What Can the Ouster of Kevin McCarthy Teach Us about Power and Leadership?

Obviously, the U.S. House of Representatives is not the typical workplace. For one, the employment contract representatives have is with their constituents, so they can’t be fired just for insubordination. They can barely be fired for malfeasance—after all, George Santos is still a member of Congress. 

Since I’ve been reading lately about power and organizations, a couple of lessons stood out to me from the ouster of former speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Lesson 1: The savviest leaders avoid great-sounding jobs that are nonetheless wrong for them.

McCarthy, as has been widely reported, had only one objective—to become Speaker of the House. Because of that fixation, he was willing to make compromises to get the job—and those compromises were exactly what would cause him to be unsuccessful. There was, seemingly, no option in his mind of walking away.

In contrast, in a study of successful leaders, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus found that the most successful leaders are skilled at spotting and avoiding situations that won’t work for them. 

They write in the book Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge that successful leaders “seemed to ‘know’ when a particular job would fully exploit their strengths and when their unique qualities were no longer relevant (or could even be detrimental) for the organization [...] Their so-called good timing was more dependent on their capacity to discern the fit of strengths to needs than anything else.”

And by being able to pick the right roles and sidestep the bad ones, the leaders created a track record of performance that aided their ascension.

The challenging part of this equation is that it takes humility for us to analyze our own strengths, weaknesses, political skills, and power, and whether those elements are a fit for the job we want. 

In the book Managing with Power, Stanford professor Jeffry Pfeffer writes: “My experience is that most people are neither very self-reflective about this particular dimension of the person-job match nor very realistic in guiding their actions on the basis of it.”

Lesson 2: You have to build tools to exercise power before you get the role.

Sources of power are built long before one steps into the role. External hires are generally less successful than internal ones, for example, because they don’t have the information and relationships that enable them to operate the levers of power. 

That’s also why people are promoted to a larger scope that requires them to manage the work of unfamiliar domains and to work with people they haven’t built relationships with previously find their new roles especially difficult.

The main issue is that once someone takes the new role, there’s little time to fundamentally shift the existing power dynamics—one has to play the hand they are dealt.

An implication is that we should always be thinking about what the next role will require of us to be successful. 

For example, if you’re the COO looking to take over the top job, you should be developing independent relationships with the board and external stakeholders—now. Or if the next role will require getting things done through different departments, getting to know how those groups work and how to collaborate with them is a wise thing to focus on today.

Finally—and this comes up everytime I coach leaders who feel like they’re stuck with a problematic team member—everyone should proactively develop their roster of potential hires. The most effective leaders have an always-on approach to recruiting. They aren’t indifferent to the success of the people on their team, but they also have a two-deep depth chart of people they would call if they needed a replacement.  

And in doing that work, it makes it easier to avoid situations in which our team members hold a disproportionate sway over us.

Lesson 3: Remember that subordinates always have a vote. 

Everyone having a vote is literally the case in political and membership organizations, but it’s also the operating truth of hierarchical and corporate forms. 

In Managing with Power, Pfeffer writes: “We seldom consider the fact that formal authority is a source of power if and only if we accede to it. Lower-level participants in organizations also have power—the power to resist or refuse the orders of their superiors. And, in fact, if enough of them resist, their superiors will come to have no power at all.”

He continues: “The power inherent in a given formal position is, therefore, power invested in that position by all (or at least most) members of the social organization in which the position is located. ‘Consent of the governed’ is a phrase with meaning not only in democracies, but in all forms of organization, including corporations and other bureaucracies.”

Where leaders can go astray is thinking that the employment contract supersedes the social contract. They should do what I say because I’m the boss! 

Well you’re only the boss if everyone agrees you deserve the power to boss, and that’s something we earn on a daily basis.