Why power reveals both strengths and flaws

Power sits at the heart of every leadership role. It’s the thing that lets you make decisions, direct activity and have an impact across a broader scale. It’s also something we generally don’t talk about openly and honestly. We talk about strategy, execution, and culture. We talk about governance and succession. But we rarely talk about the simple fact that the authority you hold as a CEO, executive or leader does things to you. That it changes how you think, what you act on and how other people respond to you. And in doing so, it makes some of your strengths more powerful and some of your weaknesses more dangerous.

At the simplest level, power reveals. The old cliché that ‘power corrupts’ is inaccurate. Power does not arrive like a toxin, infecting previously good people. What it does is amplify the tendencies that are already there. If you have good instincts, clear values and a bias towards creating value for others, power gives those instincts more reach. If you have blind spots, insecurities or self-serving drives, power gives those more reach too. In that sense, power is less like a corrupting force and more like a loudspeaker. It broadcasts the best and worst of you at higher volume, to more people, with higher stakes.

This is not just theory, either. Neuroscience, psychology and decades of observation of senior leaders all point to the same core mechanisms. The first is action. Power makes it easier to do things. Through the control it grants, leaders become quicker to act, more confident in their decision-making, and more persistent in pursuing their chosen course. The sense of being in control increases risk tolerance and fuels entrepreneurial behaviour. The upside is obvious: bolder bets, faster moves and the ability to force change through complex systems. The downside is just as real. Once committed, powerholders are slower to back off, even when the data turn, and they tend to prioritise the goals that feel most salient to them in the moment. Those goals are often short-term, sometimes personal, and not always what the business most needs.

The second mechanism is distance. Power creates space between you and the people you lead. Some of that distance is physical (you are in different meetings, different rooms, different rhythms), some is structural (people now depend on you for pay, progression, and air cover), and some is psychological. You are no longer just a colleague; you are the boss. That shift changes how people behave around you and how you see them. Leaders gain a helicopter view and find it easier to step back, filter noise and see issues in the abstract. That can be useful. But it also makes leaders more likely to generalise, stereotype and treat people as resources rather than as individuals. And because people naturally moderate what they say upward, the information that reaches you becomes more filtered, more massaged and, in some cases, less true. Over time, this warps the data you see, dulls your feel for the room, and weakens your ability to absorb challenge. And this is critical because leadership lives or dies on judgement.

The third mechanism is a double-whammy: power tends to increase self-esteem, confidence, and even basic self-image, while simultaneously making leaders less able to sense their impact on others. Most leaders report feeling better about themselves once they are in charge. The problem is that this confidence can slip into overconfidence. Leaders become more certain of their own views, more likely to rely on what they already know, and less inclined to actively seek disconfirming input. At the same time, power reduces sensitivity to social and emotional cues unless the task directly demands it. Some of this is just the natural consequence of the increased distance power generates, but there is more to it than that. Because across just about every type of metric you can imagine, the more power you have and the longer you have it for, empathy for others falls. So, unless you deliberately work to ensure otherwise, power will make you feel better about yourself and your judgement, while simultaneously making you worse at reading how others are actually responding to you.

The fourth mechanism is amplification of what lies within. We do not step into senior roles as blank slates. We carry a set of traits, preferences and default responses that have been forming for years, such as how we regulate emotion, whether we see opportunity or risk first, and how we handle conflict. Power strengthens the connection between that inner core and outward behaviour. It pushes us to act more on what we really think and feel, and to do so faster and with less self-censorship. This is why agreeable executives often become visibly people-oriented, why narcissistic executives tend to become more self-centred, and why task-focused leaders can slide into being seen as cold or uncaring. Power does not invent these patterns. It puts them on steroids.

This, then, is why power can reveal both strengths and flaws. On the positive side, power can enhance courage, clarity and resilience. It can make you more decisive, more assertive and more willing to take ownership. On the negative side, it can magnify control needs, ego, distrust and impatience. It can make anxious leaders more reactive to criticism. It can make confident leaders dismissive. It can take a leader who is already light on empathy and make them almost blind to the emotional reality of the people around them. The result is that the same force that enables you to do good at scale can just as easily scale your capacity to do harm, often without you noticing until the damage is public.

So, the power that sits at the heart of every leadership role and that enables every leader to be a leader comes at a price. It makes it easier to do things, for better and for worse. It creates distance. It’s an ego-booster and empathy reducer. And it amplifies what lies within.

This has always been the way, of course. But what has changed of late is that the world around us is changing, and fast. Indeed, over the past five to ten years, the context around leadership has shifted in three fundamental ways, super-sizing the effects of power on leaders so that it affects them quicker and harder than ever before.

The key levers here are that leadership has become more demanding, less secure, and more performative, which, in turn, has made leaders more stressed, more task-focused, and led to a greater emphasis on impression management. Which, combined, tend to increase the negative effects of power, and lessen the positive effects.

So where does this leave you if you hold significant power today? You can’t avoid it, because power is the job. The answer is to find ways to actively manage the effects it has on you. Three disciplines in particular matter for everyone at the top, regardless of style.

First, almost all leaders underestimate the distance created by their role and the impact it has on openness. People are going to edit themselves around you. That is natural and rational. So you have to repeatedly lower the cost of being open: ask questions, invite challenge, reward dissent, and wherever possible, avoid public disagreement when people get it wrong.

Second, discourage binary views. As leaders, we’re often expected to be definite and sound certain. But the world is rarely black-and-white, and when we speak in absolutes, it can discourage discussion. So, it’s important when we speak – where appropriate – to use qualifiers. Rather than saying, “It is like this”, try saying, “There’s an 80% chance that…” and explaining where the uncertainty comes from. This can be useful with both your team and stakeholders, as research suggests that reporting uncertainties can actually increase people’s trust in your judgement.

Finally, an excellent rule of thumb, for life as much as for work, is to treat ingratiating behaviour like poison. Do nothing to encourage or countenance it. A neutral response or making a point of ignoring it often works best. Other times, you can say something like, “I appreciate your support, but I’d really like to hear your honest thoughts – what do you really think?” This is especially important if someone is ingratiating in front of other people. Because if the people around you perceive you as enjoying ingratiation, then more of them will probably start behaving that way. And that can be toxic, because ingratiation creates distance, feeds overconfidence and reduces openness.

Power, then, reveals both strengths and flaws. It shows the organisation who you really are at scale, and there is both wonderful opportunity and dangerous threat in that. In recent years, the balance of power’s effects feel as though they have shifted more to threat than opportunity for many, as the environment in which leadership is held has become tougher than ever before. Rebalancing is possible but will require us to start doing something we have never really done before, and that’s to start talking openly about power and what it does to people. Because until we start having an open and honest conversation about that, we will struggle to help leaders manage the increasingly toxic effects power can have.

Written by Nik Kinley.