Why We Still Struggle to Talk About Power
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Barbara Suigo is a charisma expert, HR consultant, and author. Specializing in the development of soft skills, she has published the "Charisma Trilogy" and offers personalized training and coaching programs for leaders and professionals.
Reflections inspired by the work of Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on one of the least recognized dimensions of organizational life: power, influence, and everything that almost no one is ever really taught.
We speak easily about empowerment, much less about power
There is something culturally revealing in the way we choose our words. Empowerment belongs to the vocabulary of positive intentions. Power, for many, still belongs to the vocabulary of ambiguity. The first word suggests openness. The second suggests friction. The first is almost always welcome. The second is still handled with caution.
But this distinction, convenient as it is on a linguistic level, risks becoming misleading on a practical one, because autonomy cannot truly be understood if the issue of power continues to be removed from the conversation. It is not possible to speak seriously about responsibility if we do not also address who has access to decisions, who is heard, and who is able to move a proposal forward when it meets resistance.
In other words, within organizations, we are often willing to talk about everything that revolves around power, but much less about power itself. It is precisely this reluctance that often makes the conversation cleaner than it is useful.
Pfeffer, by contrast, invites us to look at the picture without cosmetic filters. In his view, power is not a moral accident. It is an ordinary component of organizational life. It means the ability to influence decisions, gain cooperation, mobilize resources, defend a position, and make something happen in the real world.
What almost no one really teaches
Perhaps the most important point is not even that power is discussed so little. The point is that these themes are taught very little.
We are taught to study, to specialize, to become competent. We are taught to be prepared, rigorous, reliable. In professional settings, the emphasis is placed on results, performance, continuous improvement, and correctness. All of this has value, of course. But much more rarely are we taught how to read a dynamic of influence, how to recognize where consensus is formed, how a position gains weight, how legitimacy is consolidated, or how power circulates even when no one names it explicitly.
This is an important and often underestimated educational gap. Pfeffer makes it visible through his course Paths to Power, designed precisely to offer tools for understanding power and building a personal base of influence. The very fact that there is a course explicitly devoted to this subject says a great deal: a decisive part of organizational life does not coincide at all with what is most easily or most willingly taught.
The result is that many people enter the workplace with very solid technical preparation, but with still fragile tools for interpreting the relational and political context in which that competence will have to move. They know how to do their job well, but they do not always know how their contribution actually enters decision making processes. They know how to produce content, but not always how that content is heard, supported, downsized, or absorbed by the context around it.
Power does not always coincide with its abuse
When power is named, it is often named reductively. In common understanding, the word immediately calls up its worst forms: abuse, domination, manipulation, control, rigid hierarchy. These forms do exist, of course. It would be naive to deny it. But stopping there means narrowing the field of observation too much.
In Pfeffer’s perspective, power is first of all a capacity. The capacity to influence decisions, direct resources, obtain cooperation, protect an initiative, and move something forward that would otherwise remain still. In this sense, power does not automatically coincide with its degeneration. It is a concrete condition of organizational action.
This distinction changes the way reality is read. If we continue to think of power only as something morally suspect, everything related to influence will tend to seem ambiguous. Whoever seeks to be heard risks appearing too political. Whoever protects their space may seem excessively strategic. Whoever understands informal dynamics well may be perceived as less transparent than someone who claims to stay away from them.
But symbolically distancing ourselves from power does not mean neutralizing it. More often, it means giving up on understanding it.
When power remains implicit
What is not named well usually becomes opaque. What is opaque tends to produce two effects: either it is demonized, or it is left to operate in the shadows.
When power remains implicit, people struggle more to read it. They struggle more to understand why some positions carry more weight than others, why some ideas quickly gain support, and why certain actors manage to shape the context more effectively. Organizational life naturally continues to be crossed by dynamics of influence, but those dynamics are perceived as something confused, almost improper, or as a dark game reserved for others.
This is exactly where a widespread form of organizational illiteracy begins. People live inside systems shaped by power, but they do not always have the words, categories, and maps needed to understand it. What is not well understood can hardly be handled with maturity.
