The Authority You Can Control
Freeing yourself from the authority struggle within
What do you think of when you hear the word authority? Police? Doctors? Parents, or bosses, or your own personal power?
Authority is a multi-dimensional facet of leadership. Let’s break it down so we can strengthen our HI.
Three types of authority
There are three main types of authority: personal, role, and external.
Most people have them all jumbled. And as we’ll see, that jumble can have high costs.
Personal authority is the power derived from being in charge — the author, if you will — of your own life, mindset, etc. It is the willingness to trust yourself and stand in your own knowing. Personal authority comes from within. I think of it as a blend of confidence and creativity.
Role authority is the power that comes from a professional or familial role. For example, if you are a magazine editor, you have the power to select which articles to include in an issue, and shape them to match the publication’s content and tone. Like selecting and shaping content, every role has one or more overarching responsibilities, or as I like to call them, tasks. Role authority is the power vested in you to carry out those tasks. The overarching tasks of parenting are to protect, feed, nourish, and teach. Being a good parent means your authority is connected to those tasks.
External authority is the power that individuals and organizations outside ourselves have to make and uphold rules. Parents, police, organizations, governments, etc., all have the power to make rules and enforce compliance. Sometimes external authority — like that of our parents — takes up residence inside of us. This can be good or bad depending on what those voices say and when they show up.
The jumble
All of these versions of authority live inside of us, and often clash, leading to stress and sometimes paralysis. (This post is about managing our own internal authority struggles. For how to handle external authority conflicts, visit — or revisit — the posts in the conflict series, or join an HI Circle!)
Say your job suddenly requires doing something you don’t like, such as calling potential clients at home. You may be under pressure by the boss (external authority) to meet a quota, and at the same time sensing your own personal authority is at odds with that strategy. On top of it, you may have internalized parental voices piping in with messages like “do what the boss says,” and “keep your job because that’s what good people do.”
Teasing out the three types of authority within us can help us think clearly and lead more effectively. First, an in-depth example of how the wires of authority get tangled up.
The good boss
A new boss, having resigned from working for a toxic one, decided he was going to care about his staff. Remembering how his previous boss sneered at the team whenever they made a request, how she seemed to thrive on barking out orders simply because she was the boss, he vowed to make sure his team felt safe and knew why he was asking them to do things.
But the good vibe workplace he tried to create ended up backfiring. His role required that he lead a team to get work done quickly. Some staff started skipping important meetings, knowing they’d be forgiven. Groups of workers constantly congregated in his office to discuss the latest totally avoidable crisis. As a result, work was delayed. Staffers refused to stay late.
He felt he had no authority. He was at risk of being fired.
Identifying priorities
The new boss realized that if he wanted to succeed in this role, he was going to have to shift.
When in any kind of authority struggle, I recommend that people search for the number one task at hand and focus on it. Finding it enables the different aspects of authority to come into alignment. The boss had to recognize that his main task as a leader was not to be nice; it was to make sure work was well distributed and getting done. Focusing on those tasks of leading, with kindness, yes, but also through creating systems of accountability and being firm about upholding them, brought his personal and professional authority back into alignment.
Internal negotiations
Sometimes it’s hard to find a path forward. There needs to be some internal negotiating.
A CEO hired his oldest friend to be his CFO, whom he later discovered was involved in some nefarious accounting practices that made the company numbers look better. The CEO was in a pickle: confront the CFO and give him another chance, or fire him? Personally he believed his friend probably was trying to do good. But professionally, in his CEO role, he had a strict policy when people put the company at risk. But how could he lose his friend because of a policy?
He spent days in an internal negotiation between his personal and professional authority, and an old external authority voice coaxing him to just smooth things over.
Ultimately, he knew his task as a leader was to uphold the value of the company and model ethical compliance to his staff. He decided to fire the CFO and hoped they would find a way to reconcile their friendship.
Practice understanding your authority
Here are some useful questions / guidelines:
In what areas do you feel that you are the author of your own life? And where do you not?
What are the top roles you’re playing and the main tasks associated with them?
Can you distinguish the voice of your personal authority from that of a leftover internalized external authority? Hint: If an internal voice makes you feel flattened or small, it’s not the voice of your authority.
We may have no control against the creeping authoritarian rule, but I hope the three types of authority and how to manage them within yourself is a useful construct. Again, for help thinking through struggles with external authority, read the posts in the conflict management series (all five: compromise, competition, avoidance, accommodation, can be accessed via the collaboration Stack, below).
And since things are slipping into dangerous territory here in the US, I will say this: When external authority is enforced with violence, it smashes all other authority options. The only task available in those circumstances is to try to hold on to any amount of personal dignity. If creativity is an option, it’s sometimes the only way through.
Need guidance stepping into your authority?
Thank you for this article. I've been thinking a lot about authority and authenticity--that my desire to be authentic has at times undermined my authority. Thinking hard about how to achieve both.
this is something I feel like in general- there is a lack of training for - and people end up in these roles without knowing how much responsibility or power they actually have and how to wield it properly. I wish this (like good parenting) was taught in schools. Much more useful than some of the more arcane subjects we end up being required to take.