Hammering Power: Part 1 of 3 Part Series on How Kamala Harris Uses the 9 Leadership Power Tools
Issue 273 — September 16, 2024
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, you are likely to treat everything you see as a nail.”
The hammer is a metaphor I use to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of power, so that women will embrace their hammer of power with confidence, authenticity, and joy (yes, there’s that word “joy,” and I’ve been saying it in this phrase for years).
You can use the power of a hammer to build something or break it. It’s pure energy. It becomes what you make of it.
The two American presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, could not be better archetypes of two contrasting ways to wield that hammer as they exercise their personal power.*
I first heard that hammer — nail quote from Time teacher of the year, the late Abraham Kaplan.
I had the privilege of meeting and learning from him during my second CEO stint, at the exact moment I was trying to figure out how to overcome physical and political attacks of adversaries. I wanted to do this without succumbing to the temptation of becoming mirror images of them, and the oppressive ways I perceived they used power. And so I began to research the subject on the context of women’s leadership and the significant disparities between women and men in leadership positions, especially top leadership roles.
For example, how many female presidents of the United States have we had?
Exactly.
I had to understand why.
For most of recorded history, the narrative of power has been about war, brutal fighting where physical strength was king (and it was almost always king), and the assumption that all resources were scarce. Therefore we had to horde our power with force if necessary.
Possibly because I’m in the throes of launching, not one, but two versions of Take The Lead’s online 9 Leadership Power Tools course — one is for women creating their careers within organizations and one for entrepreneurs, I can’t help but analyze everything I see through the lens of the principles I teach in the courses. That “nail” includes how I viewed the recent presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Oppressive Power vs Generative Power TO: the Core Mindset Shift
My research led me to conclude that for good reason, women often express ambivalence about embracing their power. That’s because we have historically borne the brunt of the worst aspects of brute power over us, from rape to legal discrimination.
Yet when we discuss the fact that power has no attributes of its own- it’s simply energy that can be whatever we make of it — immediately, faces relax and women say “Oh yes, we want the power TO make life better for myself, my family, the world.”
From the visual appearance of the two candidates, the debate presented a clear contrast between oppressive power over and the generative power TO.
Trump’s scowl and Harris’s smile couldn’t be more diametrically different ways of expressing the same thing: their approach to wielding their power.
When used authentically, both models can attract followers. We see that by the fact that the presidential race remains a tossup.
But something fundamental is changing in the cultural zeitgeist.
You may remember when Harris stopped then Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence from interrupting her during their debate. She was not aggressive but stated firmly, ”I’m speaking.”
Women around the country immediately related, putting the phrase onto t-shirts and talking animatedly about it on social media.
Journalist Molly Jong Fast referenced the moment in this recent commentary about the September 10th Harris/Trump debate:
“That moment when Trump told Harris he was ‘talking now’ reminded a lot of us of what it’s still like to be a woman in the world. I’d say this was one of the very few times being a powerful, white man did not benefit Trump. Women are used to being interrupted. That’s why when Harris said it to Pence in 2020 it was such a powerful encapsulation of the experience of female life. Trump tried to make the line his, but he flailed and failed, and that quickly became a theme of the debate. And somehow, Harris used the power imbalance to be powerful… She was able to use the optics of a woman standing up for herself to her advantage.” (emphasis mine)
Image courtesy of AP Photo/Alex Brandon via whyy.org
I remember when, in 2016, Trump physically charged into Hillary Clinton’s space during their debate. Clinton stayed to her forceful presentation, but she didn’t react, as though she didn’t see him. I thought about all the times I had done the same thing, because that is how women of our generation had been socialized — to be self-contained and not to show our anger, lest we be judged negatively for it.
That was the moment when I knew viscerally that she had given too much of her power away and would likely lose the race.
Fortunately, a generation of women has emerged with more confidence in how they wield the hammer of their power in a generative way — claiming their space and embracing their power TO define their terms.
As Jessica Bennett noted in the New York Times, “Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.”
What do you think?
Can power TO win outdo power over in a hardknuckle political race?
Is our culture ready for the women who lead like women instead of mimicking the men?
What other observations do you have about the manifestations of power in leadership?
*Take The Lead is a nonprofit organization and does not support or oppose political candidates. But we can apply our teachings to analyzing the leadership behaviors of candidates as well as other people in leadership roles in order to learn from them. That is the intent of this post.
GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.