Westside Toastmasters is located in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California

POWER ISSUES AND QUESTIONS

Leaders are influential power users in the work community and with its members.
Power is the ability to get others to do what the power user wants them to do whether the others want to or not.
Power use is a cornerstone of current inner leadership theory and practice and the essence of leader behavior in the interior regions of the corporation.
Inner leaders use power instrumentally as an aid to achieving their intended results in the work community.
The ethics of power lies not in power itself but in the motives and values of the user.
Power use is critical in understanding normal work-community life since both inner leaders and their coworkers use power to secure their goals, control scarce resources, negotiate agreement, or take independent action to try to achieve their personal goals.
Power is a relative concept—the inner leader may be relatively powerful in one circumstance and not so powerful in another.
Using power tends to increase power; failure to exercise it can result in its loss.
Effective leaders know that power use has limits and have learned to accommodate their use of power accordingly.
Inner leaders learn to use and become expert in as many power tactics as they can.
Inner leaders use power in relationships with both peers and superiors in the formal work community structure.

Do the hierarchies you create focus on maintaining and keeping power? Sharing and distributing power? Provide specific examples.
What obstacles do you face in using power in your relationships with coworkers in the middle of the corporation?
Do you make use of all the techniques of power usage in your relationships with your superiors? With your peers?
Which power techniques do you use most? Which are most consistently successful for you? Why?
Can you provide examples of each of the sources of power referenced in this chapter from your present work situation? Are some sources of power more useful than others? Explain.
What is the risk to you as a leader of providing stakeholders with as much power as possible? Does this action risk loss of power for you? Explain.
Do you recognize that you can give more of your power to your coworkers and still retain all your power? How does power multiply when the leader shares power with others?