Leveraging & Positioning with Natalie Holder

Natalie Holder’s Bio

Natalie Holder is an American employment lawyer, author, corporate trainer, and organizational strategist known for her work in workplace diversity, compliance, and inclusion strategy.

Key Highlights

* Professional Focus: Specializes in workplace investigations, anti-harassment/discrimination compliance, executive coaching, and building inclusive, high-performance corporate cultures.

* Leadership Roles: Has served as Chief Diversity Officer for the United States Capitol Police and Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, as well as leading global HR compliance for Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

* Founder: Founder of QUEST Employment Initiatives LLC.

* Author: Written works include Exclusion: Strategies for Increasing Diversity in Recruitment, Retention, and Promotion (American Bar Association Publishing) and Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Workforce: New Rules for a New Generation.

* Legal & High-Stakes Consulting: Barred in New York, Connecticut, and Maryland, she has delivered court-ordered training and counsel in high-profile workplace discrimination cases involving institutions like Fox News and the New York City Fire Department.

Talking Points: Leveraging & Positioning

Framing

Position is what the org chart gives you. Leverage is what you can actually move. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is why capable people stall in roles they have already outgrown.

The research on organizational power is unusually clear on this point: formal authority is one source of influence among several, and often not the strongest. What follows separates the two, then shows where leverage actually comes from.

Your title tells people where you sit. It does not tell them what you can move.

Where Power Actually Comes From

French and Raven (1959) identified five bases of social power, later expanded to six. Only two are positional.

• Legitimate — authority conferred by role. Positional.

• Reward — control over what others want. Largely positional.

• Coercive — capacity to punish. Positional and corrosive to use.

• Expert — power from demonstrated knowledge. Personal.

• Referent — power from being someone others want to align with. Personal.

• Informational — power from what you know and control the flow of. Personal, and the most portable.

The distinction matters because personal power travels with you and positional power does not. A woman who has built her influence entirely on legitimate authority loses all of it the day she changes roles.

Source: French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). University of Michigan. Primary theoretical source: the taxonomy is foundational, but the six categories are conceptual rather than empirically derived.

Four of the six ways people hold power have nothing to do with their title. Those are the four you can build.

Dependence Is the Whole Mechanism

Emerson (1962) framed power as a property of relationships, not people. A holds power over B to the extent that B depends on A for something B values and cannot easily get elsewhere.

Three conditions make dependence real: importance (they need it), scarcity (few others have it), and non-substitutability (they cannot route around you).

This is the most useful frame in the literature, because it is diagnostic. If you have no leverage in a situation, one of those three is missing, and you can usually name which.

Source: Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31–41. Primary empirical and theoretical source; widely replicated in exchange-network research.

Leverage is not something you have. It is something someone else needs.

The Indispensability Trap

Here is where the research turns uncomfortable for high performers.

Dependence creates leverage, but the same dependence that makes you valuable in place can make you expensive to move. When no one else can do what you do, promoting you costs the organization the function you currently hold.

Kanter (1977) documented this in structural terms: the positions that generate visibility and advancement are not the same positions that generate operational necessity. Work that is critical but routine confers little power; work that is discretionary, visible, and relevant to pressing organizational problems confers a great deal.

Salancik and Pfeffer’s strategic contingencies work makes the same point at the unit level: power accrues to those who resolve the uncertainties the organization is most anxious about, not to those who perform reliably.

• Critical and routine: high dependence, low power. The trap.

• Discretionary and visible: moderate dependence, high power.

• Resolves organizational uncertainty: the highest power of all.

Source: Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books. Primary qualitative and organizational research. Salancik, G. R., & Pfeffer, J. (1977). Who gets power — and how they hold on to it. Organizational Dynamics, 5(3), 3–21. Practitioner-facing but grounded in the authors’ empirical resource-dependence program.

Being essential and being promotable are not the same thing. They can be opposites.

Positioning in the Network

Burt (1992) showed that advantage accrues not to those with the most connections, but to those who sit between otherwise disconnected groups, bridging what he termed structural holes. The broker sees information earlier, controls what passes between groups, and has options others cannot see.

Ibarra’s research on women’s networks adds a necessary qualification: women in male-dominated organizations frequently face a structural double bind, needing both instrumental ties to the dominant coalition and same-gender ties for support, and often having to maintain two networks where a male peer maintains one.

Source: Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Harvard University Press. Primary empirical source. Ibarra, H. (1992). Homophily and differential returns. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(3), 422–447. Primary empirical source.

The most valuable seat is rarely at the center of your team. It is between two groups that do not talk to each other.

Leverage in the Room

Fisher and Ury’s concept of the BATNA: best alternative to a negotiated agreement, remains the most practical single tool here. Your leverage in any negotiation is determined by the quality of your alternative, not by your argument.

The applied consequence: leverage is built before the conversation, not during it. The woman with a competing offer, a portable network, and a documented record negotiates differently from the woman with none of those, not because she argues better, but because she can walk.

Source: Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to yes. Houghton Mifflin. Practitioner framework rather than primary empirical research, though the underlying negotiation findings are well supported.

You do not build leverage in the negotiation. You arrive with it, or you do not.

The Gendered Complication

Two findings must be held together, because taken separately, either one misleads.

Babcock and Laschever (2003) reported that women initiated negotiations substantially less often than men, and the finding entered popular discourse as women simply not asking.

Later work complicates this considerably. Artz, Goodall and Oswald (2018), analyzing a large matched employer-employee dataset, found that women asked for raises at broadly similar rates to men but were less likely to receive them. The problem, on that evidence, is not the asking.

Contested: The ‘women don’t ask’ framing is widely repeated and empirically disputed. Present both findings. Advising women to simply ask more, without acknowledging differential outcomes, misstates the research and places the burden in the wrong place.

Bowles, Babcock and Lai (2007) additionally found that women who negotiate assertively can face social penalties men do not — evaluators were less willing to work with them. This is the backlash effect, and it is why generic assertiveness advice frequently fails the people it is given to.

Source: Artz, B., Goodall, A. H., & Oswald, A. J. (2018). Do women ask? Industrial Relations, 57(4), 611–636. Primary empirical source. Bowles, H. R., Babcock, L., & Lai, L. (2007). Social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103(1), 84–103. Primary experimental source.

The evidence does not say women fail to ask. It says the same ask lands differently depending on who makes it.

What This Means in Practice

Diagnose before you act

• Which of the six power bases are you actually operating from?

• Where does someone depend on you, and is that dependence visible to anyone who decides?

• Is your critical work routine or discretionary? The first traps, the second travels.

Build what is portable

• Expert and informational power survive a role change. Legitimate power does not.

• Bridge two groups that do not talk. That position is scarce by construction.

• Build your alternative before you need it. Leverage arrives with you.

Remove the trap

• Make your work legible, a record of decisions, costs, and outcomes.

• Build the person who can hold your seat. The immovable do not get moved.

Position is given. Leverage is built. Only one of them survives your next job change.

A Note on the Evidence

The organizational power literature is largely observational and theoretical rather than experimental, and much of it dates from a period when the organizations studied looked different from those most women lead in today. The negotiation findings are experimental and better identified, but effect sizes vary considerably by context.

Where a widely repeated claim is disputed, it is flagged above. Present the dispute rather than the tidier version.