Reducing power gradients in organisational culture

Hello. Welcome. My name's Jade Garratt. I'm co-founder and director of Psychsafety, and I'm going to be talking today about a topic I find particularly interesting, which is reducing power gradients in organisational cultures.

So in this talk, I'll be covering, first of all, the types of power or at least one way of thinking about types of power. We'll then consider what power gradients are, what we're actually talking about here, and why we want to try as far as possible to reduce our power gradients. I'll do that, in part, through a departmental case study. So we'll explore one example of a university department that we worked with for over a year, and consider how they actually did some really great work on reducing power gradients in their context. We'll look at the micro, the meso, and the macro practices, which can be so powerful for helping us to reduce power gradients, and we'll wrap up just with some reflections on what else can we try in this area. So what is power?

Well, the physicist in me wants to say that power is the rate at which work is done, or energy is transferred. But probably the more useful definition that we can refer to, especially when we're thinking about our organisational context, is power is the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events. So the power that we have within an organisation that we're working in, a business or another kind of organisation, is what allows us to get things done, to do that through influencing the behaviour of others or just in making things happen. And the model of power that we like to use is what we refer to as our four typologies of power. This is actually derived from some work by French and Raven; it's a slightly simplified version of some of their work. But we find it particularly helpful when we're working in practical, real-life contexts with people in different kinds of workplaces to help us move beyond a basic understanding of thinking of power as just being the formal power that we have. So when we talk about formal power, what we mean is the kind of power we can write down. You could see that in our job titles. Maybe we might share it when we write about our work. But it's imbued by the structures, the hierarchies, the rules and the laws that govern us, whether that's our nation state that we're in, whether it's roles that we have as part of our role as citizens in a country, or whether it's the formal roles that we have in our workplace, or maybe we might have formal roles as part of our teams or our communities. But it's the official one. It's the one that we can see very clearly; it's usually the most overt form of power. The next kind, though, is sometimes less easy to see but often highly influential. So this is our informal power. Now our informal power is the power that I might have, let's say, in an organisation because I'm really good friends with someone in a senior leadership position. It's the power that's endowed and defined by our social status, our popularity, our networks. So, things that will affect our informal power include the way that we are with people, maybe the degree to which we're able to build connections, build friendships across an organisation, build professional working relationships, even things like how long we've been with an organisation. You know how much time have we had to build up these kinds of networks. This will all determine the kind of informal power that we have in particular situations. Then we have our demographic power. So this is the power that comes from factors that are usually beyond our control, things like our gender, our race, our age, our sexuality, and not always, but usually, the more that those demographics align with the dominant norms of the organisation that we're in, the greater the demographic power that we have in that particular situation. So let's say I work in an organisation which is predominantly led by straight white men. Then, if I am a straight white man and in that organisation, chances are I'm going to have a certain degree of demographic power because my personal demographics align with those in power within the organisation. The last power, a really interesting one, is our expert power. So this is the kind of power that we have because we've got a certain level of expertise or a certain amount of experience in a given area. Like all of the forms of power, this is highly situational and highly contextual. And sometimes it comes in the way we might expect, like we've worked in a domain for many, many, many years, so we've built up a lot of expert power in that area. People look to us to gain our perspective on things because they know that we are the experts in this area. Maybe it's because of our formal study, our education. We've perhaps got a PhD, a doctorate in something, and so people might look to us as a certain degree of expert power there. But it can also be things like if you have previously been in an organisation that's gone through a large restructure and you've led teams through that change. If you're now in an organisation which is about to embark on a large restructure, people may well look to you. You may well find that you've got a certain degree of expert power in that situation because of the previous experience that you've had. And these forms of power are cumulative. We don't sort of only have one of them. We all have power of different kinds in different situations. What we tend to see is that when you see someone who has a lot of formal power, they've maybe got a senior status within the organisation, but perhaps they've also got a lot of expert power, maybe a lot of demographic power, and they've built up a lot of informal power. This is where we can start to see some people having a lot more power than others within an organisation, within a particular context, which is what we're going to come onto in a moment. Okay. So what about power gradients?