Positional Power: Improving Your Position

Positional power is inherent in the position. Positional power is often initially conferred by external forces. To get promoted and get a better, more powerful position, you have to impress key people in the company to give you that position.

Respect for power: Winning widespread acclaim

What others think of you greatly affects whether they will follow you. Respect is an important power resource that can be harnessed.

You can win respect from many aspects: knowledge level, special skills, age advantage, special status or special group membership, qualifications, and the awe of others.

Rhetorical Power: Communicating with Purpose

Mastering persuasive rhetoric, whether spoken or written, is an important source of gaining power, position, or status. When other conditions are equal, people with strong language communication skills can become strong in a specific environment.

Resource power: experience management control

It doesn’t matter whether you have the resources that others need, as long as you can control these resources. Within an organization, you normally have control over certain resources. These resources are limited in quantity and distributed in a way that increases productivity. Within these boundaries, you have the power to provide more or less support to others. This is called resource power.

Relational power: building a network of relationships

Relational power comes from who you know and how well you know them. If you're the chairman's golf buddy, the rising vice president's favorite, or the friend of a key person in the finance department, you'll gain power from those relationships.