Monday Mentor-Week 22-Personal Power and the Effectiveness Equation

Every leader needs personal power to operate in an organizational and corporate environment. Personal power is what a leader uses to get the job done and achieve results. Personal power is necessary and must be carefully balanced for optimum leadership effect.


There are five types of personal power for leaders. They include threat, reward, organizational or legitimate, expert and relational or relevant power. The effective leader must combine the use of all five and avoid the overuse in any particular power area.

This all leads to a very important concept and manageable competency. Leadership effectiveness is comprised of 25 percent job and technical knowledge, 25 percent integrity and ethical values and 50 percent relationships. The first two areas, job knowledge and ethical values represent core leadership credibility while the relationship piece is how a leader accomplishes his or her objectives.

This leadership effectiveness equation must be managed daily to insure that one area does not over-shadow any other. If technical and job knowledge is more in play than relationships, team performance, tone and loyalty will suffer. If integrity and ethics are at a higher than needed level, crusading and lack of approachability will occur. When relationships are weighted more than 50 percent, the team may not trust the leader. Balance in this effectiveness equation must be kept constant (LE = .25 JK + .25 I/E = .50 RE).