Understanding Your High Performer Superpower: Referent Power

(This article was inspired by and is dedicated to my exceptionally talented daughter, Alexis as she learns to navigate the brilliance of her referent power.)

You’ve heard me in TikTok posts talk about a special superpower that high performers have that makes you a frighteningly significant threat to your organization’s insecure underperformers, to your dysfunctional family, and to your frenemies. High performers are sitting on a superpower that's referred to in the leadership literature as “referent power”. A 2024 Psychology Today article describes referent power as the ultimate form of influence, considered the most potent power. I’ve spoken about it before to offer education and awareness because it’s still an unknown power to most of you, a mystery, yet an inherent part of most high performers secret abilities, as well as the most triggering to your detractors.

According to Psychology Today, which references “referent power” in the context of leadership powers, it is considered the most potent of the five leadership powers, because it doesn’t require that a leader micromanage, use coercion, or reward in order to influence others. People follow a leader with referent power based on who the leader is and how they behave. Referent power has the broadest range of influence of any power, allowing it to be leveraged on a large scale. My translation: if you have “referent power,” you are influential (a natural leader of people) because of WHO YOU ARE (how you show up in the world day after day).

In contrast to leadership authors who deem ‘referent power’ a coachable leadership trait, I believe that referent power is innate in many high-performing Black women (for more reasons than I can present in this article).  Yes, while it can be taught and practiced like most other leadership traits, the majority of high-performing Black women already have the “it-factor” of referent power, with little or no understanding of how it works. What follows is my CULTURALLY INFORMED/TRAUMA INFORMED take on the subject.

The Gifts of High Performer/Referent Power- The BLESSINGS

My research supports the following evidentiary traits/behaviors of referent power in high-performing Black women. They are what instantly inspire folks to follow/be influenced by you. Review the list. If you believe you influence people because of at least 12 of the 15 referent power traits/behaviors listed, you're anointed with the referent power superpower.

• People like you (they attempt to befriend you).

• People listen to you. 

• People ask for your advice/counsel. 

• People follow your advice, directions, and suggestions.

• You change/shift the energy when you walk into the room for a meeting. 

• People look to you for calm in a storm.

• People freely compliment you (on your appearance, your abilities/talents/achievements).

• People want to be around you/take comfort in your presence (even when you don’t want to be around people).

• You demonstrate restraint/grace under fire (you don't flinch during efforts to emotionally bait/ trigger you).

• You are articulate (you communicate fluently/effortlessly).

• You firmly stand up/speak up for the rights of others while also exuding a spirit of kindness and grace.

• You are consistent and dependable (you say what you mean, mean what you say and do what you say you are going to do, when you say you are going to do it.)

• You have AND communicate boundaries, ( i.e., what you will and will not allow/participate in).

• You are inner-directed (think for yourself, not swayed by popular opinion).

• You have unshakeable confidence (you know who you are and NEVER doubt yourself).

• You are all of these things EFFORTLESSLY (without consciousness or effort).

When Did You Know You Had It?

Personally and professionally, I believe that our referent power/leadership ability to influence others naturally appears at an early age. Many of my clients share childhood proof of referent power experiences similar to mine. For example, at age twelve, I was asked to write and deliver an address to my entire elementary school of peers and their families in a memorial service for slain political icon Robert F. Kennedy. In high school, I was featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer in an article highlighting the top 20 academic students in the entire city, predicted as future city leaders. This recognition came at age 16 after I founded and was elected president of my high school's Human Relations committee, which addressed race relations within the school. These early experiences were predictably followed by a career lifetime of overachieving accomplishments such as the first college graduate (3 degrees) and first and only entrepreneur in my family, all achieved utilizing my referent power. 

As a testimony to the survival/superpower nature of referent power, my own family’s failed efforts to make and keep me as the “black sheep” of the family, despite the early/lifetime’s worth of evidence as a high-performing academic achiever with referent power, subsequently followed by the failed efforts of incompetent, insecure supervisors, have only served to steel my anointing. (For my religious or spiritual readers- My point here is…that mere humans CANNOT destroy that with which the good Lord has bequeathed you.) 

