Original subtitles

Good day, my name is Stephen McGurn, and the purpose of today's presentation is

to explore the concepts of personal and positional power for the PMGT 840 class,

Managing Teams and Leading People, June 17, 2025.

In this presentation, we're going to explore the differences in the

of personal and positional power.

Personal power can be derived based on a person's unique qualities, whether it

be their expertise in a certain subject, the integrity that they have and show

and demonstrate in their projects and professional life, the charisma they

with the people around them, and their ability to build strong bonds.

Personal power is a crude

you know, in various means.

Expert power, for example, is demonstrated when people have unique

skill sets or very specific knowledge in an area of, you know, their area of

expertise, whether it be in the workplace or in consulting, or they

certain skills or rare experience that are not common.

Reference power is more based on trust and admiration or the personal influence

that people exert, highly reflective of soft skills and emotional intelligence

and relationship building capabilities that people have.

Information power, on the other hand, is all to do with brokering knowledge and

information data and or the perspective.

that that knowledge holds.

So you may have an opinion on certain aspects of the

industry that you're in. And it's not just a question of the knowledge you

but how that knowledge is viewed through the lens of whether it be consulting or

specific work through like engineering, for example.

And all that is when the knowledge you have is specifically not common. and not

a commodity.

So you're being brought in as an expert in the field.

Positional power, on the other hand, is authority that's granted through a

formal role or a title. So you might be hired or promoted into, let's say, a

vice president role, which gives you authority over a certain aspect of your

business or unit within the company, or you might be elected to public office.

And through that title that you're conferred, you have this authority to do

certain work, whether it's like you're a judge and you have the ability to

decide. of people's guilt or innocence, or if you're a member of Congress who's

elected and you can vote on bills, authority is granted to you in the job

you have or are elected to.

So the sources of positional power could be legitimate power. So like I

mentioned before, you're hired to be a vice president or director of a certain

department, and you have power and authority based on that. Or like I

before, a judge.

You know, a judge, the minute they're sworn in, they have certain authority to

do within the scope of the role they have.

Reward power, on the other hand, is more if you're in a position where perhaps

you don't have authority to hire and fire people, but maybe you're the

maker who grants salary increases or you have control of certain bonus amounts

that people could be given.

Even a project manager may have access to that, like a retention bonus that

recommend or they approve in order to not lose a...

a key resource on a project. If you know that the job market is hot, you might

say to everybody, you know what, if you stay till the end of the project, I can

authorize $5 ,000 as a retention bonus. That would be.

Reward power.

Also recognition.

Sometimes people aren't always motivated by money.

Sometimes it's about a congratulatory or a celebration for the end of a project

or solving a key problem or, you know, something that the team was struggling

around and you have that ability to bring recognition to a person or to a

and then some folks have a certain type of power to grant people like if you're

a practice manager or a resource manager and you control where people get

allocated you might be able to say hey that was a really tough project you're

and i know you really want to do x type of work next i'm going to give you that

type of project next so that's the type of power that people can exert through a

role that they have so that they can grant somebody a reward for their next

assignment which is in the form of a really fun or interesting project or

something new that they've been meaning to try.

Now, coercive power, on the other hand, is sort of a demotivator from a power

perspective. It's the authority to penalize or discipline team members. So

put somebody on a performance plan or, you know, I mentioned higher fire

authority before. Maybe you have that ability to fire people or to reorganize

team. All those can be viewed as coercive types of power.

Sometimes it's required.

but it's also not necessarily the most effective power to yield or exert over a

team.

Our class notes had a very effective table that I've reproduced on this

You can see here the positional power is usually temporary in nature, and it's

more of an opportunity to drive compliance aspects of performance.

Whereas personal power, I feel, is a more intimate type of power to have, and

it's also harder to earn.

It usually results in deeper trust, partnership, and usually persists beyond

bounds of the project.

So positional power is in the moment power that you have over people for a

limited amount of time.

Once those people are out of your sphere of influence and no longer in your

project or in your department, you no longer have power over them.

Personal power could be a leader that people view as

motivational or inspirational.

And it usually is almost like putting money in the bank that you could

later on because people have granted you trust. They've granted you respect.

