Impact of Power

There are three kinds of power:

1. Power over others
2. Personal power to make decisions that can change what happens.
3. Shared power that comes when people join together to reach a goal and each one is as important as the others [D5] [D9].

People without power often do not feel it is safe to tell a person with power over them what is wrong. They worry that if they make people in power upset, those people could make life harder for them [D10]. This is one reason why people will not say that a team leader needs to do a better job, even when it is true. You must be very brave to risk telling the "boss" what you think is not working.

Most people notice things that they cannot control, more than the things that they can [D7]. So people whose job is to ask the team members "How are we doing?" may forget that others see them as people with "power over."

What if an individual with disabilities, family members and a PDD intake staff need to work together to get the individual some support to have a good life. If the family knows the PDD staff talks too fast for the individual to understand the plan, they should tell the staff. But they may be scared that the staff will not want to work with them if they do. If the staff does not help them fill out the forms right, the individual will not be able to get support. So they do not speak up about the problem.

Team members do not see you as an ally who will share power with them right away [D1]. It takes time for you to change what team members think about who has the power. So it is important to have different ways to ask, "How are we doing?" when you work together.

Here are some tips to overcome the problem of power so that you can get good feedback.

• Tell people you want to hear how you can be better at what you do. You do not want to hear only the good things.
• Ask questions that cannot just get a yes or no answer. Ask what worked or did not work.
• Make feedback anonymous. Anonymous means that you do not know who said what. That means someone else must collect the information, or it must be written.
• Have someone who is not part of the team get the feedback from team members.
• Give Feedback Forms only to team members who can read and write well. Find a different way to collect information from others.
• Be careful to ask just one question at a time. If you ask more than one, people do not know which one to answer.
• Ask short questions with easy words.

Click here for an activity that teams can try to explore who has more power.