Power Intelligence:

Insights on Power and Leadership

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Power Literacy: Knowing—and Using—the Many Kinds of Power

Power Literacy: Knowing—and Using—the Many Kinds of Power

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. 

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Power Struggles at Work: How to Navigate Them Without Losing Yourself

Power Struggles at Work: How to Navigate Them Without Losing Yourself

A colleague takes credit for your work in front of the people whose opinion matters most. You find out your peer lobbied against your initiative in the meeting you missed. Your coworker slow-walks their deliverable, out of jealousy or spite you suspect, just to sabotage the project you’re leading.

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When nobody is in charge

When nobody is in charge

I’ve spent many years (maybe too many?) in communities, groups, and organizations governed by consensus: lots of meetings, lots of talk, lots of conflict. A friend and I had a running joke. Whenever someone began to speak with, “I just have to say this…” or “I have to speak up…”, we’d glance at each other and silently mouth, No you don’t.

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Additional Posts

Power Literacy: Knowing—and Using—the Many Kinds of Power

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. 

read more

Power Struggles at Work: How to Navigate Them Without Losing Yourself

A colleague takes credit for your work in front of the people whose opinion matters most. You find out your peer lobbied against your initiative in the meeting you missed. Your coworker slow-walks their deliverable, out of jealousy or spite you suspect, just to sabotage the project you’re leading.

read more

When nobody is in charge

I’ve spent many years (maybe too many?) in communities, groups, and organizations governed by consensus: lots of meetings, lots of talk, lots of conflict. A friend and I had a running joke. Whenever someone began to speak with, “I just have to say this…” or “I have to speak up…”, we’d glance at each other and silently mouth, No you don’t.

read more

What Actually Makes Someone Powerful?

When you think about the most powerful person you know, chances are you’re not picturing their position — you’re picturing their presence. The way they speak, the way they enter a room and take up space. Or the way they hold steady under pressure, staying calm and easygoing while everyone around them is coming apart.

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How to Build the DPI Into Your Business

Congratulations. You’re now DPI certified! You have a good grasp of the Power Intelligence framework, and know how to debrief a DPI report and turn it into a development plan.

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The Trouble with Nice

In my early twenties, when I was studying at the University in Zurich, I had to take a state Latin exam to get to the next level. It was a level of difficulty that I had never had to deal with before, and I honestly couldn’t see how I could pass it. So I found a tutor, a retired university instructor. She was a philologist, which is a very old word for a linguist and a very right word for her, because she absolutely belonged to another era.

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How to Introduce the DPI in 30 Seconds

The Diamond Power Index® isn’t easy to introduce in a sentence.While it measures something very real and very consequential — how authority and influence actually operate in a leader’s world — the words used to describe it (“power,” “360,” “assessment”) closes doors before the conversation gets started. Add to that the fact that different clients come to this work with very different presenting problems, and there’s no single way to describe it that works for everyone.

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Is Your Leadership Assessment Telling You the Right Thing?

If you’ve supported leaders through any kind of development initiative, you’ve learned that the world of leadership assessments is vast, and crowded. DiSC. StrengthsFinder. MBTI. Hogan. EQ-i 2.0. The Leadership Circle. Maybe a 360. These are all good tools. So which one do you use? How do you decide?

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Can you outskill bad character?

I must have given hundreds of talks on power, from classrooms to boardrooms, and I can say with confidence that this question or some version of it comes up every single time.

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The Lost Art of Not Knowing

I was listening to a podcast the other day, a very popular one, with millions of listeners, and the host was interviewing a Nobel Prize–winning economist. As he was listing his guest’s accomplishments, he said, “and then you won the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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Rank Is a Drink Best Served Mixed

Of course it had to happen on a holiday weekend. The rainiest weekend of the spring. Our septic backed up, and with no one available to help, we dug up the earth, well, mud actually, lifted the 100-pound concrete slab, and tried to unclog it ourselves.

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Motive is in Your Hands

We’re inundated with coverage of the Epstein files as they trickle out. It is hard not to notice that the process looks a lot like the pattern it exposes, a system that bends to protect the powerful.

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The Fog of War

You’ve got five meetings today. A decision hanging over your head: launch now or wait until spring? Three final-round candidates to interview. A key team member just announced maternity leave. And this isn’t an unusually busy week. This is every week.

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Are You Too Much?

“Just try to tone it down a bit, Julie.” It took me by surprise. This was a teacher I respected deeply, someone whose judgment I trusted, and she was telling me that I was too intimidating to another student. That I needed to dial myself back.

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