Unlock Jeffrey Pfeffer’s seven attributes of power from ‘Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t’: Ambition, energy, focus, self-knowledge, confidence, empathy, and conflict tolerance. Master actionable strategies to build personal influence, overcome career obstacles, and achieve lasting success in leadership and life.
What separates the people who build substantial influence from those who stagnate in middevel positions? Is it luck? Circumstances? Being in the right place at the right time? According to Jeffrey Pfeffer’s decades of research at Stanford Graduate School of Business, documented in his book “Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t,” the answer is both simpler and more actionable than most people realize.
Through analysis of political and business biographies, observation of hundreds of leaders across all walks of life, and systematic research on power in organizations, Pfeffer identifies seven personal qualities that consistently predict who will acquire and maintain power. These qualities fall into two fundamental dimensions that distinguish people who rise to great heights and accomplish remarkable things: will (the drive to take on big challenges) and skill (the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment).
Understanding these qualities matters because, unlike physical traits or family connections, most of these attributes can be developed. Power is not something you’re born with—it’s something you build through deliberate cultivation of specific personal characteristics.
The Three Qualities of Will
Ambition: The Foundation of Sustained Effort
Success requires effort, hard work, and persistence. To expend that effort and make necessary sacrifices requires driving ambition. Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and considered one of the ten best mayors in American history, did not run for that office until he was 53 years old. Daley realized early in life that he desired power, and he was willing to wait patiently for the opportunity to exercise it. He spent three decades toiling quietly at the routine jobs of urban machine politics.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Abraham Lincoln emphasized Lincoln’s driving ambition as one of the most important qualities that produced his success in political life. Lincoln’s drive enabled him to overcome an impoverished background, early political setbacks, and personal slights.
What’s true in politics holds equally in business. Jill Barad, who rose to become CEO of toy company Mattel, possessed unquenchable ambition. She often wore a bumblebee pin with meaning behind it: “The bee is an oddity of nature. It shouldn’t be able to fly, but it does. Every time I see that bee out of the corner of my eye, I am reminded to keep pushing for the impossible.”
Organizational life can be irritating and frustrating, diverting people’s effort and attention. Ambition—a focus on achieving influence—helps people overcome the temptation to give up or give in to irritations. As Melinda, a vice president in a large credit card organization, explained to Pfeffer, her relentless focus on a goal permits her to put up with annoying, stupid, frustrating situations she encounters—to not get hung up with the imperfect in the moment. Her desire for career success helps her control her emotions and continue working to achieve her objectives. This ability to stay focused on outcomes rather than people and their idiosyncrasies has been an important factor in her rapid career progress.
Without ambition, you will not sustain the effort required to build power. People with modest ambitions achieve modest results. If you want substantial influence, you need substantial ambition driving you forward.
Energy: The Competitive Advantage of Effort
Laura Esserman, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California-San Francisco, led remarkable changes in medical practice both locally and nationally from a position of little formal power. She got her MBA degree while practicing medicine full-time and having her first child. As she once said, “You don’t change the world by first taking a nap.”
Frank Stanton, president of CBS and a huge influence in the news and broadcasting world, worked prodigious hours including weekends and typically got five hours of sleep a night. Rudy Crew, the school system leader, is an insomniac, often up at three in the morning. Crew was typically the first person to arrive in the New York City chancellor’s office, where he made the coffee. Pfeffer notes that he knows of almost no powerful people who do not have boundless energy.
Energy does three things that help build influence. First, energy, like many emotional states, is contagious. Therefore, energy inspires more effort on the part of others. As a young congressional secretary working for Representative Richard Kleberg in the early 1930s, future U.S. president Lyndon Johnson worked his two aides mercilessly. But because he worked alongside them with just as much effort, they didn’t complain. Your hard work signals that the job is important. People pick up on that signal, or its opposite. People are more willing to expend effort if you are too.
Second, energy and the long hours it permits provide an advantage in getting things accomplished. Research on genius or talent—exceptional accomplishment achieved in a wide range of fields—consistently finds that laborious preparation plays an important role. Social psychologist Dean Keith Simonton spent more than a quarter century studying the determinants of genius and writes that individual differences in performance in a wide diversity of talent domains can be largely attributed to the number of hours devoted to the direct acquisition of necessary knowledge and skill.
