When you’re on vacation the idea is to not think about business, to not let the “itch” of issues get under your skin.  In that sense, my time off this summer was…. well, let’s call it a semi-success.

Part of the problem was the responses to my last extended blog entry, “The Department of Redundancy Department.” The blog had made some inferences about strategic leadership communication based on recently published research which found that project managers with “positional power” were less likely to use persuasion to get things done than those without it.

The responses tended to fall into one of two camps.  One basically accused me of being oblivious to the obvious: “real” leaders, they dismissively pointed out, use persuasion and influence.  Ergo, in the research, those managers with “positional power” who didn’t use persuasion weren’t “real” leaders.  Really, Barry, they seemed to be saying, do we really have to point this out to you? I could almost sense the schadenfreude, the secret pleasure that a “smarty pants” blogger who thinks he’s cool because he quotes Harvard research had missed the most self-evident, basic truth about leadership.

I responded politely, and didn’t bother to point out that their argument was, in fact, an almost perfect example of circular reasoning–circulus in probando—which while full of sound and fury, signified nothing.

Much smarter, and more informed, were the responses from research-savvy communication practitioners who pointed out that: (1) the sample size of the Harvard research was small, and the results, therefore, not easily generalizable; and (2) it focused on project managers, not senior leaders, and therefore didn’t directly support the inferences I had made.

All true. And yet, curiously enough, none of the respondents who pointed out the error of my ways was willing to take the next step and say that my inferences were false. As seasoned professionals, they had worked with lots of senior leaders, and had enough experience to sense, just as I did, that something about being in power makes one less likely to engage people using persuasion and influence.

Wondering what that might be was an “itch” that kept pulling at me during my vacation, breaking through my efforts to relax and pull away.  I had suggested several justifications leaders might have for not using persuasion, but justifications aren’t reasons. And I wasn’t ready to shrug my shoulders, and accept the finding as a fait accompli, yet another proof of Lord Acton’s tried and true, if trite adage: “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

That only generated to more questions: why does power corrupt? Or better yet, how? What is it about power that is corrupting? What are the social, organizational, or psychological dynamics that tend to pull even the best-intentioned leaders away from using persuasion and influence and toward the exertion of authority?

Truthfully, I had no good answers. But awaiting me upon my return from vacation was a soon-to-be-published research article that offered insights into exactly these questions.  I’ll share those insights in the next entry of “Power and Persuasion: Friends or Foes?”