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Every day, you have to make something happen. Get someone to support your idea. Convince a skeptical colleague. Get a teammate to share their data. Help a struggling employee turn things around. Move a stalled initiative forward. In order to do that, you have to persuade, influence, direct, cajole, coerce. In other words, you’re using power.
We tend to think of power as something fairly straightforward. If you’re the boss, you should be able to make things happen. If you’re not, you have to persuade by other means. But anyone who’s worked in an organization knows it’s far more complicated than that.
Getting something to happen depends on at least three things: your leverage relative to the other person, what they need or value, and the situation itself. Would a simple request suffice? Do you need data? Logic? An emotional appeal? Do you need to build trust before asking? Rally allies? Make a decision no one else can make?
Using power is less like flipping a switch and more like solving a puzzle. Every situation asks something different from us.
And yet, when we think about power, we usually picture the most visible forms of it: the title, the corner office, the seat at the head of the table. As though authority alone is what gets things done.
But think about your own week. Maybe you steadied an anxious team after disappointing news. Solved a technical problem no one else could untangle. Helped two departments stop talking past each other. Won over a skeptical peer who didn’t report to you. None of those depended primarily on your title.
Power flows through many channels in an organization. You don’t need a title to have it. Seniority confers it. So does expertise, a strong network, a trusted reputation, even the simple fact of being someone people enjoy working with. These less visible forms of power aren’t less than, aren’t secondary to positional authority. They’re often the forces that allow work to move, people to coordinate, and organizations to function.
Which raises a question every leader eventually faces: if there isn’t one power that rules them all, which one should you use?
The answer is all of them—because the right power depends entirely on the context, and context shifts constantly.
Think of power less as a preference or leadership style and more as a toolkit. You wouldn’t use a hammer to tighten a screw. Yet many leaders do exactly that. They become known for one way of influencing—authority, expertise, relationships, charisma—and then reach for that same tool regardless of the problem.
A supply chain crisis needs your expertise. An economic downturn calls for steadiness and presence. A struggling employee needs your personal power. Allocating resources and clarifying priorities requires positional authority. The skill isn’t mastering one kind of power. It’s knowing which one the moment requires.
That skill is what I call power literacy: the ability to recognize the different kinds of power, understand what each is uniquely suited for, and deploy the right one as the situation demands.
Here’s where most of us go wrong. We treat our powers as a style preference rather than a set of tools. We ask which power is “better” instead of asking what this situation requires. We default to comfort over context, reaching for the power that feels most natural to us, rather than the one most likely to work.
And we spend a great deal of time worrying about overusing power—being controlling, domineering, the loudest voice in the room—while badly underestimating the cost of underusing it: the expertise we never share, the relationships we never leverage, the decision we never make, the moment we stay silent when our voice was needed most.
Power literacy begins with knowing your tools. Here are six that show up repeatedly in organizational life: three social powers, granted from outside you, and three personal powers, developed from within.
The Social Powers
Social powers are those that are externally derived. The organization, the group, or society grants them to us, and thus, can remove them. They are very influential yet also very limited in scope: they don’t automatically travel with you when you leave the role or the room.
Positional Power
This is the authority vested in the role you occupy: the VP, the department head, the project lead. It’s how you set direction, allocate budget, assign work, and clarify priorities.
We’ve all experienced positional power used well. A leader says, “Here’s the decision. Here’s who’s doing what. Here’s what success looks like.” Suddenly everyone knows what to do, where to focus, what to prioritize because the uncertainty is gone.
We’ve also experienced its absence. A manager refuses to decide, avoids difficult conversations, or hopes the team will simply “work it out.” But the leadership vacuum doesn’t stay empty. Someone else fills it—often the loudest voice in the room rather than the wisest.
Positional power is uniquely good at solving coordination problems. It gives people clarity about who’s responsible for what.
But remember its limits. You’re not the VP at the dinner table. You’re not the project lead among peers who don’t report to you. Step outside the role, and much of that power stays behind.
Informal Power
If positional power comes from the organizational chart, informal power comes from relationships.
Informal power is the colleague everyone consults for their opinion before making a decision. It’s the colleague whom everyone checks in with before the meeting, asks for help making an introduction, texts to get the scoop on the latest initiative.
“Do you know where Finance stands on this?”
“Can you introduce me to Sarah?”
“Can you help me understand what’s really going on?”
People who have informal power know how the organization works. They know who trusts whom, where resistance is likely to emerge, and how to build support before asking for commitment. A few conversations from someone like this can get a stalled initiative moving again.
Used well, informal power often looks surprisingly ordinary: welcoming a new hire, making an introduction, vouching for someone’s competence. These are small acts that have a disproportionate impact.
Used poorly, though, informal power closes doors instead of opening them. Because it’s granted by the group, there’s always a temptation to protect it—to close the circle, guard access, keep outsiders out and protect the clique. And like all social powers, it doesn’t travel automatically. Join a new organization and your insider status resets to zero.