Third, when people have limited time and attention, the people with the most energy and persistence are going to be more successful in capturing that time and attention. This matters because persistence and energy are, fortunately, attributes you can do something about.
Focus: The Discipline That Multiplies Effort
Having ambition and energy won’t help much if your efforts are scattered across multiple, unrelated domains. Power and influence are built through concentration of effort on a limited number of activities and relationships. Most people dissipate their efforts, working on too many things and building too many relationships without depth. Focus means prioritizing ruthlessly.
Ross Perot built Electronic Data Systems and made billions by focusing intensely on government contracts for data processing, particularly Medicare and Medicaid processing. He didn’t try to be all things to all people. He found a niche, dominated it, and built from there.
Focus also means saying no to opportunities that don’t align with your path to power, even when those opportunities are attractive. As one executive Pfeffer studied noted, every yes to something is a no to something else. If you want to build power, you need clarity about where you’re heading and discipline to avoid diversions.
The Four Skills That Create Power
Self-Knowledge: Understanding Your Strengths and Limits
One of the biggest obstacles to acquiring power is not understanding your own deficiencies. Cornell social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning conducted research showing that people without the requisite knowledge to perform a task successfully also lacked the information and understanding required to know they were deficient. People who scored in the 12th percentile on tests of grammar and logic thought they were in the 62nd percentile. They overestimated their own performance, had difficulty assessing what they had answered correctly and where they had made mistakes, and could not accurately recognize the relative competence of others.
The solution is simple but requires humility: get advice from others who are more skilled than you and will tell you the truth about yourself. Unfortunately, asking for this sort of help sometimes feels like weakness, and people are reluctant to admit what they do not know—that self-enhancement thing again. Ironically, those who admit ignorance are more likely to improve than those who either don’t know their deficiencies or are afraid to admit them to others.
As Confucius said, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.” Improving requires sharing this information with others who can help remedy the lack of knowledge. This applies as much to understanding power dynamics inside companies as it does to technical skills.
Self-knowledge also means understanding your automatic responses and working to control them. If you’re naturally conflict-averse, you need to know that about yourself and develop strategies to stand your ground when necessary. If you tend toward arrogance, you need to recognize that trait and modulate it when building relationships. The better you know yourself, the more effectively you can develop the other qualities required for power.
Confidence: Projecting Self-Assurance
Power often comes to those who act as if they already have it. Confidence is a key to success because when you encounter a new situation, people in that setting are unfamiliar with you and need to figure out whether they should take you seriously. You need to seize control of the situation. In making decisions about how much power and deference to accord others, people naturally look to the other’s behavior for cues. Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers associate confident behavior with actually having power.
Amanda was a talented executive sent by her large consumer products company to get a master’s degree in management. In the spring, she began thinking about her organizational reentry and drafted an email to her company sponsors. A friend strengthened the tone of the message, making it clear that Amanda aspired to the senior executive ranks and was looking for a career path that would get her there, stating much more explicitly the type of position she expected on her return. Although initially reluctant to send what she viewed as a presumptuous message, Amanda forwarded it and was pleasantly surprised by the response. Her company colleagues liked her confident approach and expressions of ambitious career aspirations. That’s how senior executives behave, and Amanda had shown she was just like them.
Research by social psychologist Brenda Major shows that women work longer and harder for the same amount of money, award themselves lower salaries, and have lower career-entry and peak-earnings expectations than men. One implication is that because women don’t think they are worth as much, they are disadvantaged in salary negotiations, which is one reason for persistent male-female earnings differentials.
The consequences of not being confident and assertive apply to everyone, not just women, and not just in salary determination. If you aren’t confident about what you deserve and what you want, you will be reluctant to ask or to push, and therefore you will be less successful in obtaining money or influence compared to those who are bolder.
Empathy: Reading and Understanding Others
Training in negotiation often includes advice to negotiate over interests rather than positions. Through mutual concessions, both parties may end up better off, but to succeed at such an approach, you need to understand where the other is coming from. This ability to put yourself in another’s place is useful for acquiring power.
