Power is a team not an individual sport

The Nonsense Dialogues

How to become more powerful and successful using the power of others.
That was going to be our shamelessly clickbait title for this episode but the Olympics are currently on and we thought we'd instead piggyback on everyone's excitement over that.
This episode does indeed explore the concept of power, where does it come from and how can one gain and deploy it. To help us, we have invited Dr Andrew Frain, a social psychologist, who like Randal, is a true believer in the social identity approach. The Nonsense we address this week is the conventional individualistic approach to power as characterised by French and Raven’s bases of power. Instead, Andrew presents John Turner’s model for understanding how power can be gained and deployed through leadership, authority and coercion. We all then discuss the implications of this with each of us taking a different perspective. Randal shows off his intellectual pretensions by quoting Nietzsche and David tries to be the cool kid in school by taking a Marxist approach to the distribution of power in organisations. On the way, we cover the absence of power as a topic in management education, how to resist power, the shaping of collective realities in deriving and sustaining power, and we start to discuss the application of all this to improving management, leadership and change in modern organisations. However, as usual, we ran out of time and decided to carry that discussion over into Part 2 of our exploration of power. That episode will be coming soon. Promise.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.