Consequences of Having Referent Power- The CURSE

• You don’t even know you have it until AFTER they start traumatizing (punishing) you for having it.

As a performance coach, particularly through my mentorship/executive performance coaching service, I mentor/coach on the five types of leadership power, of which “referent power” is one, and the least understood, thereby unexpectedly causing the most workplace trauma for high performers. Why? Because you don’t even know you have it, you just keep being you, causing your detractors to become more and more traumatized by your inherent influential brilliance and therefore dedicated to traumatizing you for traumatizing them. Their response to you is so exceptionally immature, dysfunctional and ridiculous that as a sane and rational person laser focused only on delivering your very best performance, you never even see it coming.

• You notice increasingly irrational/ hostile reactions to you just being/doing you.

You may have been forced to notice but remain completely perplexed about what you’re doing to wreak what seems to you to be irrational, emotional havoc among your less talented friends, team mates and supervisors. In your mind, you go to work, mind your business, do your job, and go home. In stark contrast, in their insecure, traumatized minds, they’ve noticed that you have an uncanny influence on people, most importantly…PEOPLE LIKE YOU which is embarrassingly more influence than they have, even while trying. Once they clock it as “you/a high performer can do something better than they can” (and you don’t need them to do it/or achieve your success), they go berserk and then desperately try to neutralize the effect of your referent power. This is especially true if your family, friends, or coworkers have narcissist tendencies (me, me, me) because in their way of thinking, you are "winning” (with your referent power), and they are losing. Everyone knows NARCS are control freaks who hate to lose. What really ignites their ire is that they cannot control if or how or when you exercise your referent power, but they will defy all common sense and conscience trying their damnedest to stop/destroy you. 

• Your Punishment for Being a High Performer with Referent Superpower

1. What follows is a covert/overt plan to introduce workplace trauma into your daily work experience to immediately neutralize you as an unforeseen threat to the organization or your team’s level of mediocrity formerly posing as excellence. Unknowingly, you’ve upended their delusion of what performance/production should be and unintentionally raised the performance bar exposing just how little they either know or are capable of. For that crime, Beloved…you surely must die a workplace death.

2. Prepare yourself for an increase in both macro and microaggressions, irrational “gotcha conversations” attempting to accuse you of some mistake or oversight, mobbing by colluding with insecure, jealous peers, covert HR supported plots to include corrupt performance evaluations, bogus PIPs or worse, all concocted to sabotage your work and discredit your reputation as a stellar, elite performer for something they sorely covet but WILL NEVER EVER have...referent power.

• The Reason It's Called a Superpower is Because... And STILL You Rise

3. They are NOT prepared for the fact that while they are executing their ill-fated plan to eliminate you as a threat. People will STILL like you, be drawn to you, seek your counsel to solve problems, and help them make the impossible possible. In essence, your sun still shines, although they are horribly triggered to do whatever they can to thunderstorm on your “referent power” parade of success. And as a result, what I had to learn firsthand is, when their trauma-inducing plan fails, they will resort to a surefire remedy to remove the source of their pain. They will fire, terminate, dismiss you quickly disposing of any evidence that you ever existed/succeeded in making them look like incompetent dunces. STILL you and your referent power will live on to grow and shine at your next opportunity. Your referent power abilities WILL outlive the impact of your workplace trauma but your workplace assassins will be stuck with the memories of how you exposed them to be lying, cheating, unethical, incompetent, jealous boobs.

In closing, let me remind some of you that not all high performers have the referent power gene. You can still be a model of black excellence at work and in your personal lives, and not be gifted with the ability to positively sway others' opinions, to calm people during panic, and to speak up with unflinching courage when others cower in silence. In high-performing Black women, referent power shows up as exuberance, charisma, swag, wisdom, style, exceptional articulation, ancestral creativity and most importantly, a terrifying, indefatigable FEARLESSNESS. The powerful result of possessing referent power is that people will follow you anywhere because of how you consistently show up every day with those 12-15 referent power traits/ abilities, earning both their adoration and respect. This, in and of itself, makes High-Performing Black women with Referent Power a more formidable foe against our workplace and personal life enemies than they can EVER imagine.

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