One source of Lyndon Johnson’s success as Senate majority leader was his assiduous attention to the details of his 99 colleagues—knowing which ones wanted a private office, who were the drunks, who were the womanizers, who wanted to go on a particular trip. All these mundane details permitted him to accurately predict how people would vote and figure out what to give each senator to gain their support.
University of Texas psychologist William Ickes has studied empathic understanding and notes that empathetically accurate perceivers are those who are consistently good at reading other people’s thoughts and feelings. All else being equal, they are likely to be the most tactful advisors, the most diplomatic officials, the most effective negotiators, the most electable politicians, the most productive salespersons, the most successful teachers, and the most insightful therapists.
What sometimes gets in the way of putting ourselves in others’ shoes is too much focus on our own objectives and not enough concern for recruiting others to our side—or at least curtailing the likelihood of their opposition. When Laura Esserman was pushing for changes at the breast care center at UCSF, she initially focused on saving lives and doing the right thing while ignoring others’ concerns about budgets and resources. One day she realized she was diverting her efforts into an enterprise that only provoked opposition. She called her department chair, said she understood his point of view and agreed with him, and within two weeks closed down a service that was causing conflict. That simple act gained her support from people whose help she needed. Far from diverting you from accomplishing your objectives, putting yourself in the other’s place is one of the best ways to advance your own agenda.
Capacity to Tolerate Conflict: Standing Your Ground
There are many books and substantial research on the detrimental effects of workplace bullying—the screaming, ranting, profanity, and carrying on that sometimes occur in workplaces—on both the targets and the organizations in which they work. So why does such behavior persist? Because it is often extremely effective for the perpetrator.
Most people are conflict-averse. They avoid difficult situations and difficult people, frequently acceding to requests or changing their positions rather than paying the emotional price of standing up for themselves and their views. If you can handle difficult, conflict-filled, stress-filled situations effectively, you have an advantage over most people.
Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff and formerly a successful member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, is known for his temper. Emanuel seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents but never quite losing himself in the midst of battle. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, recognized for accomplishing a lot while in office, was someone who never shrank from a fight. His toughness edged toward ruthlessness and became a defining aspect of his mayoralty.
Some people mistakenly believe this willingness to engage in conflict is a source of power only in Western cultures. But the evidence doesn’t support this view. In Singapore, a country that runs campaigns promoting courteous behavior, former long-serving prime minister Lee Kuan Yew has been described as someone who was often rude and contemptuous. Lee came to power by taking on the British and has shown no reluctance to back down from fights with political opponents over the ensuing years.
This doesn’t mean you should become a bully or that you should seek conflict for its own sake. It means you must be willing to stand your ground when it matters, to not back down when you’re right, and to not let the discomfort of conflict deter you from pursuing important objectives.
What About Intelligence?
After discussing these seven qualities, Pfeffer addresses one attribute often associated with power but that he considers, beyond some level, highly overrated: intelligence. While you need sufficient intelligence to master your domain, exceptional intelligence does not predict exceptional power. Being smart helps, but being too smart can actually hurt if it causes you to focus on complex analyses while missing political realities.
Research shows that measures of intelligence, such as IQ, have almost no correlation with job performance beyond entry-level positions. What matters more for acquiring power is not raw intelligence but political skill—the ability to understand what people want, build coalitions, navigate organizational dynamics, and get things done through others.
Developing Your Power Qualities
The good news is that most of these qualities can be developed. Ambition can be cultivated by clarifying what you want and why it matters. Energy can be increased through health practices, elimination of energy drains, and deliberate choices about where to invest effort. Focus can be sharpened through ruthless prioritization and saying no to diversions.
The skills of self-knowledge, confidence, empathy, and conflict tolerance can all be developed through practice and feedback. Get advice from people who are further along paths you want to travel. Put yourself in situations that stretch these capabilities. Observe people who exemplify these qualities and learn from how they operate.
Power is not mystical or innate. It flows from specific personal qualities that can be identified, studied, and developed. The question is not whether you have these qualities now, but whether you’re willing to do the work to develop them. As Pfeffer’s research makes clear, the path to power is open to anyone willing to cultivate these seven essential qualities with discipline and persistence.
