — how the consequences are going to play out of what if I say this to my boss or speak my truth here or leave this job. It’s just: this is simply how I want to live. And I’ll accept the consequences if that’s what it takes.
That’s exactly right. And so that set of principles is what frees us. And if you look around at the people who — they didn’t have resources but they were empowered and they changed the world — all of them have something in common. They were living by a set of principles internally and externally. Not perfectly, obviously — we’re humans, we’re not made perfect. But it’s generally how one lives their life.
And when you see somebody who’s living by a set of principles, you’ll also notice that they never are blaming other folks, that they’re never feeling like — they’re never worried about somebody’s power over them. They’re addressing it. And that also will affect your opportunities as well — when I’m hiring, I’m much more interested in the resourcefulness and the self-ownership of the person rather than the skills listed on their resume.
And people really detect that in any counterpart that they might work with.
That’s right. I’d rather pick the right mentality than the right skill set for sure. I’d obviously like to pick both when I can, but yeah.
So this is what happens internally as well as externally. The drama internally goes away when we feel empowered internally — when we know that we will make the choice even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if I have to feel helpless, I’m going to make that choice. Even if I’m not going to have power over somebody else or try to have power over myself, I will rather feel the discomfort of the fear and the helplessness. I’ll rather enter into the shame. I would rather allow my own destruction — as far as the destruction of my identity, my identity as one who’s put upon, or my identity as one who’s valuable — I’d rather allow that to be destroyed rather than move into fear and act from fear and try to have control over somebody.
So it’s an internal and an external thing. And when you figure it out internally, you have no choice but to act it externally. So if you feel like you are subjugated by something externally, then you also feel like you’re subjugated by something internally.
Well, that sounds like a great point to wrap this up on. Thank you very much, Joe.
Yeah, pleasure, Brett. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app. We’d love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.