Gianni Infantino’s Fifa failure is a lesson for leaders everywhere
If you want to win in leadership, you must get comfortable with power, writes leadership expert Steve Mostyn
Fifa President Gianni Infantino is facing perhaps the biggest crisis of his career after a global revolt including Uefa, the European Football Governing body, that led him to abandon, for now, a multi-billion-dollar plan to sell commercial stakes in the Football World Cup to Private Investors.
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This evolving story illustrates the importance of asking yourself honestly ‘Where Does My Power Come From?’ It’s a question the most effective leaders ask regularly, and I ask it frequently of executive leaders and am constantly intrigued by their assumptions and answers.
The answer to success in being aware of your power source is not what you expect. It has little to do with job title, role, or political backing. It has everything to do with others.
The first step is to get better at asking better questions- then the unexpected pushback from stakeholders can be minimised or at least predicted.
The best leaders ask the best questions, and it can be taught and learnt in equal measure. By encouraging a culture of better questions, better attempts at answers will emerge, and those being asked feel involved, creating a positive cycle of feeling valued and involved. They have a stake in the outcome. It seems Uefa felt uninvolved and ignored. But those questions don’t happen by accident. They emerge from a practice. A reflective practice. Do you have a reflective practice? Do you know how you reflect?
Then ask yourself.
Where does my power come from?
Far too often, when I have asked the question Where does your power come from? in workshops, I’ve heard pushback around an assumption that power is a dirty word linked in some way to the dark arts of politics and selfishness. Many people, and particularly less-experienced leaders, believe there is something unethical or untoward in even thinking too much about power, much less thinking and acting strategically to gain and use power. Or perhaps the pushback may be simply the social process of not wanting to discuss this taboo in front of other powerful peers.
But it’s clear: if you want to win in leadership, you must get comfortable with power. It is the lifeblood of effective leadership.
In a seminal study of power, “Power is the Great Motivator,” David Burnham and David McClelland studied measured outcomes in performance and concluded that those who work through others :
“Recognise that you get things done inside organisations only if you can influence the people around you, they focus on building power through influence rather than their own individual achievement”
Keep close to your key constituencies, stakeholders and others who allow you to be successful and realise that power is multidimensional. By asking better questions constantly, you keep your legitimacy and your role alive and thriving.
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Steve Mostyn is an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School and is the author of: Why Great Leaders Ask Great Questions.
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