They've granted you all these things because you have done.

well by them as well. You've built that trust, you've earned that respect, and

now you have this relationship that both parties are invested in. So that's the

difference, I believe, in personal and physical power. One is transient, but

potentially more impactful. Another one is more relationship -based and

persisting over time.

I was thinking about how the different types of power can

be demonstrated in my day to day. I work in IT consulting and manage a team of

architects and developers and project managers.

And for me, I think there are points in time on a typical project where you see

all the types of power sort of get exerted. So if you look at a project and

kickoff, that is positional power, customary for the executive sponsor to

formally introduce the consulting team to the larger audience.

And it's not just a formality, it's a crucial transfer of positional power

that... that stakeholder is granting to the team being put in place and the

project manager.

being assigned to it. It's kind of like a substitute teacher stepping into a

classroom. The principal will lend them that authority to teach and manage even

though it's not quote unquote their class.

So it's a type of borrowed power that a customer grants to a consulting team or

a team of consultants that either augment or fully are outsourced into a

within that client environment.

That typically allows us to immediately begin our work with full authority to

progress because we have that borrowed power that's been granted to us.

Now, if we look at the project plan, again, that's the type of power,

power that controls the ebb and flow and the rhythm of the project.

When we create that project plan, it serves...

a lot of useful purposes like organizing activities defining scope but also

wields a subtle but super potent form of positional power we set due dates we're

outlining milestones we're creating targets for people to hit and they're

usually outcomes if we You know, our consequences if we don't hit those and

plans have to change and we have to sort of exert some power to keep the project

in line.

That project plan will dictate the rhythm and momentum of the work that

going to do.

Kind of like how an air traffic controller, they don't fly the planes,

would have certainly a lot of influence on where the plane go, how they land,

the timing of everything.

Certainly not somebody who's a pilot, but certainly somebody who has that

ability to influence greatly.

how the pilots do their work.

Consultants are essentially in that kind of position where they often will have

that ability to exert control over how a project goes within the

confines of the power that's granted to them by the client stakeholder.

Best practices are also a way that we can leverage positional power through

expertise.

As consultants, we'll bring in either unique expertise, whether it be IP that

bring or processes or just that.

history of having done it a million times before and it grants a certain um

know credence and weight to our opinion because it's not that we're discovering

it together for the first time we've gone through it enough times to know

all the hazards are and the traps that lie in wait kind of thing so

We also, you know, because we work across multiple organizations and

with competitors and we compete against competitors, we work with suppliers and

customers, we have that.

objective outside in view that we can share with our clients and usually

eager to understand what that perspective is and how they can

their you know those best practices into their day -to -day operations of how

they run their business

And then, of course, there's data, right, and the power of data. So we can

leverage the positional power through that data expertise.

So clients will often operate on a sense of how they're performing.

They don't really know, right? They lack that hard data to back it up. So this

is a way where expertise power truly can shine by bringing that data.

viewpoint and pulling out reports and providing customers black on white math

say you're operating at 32 % efficiency or there's a certain amount of

percentage of loss or waste in your processes.

That type of data lends credibility.

It's not just a gut check that you're doing where everybody can kind of have

some bias built into how they look at things.

Then, of course, there's relationship building. So as consultants, we

strive to be on site as often as possible to have those impromptu

and build relationships and trust with the clients as best we can. So

that ability, that proximity helps.

build that trust that helps build that familiarity and you also are viewed as

kind of being in the trenches at that working level with them and there's a

shared pain and going through projects together that builds uh you know that

sort of trench warfare um and and suffering together leads to the the

being sweeter kind of thing so um

That's another way that power can be built is through relationships. And, of

course, if you look at steering committees, that as well, there's a

amount of power in there, positional power, but also builds relationships and

trust. That's where you demonstrate to the stakeholders all the things that

you've built on and how you're driving the project, all the efficiencies, all

the data. It all sort of comes to a swell in those steering committees. So

that's another way that relational power.

comes to bear in a day -to -day of a consultant's life.

I hope this presentation on different types of power exerted and the viewpoint

had on how consulting leverages the different types of...

power that can be exerted with clients and team members was informative to

everybody and that I hope hopefully that some of it is helpful and your own

personal understanding based on my viewpoints of personal and positional

Thank you for your time.