Day #30

Limits of Power

This week we are exploring the shape of our Power as a Social Leader.

Your formal power is given to you by the Organisation that you work for: your Social Authority is earned, through your actions, within your Communities. Both types of power have limitations, but the things that limit them are different.

Perhaps formal power is more limited by seniority and the nature of the system that it is held within, whilst Social Authority is more limited by context, and connectivity. Essentially the larger your community AND the better the quality of connections, the more likely it is that you can build Social Authority.

Use your sixty seconds today to answer this question: ‘What limits your power’?

Think about it in those different dimensions: what factors in your day to day work and life limit what you can achieve. What barriers stubbornly refuse to be knocked aside no matter how much ‘power’ you in theory hold.

For example: you cannot make people trust you, no matter how much power you have.

Some things can only ever be gifted or invested.

To understand our power is to chart the landscape that we inhabit: the formal and social dimensions, and the nature and types of power that intersect within them.