Take Five: Effective Leaders Share Power — A Conversation with Leadership Consultant Marlene González

Posted on March 7, 2010

Diversity & Inclusion conferences are a great place to meet new, interesting, and accomplished people. Not too long ago at the Network of Executive Women session in Chicago where I gave a keynote, I reconnected with Marlene González whom I had met previously. She is the author or “Succeed in Corporate America”©: The Best Advice, Perspective and Insights to Succeed in the Corporate World.” She has held various corporate leadership jobs including, Worldwide Training, Learning and Development Senior Director at McDonald’s and has worked in the US, Europe, and her native Latin America. She now leads her own company as a leadership consultant. So I was about to ask her to do a Take Five when I received from her a short item she had written reflecting on the dynamics of power sharing. This is an important concept because with groups who have traditionally been marginalized, understanding power and how to use it effectively, particularly when it has often been used against them, can lead to a distorted view of power and even a fear of using it, and in that process miss that power can be exercised authentically and inclusively. Marlene offers guidance on how to share power in ways that lead to effective leadership.

Rather than artificially breaking up her piece into Five Takes, I offer it here as one cohesive piece that still can be read in five minutes.

This January the drama in Northern Ireland was intense. According to the Irish Times, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Irish counterpart Brian Cowen were working around the clock to finalize agreements to transfer police and justice powers from London to Northern Ireland’s government–the final stage in two decades of peace negotiations centered around power sharing between Catholic republican opponents of British rule and Protestant unionists who supported it. Indeed, the stability of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government itself hung in the balance.

At the last minute, the two sides reached an agreement to share police and justice powers. Mr. Cowen said the deal laid the foundations for a “better future . . . built on mutual respect for . . . each other’s political aspirations and cultural expressions.”

In Northern Ireland, the stakes of sharing power are high. In business they are as well. And doing them across cultures heightens and complicates nearly every dimension of the negotiations before and after the agreement.

As a crosscultural workshop leader for Fortune 500 companies, I find that organizations who have made great progress towards creating a diverse workforce often fall short on “inclusion” strategies that build diverse leadership teams for the 21st century. A truly inclusive company’s leaders make the transition from delegating tasks to “Sharing Power”– respecting others’ beliefs, values, processes and behaviors enough to allow for real crosscultural pollination in shaping how business gets done. When leaders share control, they demonstrate trust and respect for others’ abilities, as well as their own ability to adapt to a changing world and its changing markets.

Here are seven principles for leaders who want to share power effectively:

1. Seek Models. Look around your organization; examine closely in what ways effective leaders share power with others and use them as models.

2. Determine Competency Levels. Knowing the critical competencies of employees allows you to share power in ways that set them up for success and conserve your own time and energy.

3. Set Clear Boundaries. Be clear about any limits you must place on your employees’ freedom in pursuing a project. Non-negotiables–such as datelines and desired outcomes–must be made explicit from the start.

4. Get Out of the Way. Once boundaries have been set, give people room to maneuver.

5. Expect Crosscultural Pollination. Encourage employees to share ideas and feedback as frequently as possible to increase awareness of different ways of approaching tasks.

6. Encourage Risk Taking. Sharing power with people also means initiating them into risk taking. Encourage them to propose ways your company might take educated risks.

7. Be a Match Maker. Introduce employees to people and networks that may enable them to leverage their new power more effectively.

Leaders who follow these principles of power sharing will find that they have greater followership — and in that have teams that increase their impact on the organization.