Do You Throw Your Weight Around?

It’s called leverage and here’s how it works. Someone possessing authority over someone else demands cooperation, compliance or acquiesence. It’s the oldest method of manipulation, using power play to move the world in your favor or toward your ends. It can be as subtle as a restaurant owner choosing not to serve a teen until she has served the older more distinguished customers who can clearly articulate their wants. Then again it could be as blatant as threatening to withold money from a scholarship fund unless certain personel are not removed from the organization that administrates the fund. As the economy runs on a deficit so the world seems to run on leveraged power. As it happens, we are all either in power, searching for it or ferociously pursuing it.

Before we dismiss ourselves from thinking that we would ever participate in leveraging consider the following list and why each bullett qualifies as leveraging:

• complaining about your co-workers or fellow students (How is this leveraging? You are using your emotional arguments to sway the sympanthies of peers and form a mob that paints someone or some people as villains)
• servicing certain clients better than others (How is this leveraging? You are exercising your prerogative as the seller to discriminate because you think one group of people needs you more than you need them.)
• Using a condescending tone to talk down to people (How is this leveraging? You have identified qualities in the person that you deem inferior and assumed that it gives you a right to bully.
• Appealing to loyal authorities on your own behalf (If you’re asking how this is leveraging you gots to be jokin’. Nevertheless, this is when you use your access to “big timers” to get you out of trouble. Example: My dad, the former Shooting Guard for the Detroit Pistons and current chief of Police in Kalamazoo, made my 100 mph over-the-speed-limit ticket somehow vaporize.

So let’s say we ask not only whether or not we throw weight around but rather how effective it is. Is there a danger to relying too heavily on coercion? What kind of leader are you?