Social Status
While informal power is power granted by your immediate group, social status is the power granted by societal norms and based on identity markers. Social status operates mostly outside our conscious awareness. It shows up as assumptions, expectations, judgment, and bias, both positive and negative. Social status shapes who’s assumed to be competent, whose ideas gain traction, and who gets the benefit of the doubt after making a mistake.
Imagine someone voices an idea in a meeting, a junior employee, a woman, someone from a marginalized group. No one responds. Five minutes later, a male senior executive says essentially the same thing, and everyone nods. The difference isn’t the quality of the idea or even timing. The difference is the status of the person voicing it.
Using social status well means being aware of it. It means noticing how status shapes perception, seeking out disconfirming feedback to challenge the assumptions you hold, and deliberately widening opportunity for others whose voices might otherwise be overlooked.
The Personal Powers
Personal powers are those that come from within, either developed or innate. They’re earned rather than granted, and because they live within you, they travel wherever you go.
Expertise Power
Expertise power comes from competence—the knowledge and skill you have to solve problems. It looks like the engineer who spots a flaw before launch and saves the company millions. It is the HR leader who knows exactly how to navigate a difficult employment issue. It’s the financial analyst who sees the risk hidden in the numbers.
Expertise solves knowledge problems.
We all recognize expertise overused: the person who has to be the smartest in the room, who answers every question, who’d rather be right than solve the problem. We’re much less alert to its underuse. Underuse of expertise is the specialist who assumes someone else will speak up. It’s the person who doubts the value of what they know. It’s the boss who solves the problem or does the work instead of coaching others to do it.
When expertise goes unspoken or unshared, the organization loses more than information. It loses discernment because all ideas are treated equally. And it weakens the system, leaving it unable to grow and adapt to the times.
Experience Power
Expertise is knowledge, but experience is wisdom. It’s the wisdom that accrues from having lived through things, the wisdom that develops after enough successes, failures, reorganizations, crises, launches, disappointments, and recoveries that you begin to recognize patterns.
While a new executive sees declining sales and jumps to a solution, a veteran might pause and consider similar things that happened in the past. The first time you go through a reorganization, slump in revenues, serious budget cuts, it feels like a disaster, an emergency. The seventh or twenty-seventh time you’ve been through it, you know how to handle it, and how to help others through it.
Experience is the steady hand. It’s pattern recognition, judgment, and discernment.
But experience overused becomes cynicism. It looks like the crusty veteran whose skepticism shoots down new ideas with a snarl, “We tried that once before.” It’s the colleague who defends the status quo, resists change and dismisses novel and innovative ideas.
Experience power is underused when accumulated wisdom is discounted or left unspoken. This happens when people assume their experience is outdated, less relevant than formal expertise, or subordinate to positional authority and therefore choose silence over contribution. Underuse of experience power looks like “shiny object syndrome,” an uncritical chase for the next big technology or intervention. The quest for novelty crowds out historical memory, pattern recognition, and hard questions: Have we seen this before? How did it turn out? What’s actually different now?
Personal Power
The final tool is the most portable and, in many ways, the one that makes all the others work.
Personal power isn’t something you possess. It’s a capacity you exercise: your presence, judgment, emotional steadiness, self-awareness, and ability to build trust.
We’ve all met people with almost no formal authority who leave everyone feeling clearer, calmer, and more committed than when they arrived. That’s personal power.
Personal power is also uniquely “meta.” It’s the power you use to decide which kind of power a situation calls for. Join a new organization and your informal power disappears overnight. Your title may change. Your status may shift. Your expertise may or may not be recognized immediately. But your capacity to listen well, build trust, stay grounded under pressure, read the room, and adapt—that travels with you.
Personal power underused is when self-doubt keeps us from bringing our full selves into the conversation. We become quieter, less visible, and gradually less influential. We lose out on our own influence and impact, and the organization loses out on the perspective, wisdom, and creativity that human voices bring.
Why Power Literacy Matters
The leaders who struggle usually aren’t the ones who lack power, but the ones with a limited toolkit.
They reach instinctively for the power that’s most familiar, the one that fits their personality or past success, even when the moment is asking for something else. Under stress, that tendency only becomes stronger. We cling to what feels natural precisely when we most need what’s effective.
Developing your use of power means becoming fluent across all these tools, including the ones that don’t come naturally. It means learning when authority is needed and when it isn’t. When expertise matters and when relationships matter more. When to persuade, when to decide, when to listen, and when simply to provide calm.
The challenge of using power well is seeing the full range of what you already have available and developing the judgment to choose the right tool for the moment in front of you.
To develop your power literacy, ask yourself:
- Which powers are your go-to ones? Where do they serve you well and where do they fall short?
- Which powers feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable? What would it take to become more fluent with them?
- And when you face your next difficult moment, are you asking, “Which power is best?” Or are you asking, “What does this moment require?”