Tag: power asymmetry

The Gandhi Paradox

You are not Gandhi.

Gandhi was a private citizen when he began. No title, no formal authority. People followed him because they chose to. They could walk away, and some did, and that was their right, and the movement survived anyway. The commitment of those who stayed was real precisely because it was voluntary. You could see it because leaving was an option.

Your direct reports operate inside a legal framework of employment. Their income depends on meeting your expectations. Their career depends on your assessment of them. The question this creates is one most managers never ask: how much of what I read as engagement is engagement, and how much of it is the entirely rational behavior of people who have learned that agreement is safer than dissent?

I watched this once in a team meeting. A new initiative was presented. Everyone engaged: questions, notes, apparent buy-in. Weeks later, in a casual conversation, I learned that several people in that room had serious reservations. Reservations they took home with them. They had done everything right. Their compliance had been indistinguishable from commitment.

It was not commitment. And the room never knew.

The manager who recognizes this pattern has usually decided it doesn’t apply to them. The open door is real. The invitation to candor is sincere. And none of it changes what people will risk saying to someone who controls their livelihood. The effort was genuine. The structure doesn’t register it.

This is not a culture problem. It is not a communication problem. It is not a psychological safety problem, though it will be diagnosed as all three. The power differential does not disappear because you have made yourself approachable. It shapes what people will risk saying in every conversation you have with them. It shaped what they said to you this morning.

What you are reading as engagement is real. It is also insufficient evidence. The question worth pondering is not how to fix the structure. You can’t. It is what kind of attention you owe people you cannot fully read.

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photo by 愚木混株 Yumu

Lies, Damned Lies, and Performance Evaluations

You do their performance evaluations. Their survival in the company depends on your decision and your criteria. So when you say “I get along fine with the people who report to me because I always get good evaluations from them,” do you really think that’s evidence?

This doesn’t mean they lack courage or are being strategic. They might be entirely sincere. The asymmetry simply means you cannot know. When you hold power over someone’s professional life, that structural inequality is present in every interaction whether anyone responds to it or not. Their positive evaluation might reflect their genuine experience of working with you. Or it might not. The asymmetry makes the meaning of their feedback fundamentally indeterminate.

And while the surveys are anonymous, there are just too many managers who’ve told me they can recognize who wrote the comments by the way it was written and the words they used. So even the structural protection of anonymity often dissolves in practice. And if comments are too risky and you take them off, then you’re left with numbers. And as Disraeli said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

You might deserve the praise. But their positive evaluation, given the context, cannot tell you whether you do.

The same dynamic appears when executives cite employee engagement surveys as proof their culture is healthy. The survey measures what employees are willing to say about a culture that determines whether they remain employed. What you’re measuring isn’t engagement. It’s what people are willing to have measured.

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photo by Jon Tyson