For years, Pfeffer has observed that organizational politics are a crucial reality of professional life, not a marginal parenthesis. Ignoring them does not make them disappear. It only makes them harder to read and often leaves the field open to those who understand them better, even if they never make them explicit.
The discomfort of serious professionals in front of power
This is where many serious, prepared, and conscientious people enter a zone of discomfort.
Not because they lack substance. Not because they work poorly. But because they associate power with something that seems incompatible with their idea of professionalism. They prefer to define themselves through the quality of their contribution, not through their ability to shape the context. It is a respectable position. In some ways, even a noble one. But it risks being incomplete.
Because in organizations, it is not enough for a position to be sensible. It must also find an audience. It is not enough for an idea to be valid. It must also be able to enter the places where it can produce effect. Above all, it is not enough for a person to be competent. They must also have a sufficient degree of legitimacy, recognition, and influence to turn that competence into impact.
This is not about inviting anyone to become opportunistic. It is about accepting that influence is part of adult professional life. That rejecting everything connected to power does not automatically make a person more principled. It may simply make them less equipped to read the context in which they move.
The limits of empowerment when it is only declared
It is precisely at this point that so much corporate language about empowerment reveals its limits.
Autonomy is often described as though it were mainly a psychological disposition: having confidence, feeling authorized, taking responsibility. But real autonomy does not depend only on how a person perceives themselves. It also depends on the power they actually have to make their action effective.
A person may be formally encouraged and remain substantially irrelevant. They may be given delegation in words and still have too little room to influence processes, priorities, or resources. They may be described as autonomous in an environment that continues to concentrate the real capacity to decide elsewhere.
In such cases, empowerment risks remaining a reassuring formula that does not touch the heart of the matter. Talking about power, by contrast, forces us to touch it. It forces us to ask who is truly heard, who has access to the conversations that matter, who can change a direction, and who has not only tasks, but voice.
These are less elegant questions, but more real ones. Perhaps for that very reason, they are more easily left in the background.
Understanding power is a form of professional maturity
Pfeffer has long insisted that if we want to change an organization, valid content and good intentions are not enough. Power is also needed. It takes the ability to gather support, mobilize consensus, obtain cooperation, and withstand the inevitable friction that accompanies every change. This too is a theme that is taught very little. We speak a great deal about competence and much less about the ability to turn competence into effect.
From this point of view, understanding power does not mean becoming cynical. It means becoming more lucid. It means recognizing that not everything that matters presents itself under a reassuring name. It means accepting that a decisive part of organizational life cannot be reduced to positive slogans.
Understanding power also means stopping the assumption that integrity and influence are necessarily incompatible. The point is not to choose between substance and the ability to have an impact. The point is to integrate the two without losing lucidity and without losing oneself.
Conclusion
Perhaps, then, the real question is not whether we should love power. The question is how much it costs us to keep failing to teach it, to name it well, and to leave it in a grey area of professional education and discourse.
Because what is not taught is rarely understood in depth. What is not understood in depth almost always ends up being either idealized or feared, but rarely handled with maturity. The point, ultimately, is not to celebrate power. It is to stop removing it.
As long as we continue to train people to be highly prepared on a technical level, while leaving them poorly equipped to understand influence, we will also continue to leave them without the tools needed to read one of the most ordinary and decisive realities of organizational life. As long as we speak easily about empowerment, but with difficulty about power, we will keep circling around a central issue without truly confronting it.
Read more from Barbara Suigo
Barbara Suigo, Senior HR Consultant, Author, Charisma Expert
Born in Italy and naturalized as a French citizen, Barbara Suigo is an HR consultant, author, coach, and trainer specializing in the art of charisma. With solid experience in corporate communication and extensive training in NLP, persuasion, and storytelling techniques, she supports professionals and companies by offering personalized coaching, training programs, and in-depth content.
Barbara is the author of the Charisma Trilogy, a work that deeply explores how to develop and harness personal influence and leadership presence. She has also published other books focused on personal and professional growth, solidifying her role as a leader in the field of soft skills development.
