Sometimes it feels like nobody thinks they have enough power to make positive changes.
The other day, I was reading on the internets a complaint from a departmental chair about how they lack the power to make meaningful improvements (with respect to DEIJ), because they lacked the institutional power. There’s no money to allocate to projects, there’s no chain of command to instruct faculty what to do, no influence over the dean, no access to donors, not enough opportunity to write grants, no say over tenure criteria, no control over the admissions committee, and so on.
If you’re in a similar role, maybe you’re thinking, “Yup. Sounds familiar.”
But consider this through the lens of an undergraduate in that department. What would they think of the chair who says they don’t have the power to make the necessary changes? Would they be confused, doubtful, incredulous, angry, dispirited? Because given enough time, they could probably imagine hundreds ways that their department chair could exercise their power to make things better.
No matter our position in institutional hierarchies, nobody seems to think that we have the amount of power necessary to do their job well. Why is that? Because change requires work, even if you’re in a position of power. If you think that holding authority means that you can make positive change happen without putting in the work, then you’re in for disappointment. If you wind up with authority and you want to make things better? You need to do a lot better than have good ideas and good intentions. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves. I think this is true for every leadership role.
Of course, with a dose of authority, it takes very little effort to tear things down and make things worse. But to make things better, it’s people with authority cannot just snap their fingers and make things better.
One piece of advice that I find myself going back to, time and again, came from a friend who said, “Your greatest resource is your own time.” This is true with respect to the exercise of power. Power isn’t just the ability to make things happen with the send of an email or the sign of a pen. Power is the capacity to apply effort, wisdom, and time towards a goal and then cause collective movement towards that goal.
What if you have enough supervisory power to instruct people the changes to make? Do you still need to put in the work to make change happen? Yup. Knowledge and wisdom will get you somewhere but ultimate you’ve got to put in the time and effort to see things through. You’ve got to have the hard conversations, put in the emotional labor, do the writing, show up at the meetings, make that trip, skip occasional fun stuff, keep your screen on in zoom, and all that.
Who has the power to get sh*t don1? It comes from the people who take on the task. It doesn’t have to have a title. It’s the soft power of applying effort to move levers over time, and to build relationships and consensus, and organizing the efforts of people who support action. And (as various people have said over the the past two centuries), if you don’t insist on receiving credit, it’s a little easier to make things happen.
Two stories to illustrate the my point about power, from the academic sphere
About three years ago, a new administrator came into our campus and was predictably confounded by a long history of mismanagement and malpractice in one corner of our institution. (To be specific, it was the uselessness of our post-award management in the university auxiliary, which has long been problematic, which has dissuaded so many faculty from even attempting to secure external funding. Oh, the horror stories I have seen unfold.) So, the person in charge of our campus research enterprise inherited a huge mess. Enough of a mess that I thought at the time, “Well, that’s one job I would never want.” Jump forward to this month, and it looks like the biggest part of this mess is finally getting cleaned up, which is being greeted with much praise and hope by current and prospective PIs on our campus. To the casual observer, it might look like that this administrator simply decided to implement a few changes, and BAM! things got better! But if you have an understanding of how universities work, you would see that these institutional changes required a lot of advance planning, building of bridges, reinforcement of defenses, winning the faith and goodwill of a lot of people involved, and alignment of budgetary priorities. It had to have been a ton of work to make this happen. The person who made this happen had the authority to make these changes, but they also had to spend a couple years of their professional effort pushing in this direction to make this happen. There was a thing that was horribly broken that now, we hope, won’t be broken anymore. That kind of positive change doesn’t come purely through good intentions, and I’m grateful for those who put in the work. Over this time span, I’ve learned more how to appreciate the value of this kind of work.
The other story is about me. Several years ago, I was conversing with a student from a different institution who was telling me how I nice it was to have a powerful person like me on their side, and I said something like “Ha! Power? I don’t have power. I’m a professor at a university that people go out of their way to ignore who has a blog and a twitter account, I don’t have power over anything.” And then they made a point demonstrate the various ways that I had power that they didn’t have, and how I was using it, and how I could use it. They showed how I was putting my effort into making changes, and showed how it made a difference. That didn’t really consolidate in my recognition until a year or two ago, and now I see how naive/impostery I was with respect to the nature of my own power. In hindsight, even with a smaller platform than now, I see how I had more than a wee modicum of power in the scientific community. And that to some extent was making even a bigger different than I set out to make. Now that I’m able to recognize the (soft) power I have, my job is to figure out how to best leverage it to change things for the better.
What it took so long for me to realize is that everybody has power of some kind2. And it’s most useful oneself to recognize the areas where you are disempowered, the areas over which you have power, and work to successfully navigate within the latter.
[looks at the calendar] For those who celebrate: Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day!
Yes, I realize that this is a whole field of scholarship in theories of change and power, and no, I’m not an expert in this field, although I’ve digested the tiniest bits over the years. Feel free drop your favorite books/articles/blogs/etc in the comments! (As long as it’s not Malcolm Gladwell or Ayn Rand, natch)
The times when we feel most powerless, when those with more power abuse us or take advantage of us, might be crushing enough that we might feel that we are wholly powerless. I get this.