How to Use Your Power to Make Things Right

You have the ability to wield great power in your organization. A great purpose for doing so is promoting fairness and equality.

Today’s post is by Ron Carucci, author of Rising to Power (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

“It’s not fair” is probably one of the greatest laments of organizational life. People see advancement and compensation decisions, performance ratings, organizational configurations and resource allocations, and scratch their heads often unable to reconcile those choices with the principles and policies the organization claims to live by.

Here is the risk for you as an executive: when people participating in any communal activity (like an organization, a school, or a nation) believe that their contribution matters and they will be rewarded accordingly, they commit differentiated effort to the cause. However, when they have been conditioned to expect capricious leadership, and rewards distributed to a privileged group despite their lack of contribution, they withdraw trust and minimize their contribution – doing the least amount to get by safely without being singled out.   So it behooves executives to shape their leadership around justice and meritocracy to the fullest extent possible, even if that means unseating long standing mediocre performers and shifting resources to those leaders and businesses with the greatest promise of success.

Somewhere in the organization you lead are stories of injustice; poor performance that has been over-rewarded and great performance that has been under-valued.   See your positional power as a resource that, while unable to right all of the wrongs of the past, can resolve not to perpetuate them, and can shift your organization to one people can trust and participate in confidently.

Organizational injustice may always be a harsh reality of communal life and “fairness” an arbitrary criteria applied subjectively.   Your legacy as an executive, and your credibility to effect far reaching change, will be garnered by your intolerance for injustices perpetrated on your organization by processes you do have control over. You will be amazed by the performance you will unleash, the passionate sense of significance you will set free by establishing a culture that values equitable treatment of people instead of the superficial appearance of “equal treatment.”

We saw this exemplified by an executive in a vivid display of courage. She was newly appointed to the organization. She was its only female executive and she was selected to run their global product commercialization organization.

As one of the world’s leading biotech companies, their number of products on the market was small, but they were mega blockbusters. The number in the pipeline was troubling –many were struggling to find their way to market. Their average time to market needed to be reduced by multiple years in order to push their products, and patents to market faster in order to hit their growth commitments.

She quickly sized up that the therapeutic silos in which products were developed and commercialized was preventing the organization from managing an enterprise portfolio with the ability to prioritize the most promising drugs regardless of their class or indication. Historically, the “fiefdoms” as she came to name them had earned lots of political clout, and each managed their own portfolio despite pulling from the same enterprise pool of resources. The strain this put on the scientists and development teams was enormous as the “lords of the fiefdoms” vied for priority focus, exaggerating the merits and market potential of their projects.

Newer “lords” leading the most promising therapeutic areas had little chance of garnering the needed resources to get their products to market while the established lords had the political clout to get their products over stage gate hurdles barely meeting the criteria for being advanced. She declared “this is just lunacy!”

She called all of the lords together into a very contentious session, knowing she risked substantial political retribution by them and her peers, whose P&Ls were built around their own markets and products. She said, “Look, I may be new here, but this is the most Darwinian approach to running a pipeline I’ve ever seen. I can’t even detect what criteria, scientific, financial, or competitive, we’re using to accelerate or kill these projects. It’s grossly unfair to the teams working on these projects that are getting whiplashed as the priority du jour changes on them, and it’s dishonest to our shareholders whose money we are spending on projects that clearly have no shot at making it in the market.   As of tomorrow, we will have one pipeline, with one set of criteria, and we will manage it as one portfolio. The following projects are to stop work immediately, and their teams will be redeployed onto these top five projects whose development we will accelerate.” She finished with her prioritization assessment and concluded, “I understand this is radically different than what the organization has known before, and that perhaps this is abrupt, but I just don’t see any reason to keep this in place a moment longer.”

Of course she’d secured the support of the CEO and the Board for making this radical move, acknowledging it could mean the loss of key leaders who couldn’t tolerate the exposure or loss of power.   As expected, the litany of anger, pushback, dismissal, and even sabotage that ensued for the following months was monumental.

But the cheers from the broader development community were equally as loud.   Messages of “Thank God we now have clarity and focus, and the right projects are getting the money and focus they need!” flooded her inbox. Eventually she prevailed, and two of the lords ended up departing the organization, and one therapeutic area completely discontinued.

Some might conclude that what she did just made good common business sense – do what will make the company most efficient and profitable. But she saw it as much bigger than that. To her, the horrible inequity in how the organization operated meant the most talented people, the medicines with the greatest promise and the patients with acute needs were all getting compromised.   Her courage to use her positional power exemplifies the type of justice that can be brought to organizations where dynasties of ineffectiveness and politics have successfully opposed leaders attempting to bring about change.

Look around. Where are the organizational injustices whose impact you’ve minimized in the face of more pressing challenges?   Where might you exercise your positional power to bring about greater meritocracy despite temporary political disruption?   Do it. Secure your leadership legacy of lasting impact and reputation as one who used your power for the greater good.

– Ron Carucci is Managing Partner at Navalent, an organizational and leadership consulting firm.   He is the author of 8 books, including Rising to Power: The Journey of Exceptional Executives (CLICK HERE to get your copy). His work has been featured in HBR, Fortune, CNBC, Business Insider, Business Week, and Chief Executive.

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