7 Rules of Power

Don’t resent the inevitable ubiquity of power in social life; instead, master it.

If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

Power is not ending, nor are many of its manifestations new. To effectively lead in a world that has not changed as much as many think or expect, people need to understand the basic principles—the rules—of power.

Change requires power. If change were going to happen without power and influence, it would have already.

Power is seldom the most important source of success, but what it can do, as it did for Rukaiyah Adams, is help leverage your performance and talent.

Political skill is one of the most powerful predictors of success in the workplace.

People are going to enjoy more positive affect to the extent that they have more status, power, and success.

People come not only to recognize what they need to do to change lives, organizations, and the world, they understand that they only have the choice of leaning into the rules of power and using them, or opting out, with all that the idea of opting out implies.

People need to understand the obstacles they face because of their race, gender, social class, and so forth, but then they need to master the power skills and rules to improve their prospects.

If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others.

But possibly the single biggest barrier to having power is ourselves. Therefore, the first rule of power is to get out of your own way.

An individual can increase their confidence by acting more confidently, and can build their sense of their own power by describing themselves in a more powerful fashion.

Persistence and resilience seem to require not overly obsessing about what others think and say while possessing enough ego strength to keep problems and criticism from throwing you off course.

To succeed, people need to be and feel agentic, and attempt to exercise influence and control.

If you want to have allies—always a good thing if you want influence—you obviously need to provide others with something so they will support you.

Leaders need allies and supporters; one of the primary tasks of a leader is to recruit both.

The first rule of power is about acknowledging and accepting who you are but not letting that identity define who you will be forever.

Rule breaking and violating social norms to build power fundamentally entail undertaking behaviors—taking initiatives—that are “different” and unexpected.

Because most people follow the rules most of the time, people who don’t can and often do catch their interaction partners off guard.

It is easier and often more successful and productive to just do what you want and to ask forgiveness for something that you have done instead of seeking permission for it beforehand.

People who make their own rules—who do the unexpected—often succeed in ways they could not have anticipated.

Most people, most of the time, don’t break the rules, and for very good reason. The world is filled with rules that others expect you to follow.

Rules and social conventions are made by those in power, mostly to ensure that their power is perpetuated.

How you “show up” is important, maybe even determinative, of your career trajectory, how much power and status others accord you, and whether you keep your job.

The importance of showing up without notes, appearing to be in command of the subject matter and the situation, is important.

People’s reactions to the physical and behavioral appearance of power is at least partly instinctual and subconscious.

Because people want to feel proud of what they are involved with and to believe that they and their colleagues will be successful, one of a leader’s most important tasks is to project confidence.

It is behaviors—ones that can be learned and adopted—that matter for the acquisition of power.

One way to build a powerful brand is to associate with other people and organizations that are themselves prestigious.

Everyone needs a brand. Your task: think of a short (two or three sentence) way of describing yourself and your accomplishments that bring together your expertise, your experience (what you have done), and a way of integrating that with some aspect of your personal story.

Narratives invariably arise around people and situations. It therefore behooves you to tell your story, to craft your narrative, to create your brand identity, before others can.

The old saying 'it's not what you know but who you know' has at least some truth. Who you know, and how many people you know, matters for your influence and for your career.

If no one knows or notices someone, their good work will not help them much because it will be invisible.

People should spend eight to ten hours a week building professional relationships because 'the secret to getting more business through networking is... spending more time doing it!

The straightforward message of weak ties’ importance: don’t spend too much time with people who are close. Instead, ensure that you are meeting a wide variety of people in a wide variety of organizations and industries. You never know when one of them will have information important to your job performance or career prospects.

People’s careers—and their job performance—are enhanced if they can find positions or jobs where they can perform brokerage and bridge structural holes—connecting units, people, or organizations that would mutually benefit from being exposed to different ideas, information, opportunities, and resources.

Centrality affects visibility. More people will know and know about people who are more central, and that visibility will often work to those people’s advantage for becoming the focal point for information and opportunities.

Power, used effectively, increases its wielder's power.

Making changes quickly and improving outcomes increases a leader's power because it provides a rationale for others to support them.

Because perception helps create reality, wielding power in ways that demonstrate power, doing things that signal power, helps to ensure that power will be perpetuated.

By demonstrating power and the willingness to use it, by accomplishing things, and by establishing structures that institutionalize power, the use of power becomes self-reinforcing.

Once power is achieved, everything—well, almost everything most of the time—will be all right.

Power as a Motive: Worries aside, many people seek power because it is a strong motivational force.

Power, however, also increases the number of supporters someone has, because people are attracted to and by power and want to be in the orbit of the powerful.

The Matthew Effect describes a process of cumulative advantage. 'Initial comparative advantages of trained capacity, structural location and available resources make for successive increments of advantage such that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots in science (as in other domains of social life) widen.

Success—money and power—takes care of many presumed sins, causing others to ignore, forget, or otherwise overlook or rationalize wrongdoing.

Power causes people to attend to rewards and gains rather than losses, increases their optimism, and leads them to engage in riskier behavior, thus seemingly freeing people to do what they otherwise would not as they vigorously pursue their own goals with little regard for how their behavior affects others.

People are attracted to power and success; they seek it out and strive to be close to those who possess both.

People in power typically have access to resources, including financial and social capital— indeed, such capital may be the source of their power. They often use those resources to “create,” in numerous ways, a history that whitewashes past misdeeds or reinterprets them in ways favorable to them.

Power gets to write history, and in so doing, helps perpetuate the power itself, and many of the foundations on which it was built.

Power is often associated with wealth, but even when it is not, power and its associated status and prestige can be used to generate financial resources.

Once you are in power, you are likely to remain there because of all of the processes I have described in this chapter.

Leadership is not a moral pursuit. It is above all about the pragmatics of making things happen.

Build what some people call your 'power muscles' the same way you would build any other muscle: through practice and use.

Build a powerful brand—Rule 4—by developing a concise statement of who you are and why you are uniquely qualified to be doing what you’re doing.

Knowledge is power, and in today’s world, it is literally at your fingertips. Access that knowledge—and then use it.

In a situation where you need to do things that are unnatural and maybe even uncomfortable, get people to help you.

I would wish you good luck in this endeavor—on your path to power. But luck has little to do with it. Instead, I wish you all the power that you seek.

Replacing people, then, has two positive effects on your power. First, it staffs the organization with people who have aligned perspectives and the competence to execute effectively, and that increased performance will help cement your power. And second, it provides you with allies in situations that are often challenging and politically fraught.