Leaders sometimes ask me: Why doesn’t my staff ever thank me? Why don’t they trust me? Why does no one tell me when things go wrong?
When I hear those questions, I know exactly where we need to go. We need to talk about power and the strange, distorting gravity it creates.
Being a leader is often the pinnacle of a career. You are at the center of the organization, you are well compensated, and you make the consequential decisions. You have power. And while power has its downsides, let’s be honest: most of the time, it feels good.
But your power can also be your biggest obstacle to success.
I ask leaders to imagine they are the sun, not in a Louis XIV kind of way, but in terms of actual astronomy. The sun does not feel its own gravity, but every planet in the solar system does, constantly, no matter where it orbits. Your staff is those planets. They feel the pull of your position in nearly every interaction they have with you.
When leaders aren’t conscious of this, they fall into a predictable trap. They come to believe that all their ideas are good ones. That people enjoy it when they dominate the conversation in meetings. That their jokes always land. Worst of all, they come to believe that their own isolated perspective reflects organizational reality.
The research bears this out in ways that should give every leader pause. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent more than two decades studying how power shapes behavior. His research found that the longer people hold positions of authority, the worse their risk assessment becomes and that this appears to be linked to a gradual erosion of empathy and the ability to see things from others’ perspectives. Keltner calls this the power paradox: we rise in power due to what is best about human nature, and fall from it due to what is worst. The very qualities that made you effective: attentiveness, curiosity, social intelligence are the ones power quietly erodes.
The challenge of power
Perhaps the hardest thing any leader faces — whether they are running a small nonprofit or leading a federal agency — is seeing past the wall their own positional authority builds around them. The people around you are anxious to please you, eager to leverage your influence for their own needs, or quietly resentful of how much power you hold over their professional lives. Often, it’s some combination of all three. And all of it shapes how they respond to you.
They may give you an overly optimistic picture of a situation, or a dire one. They may offer effusive agreement. Or they may say nothing at all.
This is not incidental. Research on psychological safety shows that the steeper the hierarchy, the greater the status difference between someone with something to say and the person they need to say it to the higher the perceived personal cost of speaking up. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose work on psychological safety is foundational in organizational science, describes hierarchy as a risk factor for team performance, and argues that what matters most is not the hierarchy itself, but how those with higher status handle their authority. In other words: the silence at your staff meetings is not a coincidence. It is a structural response to your power.
Your positional authority also distorts the messages you send downward. Because of where you sit, you are privy to information you cannot share, the budget realities, board dynamics, HR matters. So many of your decisions will appear inexplicable to your team. That information gap creates its own ambient tension, and it is yours to manage.
Social psychologists French and Raven identified this dimension of influence back in 1959, coining what they called “legitimate power” — the authority that flows from a formal title and role, grounded in the perception that the authority figure has the right to make demands and that others are obligated to respond. That power follows you into every room, whether you invoke it or not.
Setting feelings aside
I once worked with a leader who was actively protecting a staff member’s program from budget cuts fighting for them behind closed doors in ways that staff member would never see. At the same time, that same staff member was challenging the leader’s decisions openly and expressing significant frustration. The leader felt unappreciated, even wounded by it.
I understand that feeling. And I also want to be direct: it comes with the job.
You have a seat where decisions are made that others do not. Much of your most important work is invisible to the people who depend on you. It is completely reasonable to have feelings about that — but those feelings are not meant to be managed by your staff. You should not be looking to them for validation, appreciation, or apology.
Does this sometimes make leadership feel lonely? Yes, genuinely. That loneliness is part of the job’s structure, not a failure of your relationships.
Warning signs
A few indicators that power distortion may be getting in your way:
- You come away from interactions feeling like the victim or feeling misunderstood
- Staff consistently spin information toward the positive
- Silence greets you when you ask for honest input in meetings
- Emotional reactions from team members seem baffling or disproportionate
- Everyone agrees with you
Breaking through
Power will always shape the people around you and you can mitigate its distorting effects. It begins with self-awareness: a genuine recognition that your title changes every room you walk into, and that it affects how everyone in that room relates to you.
From there, get curious and get creative about what your staff is actually experiencing. Some starting points:
- Explicitly invite disagreement, especially if your culture leans “nice”
- Ask questions when a staff comment comes out of nowhere, don’t dismiss it
- Talk less in meetings so others can fill the space
- When a staff member pushes back, set your defensiveness aside and get curious
- Dig into the facts; make it safe and worth it for people to share hard truths
- Listen like your organization’s effectiveness depends on it — because it does
Keltner’s own prescription is straightforward: leaders must actively work to counteract the empathy deficits that power produces. When you’re feeling powerful and no one is keeping you accountable, you stop listening carefully, stop reading others’ emotions accurately, and lose the perspective-taking capacity that made you effective in the first place.
In the end, empathy
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful ruler in the world when he wrote his Meditations and he filled those private pages with reminders to stay open to being wrong. If the Roman Emperor needed those reminders, so do the rest of us. Empathy is not a soft skill. For leaders, it may be the most strategic one you have.
Hold that in mind. How does it feel when they make decisions that affect you that you don’t understand? How does it land when you’re subject to someone else’s power and you can’t see the full picture?
That’s exactly what your team feels. Every day.
Empathy is not a soft skill. For leaders, it is the most strategic capability you have. And maintaining it actively, intentionally, is one of the hardest parts of the job.
