Why do we struggle distributing power?
I have rarely met, coached, or worked with a leader of an MRC (multiracial/multicultural institution) that did not message and believe deeply they wanted to distribute power to their team. I have also rarely met a team who felt their leader was distributing power. I have watched folks who swore they wanted to, get spooked by the risk required to distribute that power. They have felt at a soul level that turning over decision making rights would end their institution.
There is a lot of internal work leaders need to do to get from that space to one in which distributing power is a regular part of their job. From my point of view there are two major blocks to the distribution of power in institutions.
One, teams who have worked in deference cultures are MUCH less equipped to distribute power. When we ask for fealty we forget to create institutional alignment. This is vastly different than institutional agreement or deference. Alignment is creating a zone by which many can exist with different points of view but move from alignment of goal/purpose. Many leaders INSIST on absolute agreement/deference in order to give over power but it makes the slice of people who can truly participate with you very small and much more high risk.
In turn, when our teams ask for shifts in strategy or policy — if the leader does not defer to the team — it is seen as not respecting them. They learn that from us.
We are shitty at discerning between alignment and agreement — most of our fights are soaked with the conflict of insisting on 100% agreement and rooting out even a smidge where people don’t agree. Get good at that and you are 1000 steps ahead in distribution of power.
The second is the inclusion paradox. We want inclusive decisions. By their nature, inclusion in a process for decision making means folks are waiting to understand what is happening until it is built… together. That ambiguity just undoes so many people. At group level we often insist on certainty. Certainty requires exclusion. It is the thing that will happen no matter what from the beginning why by default means many hands can not go into its creation.
We will have to learn to hold uncertainty robustly in order to include more people in power. We will have to learn to live with the risk distributing power creates. This is true at all levels. We have to make a tradeoff between the feeling of safety and actual safety.
These things sound simple but ultimately in the moment they feel existential.
Our tradeoffs end up being hampered because we are unwilling to look at impacts that don’t just apply to or are felt by the most powerful or ourselves. We want to eliminate risk at the price of alignment and cohesion. Risk vs control will ruin an institution because it can fray the trust people have in the collective. It is one of the quicker ways to create us vs them dynamics.
The coming weeks are going to face us with 100 tradeoffs between risk and control — it is up to us whether we stick to our inherited norms or the norms of the world we want to build.
