Power Of Persuasion

Understanding power as a component of policy making and the political process is central to understanding who is holding the cards, that is to say who or what is influencing outcomes and calling the shots. White (2016) outlines 9 sources of power and for relatability provides examples from the healthcare setting. Legitimate or positional power comes from an individual's position within an organization, this would be a manager, chief nursing officer or chief executive officer. Ideally, someone in these leadership roles would also possess expert power by virtue of their education, experience or specific skill set. These same individuals also frequently have reward power because of their ability to compensate employees for doing what they ask

This form of power requires not only education and access to data and facts, but also an innate ability to appeal to others in a way that is personalized to the audience. A certain amount of confidence and charisma is often associated with people who are able to exploit the power of persuasion. A nurse who is appealing to a board of directors for funding for a particular project will have facts and figures to back up not only the importance of their project and it's intended outcomes, but will be able to demonstrate a mutual benefit to the organization by allocating that funding. Empowerment is perhaps the most altruistic form of power in that it involves imparting power to others through informing, organizing and confidence building. It turns out that if power is shared in this way rather than being reduced it actually can grow exponentially. Empowerment could actually be considered the most powerful of all forms of power because it has the potential to be

An excellent example of this process would be the cumulative voices of all kinds of nurses in the state of Georgia (and in many other states around the nation) currently fighting in the political arena for Full Practice Authority. Though nurses can easily see the global benefit of increasing access to primary care (as well as other specialties where APRNs can and do practice) to more Georgians, empowerment can be used to garner widespread support for such policies by helping law makers to make personal connections with outcomes of expanded APRN practice initiatives as well as connections to the lives of their constituents. (Messias and Estrada,