It's All About Power

by Anna Ortynska

The sooner we accept that everyone in an organization is seeking power, the more consciously we'll be able to use it for ourselves and for others.

Wanting power is supposed to be something you don't admit. You can want impact, influence, legacy, meaningful work — all of that is fine, respectable even. But power? That's for the ambitious ones.  The ones who play games while the rest of us just try to get good work done.

I believed this for a long time. Then I spent twelve years inside a large global organization, redesigning processes across more than twenty countries, and the belief got harder to maintain. The most consequential variable in whether a good idea lived or died was rarely the quality of the idea. It was who had the standing, the relationships, and the credibility to carry it. Every time. Without exception.

Power was not a side effect of the work. It was the medium the work moved through.

The moment you stop pretending otherwise is the moment you get substantially more effective. Not more cynical — more effective. There's a difference.

Two kinds of power operate in any organization at any given moment, and confusing them is expensive.

The first comes with the org chart. Your title gives you authority over certain decisions, certain budgets, certain people. It's real. It also has a ceiling most new managers hit faster than they expect. Positional power can compel compliance. It cannot compel commitment. It can force someone into the meeting. It cannot make them care what happens there. Anyone who has watched a strategy die in implementation has watched positional power fail — and it fails in exactly the same way every time, slowly and then completely.

The second kind doesn't appear on any chart. It comes from trust, credibility, and the perception that you're someone worth following — not because you have to be followed, but because following you tends to produce good outcomes. It has to be built over time, relationship by relationship, act by act. It also, once built, tends to outlast and outperform the first kind.

The person who gets things done without formal authority isn't mysterious. They've invested in something specific: the kind of standing that isn't granted, only earned. People believe them. They're owed favours. When they walk into a negotiation, they're not starting from zero.

If you believe power comes only from your title, you'll invest in climbing the org chart. If you understand that a parallel system of influence is running under the formal hierarchy at all times — with its own rules, its own currency, and its own memory — you'll invest very differently.

The currency of this second kind of power is trust, and trust has two components that leaders consistently miscalibrate.

The first is competence. People trust you to the extent they believe you can do what you say you can do. This is where most professionals invest heavily — skills, credentials, track records, polished deliverables. It matters. It is also, on its own, insufficient. Competence produces one kind of trust: you can depend on this person to perform. That's useful. It's not loyalty. It's not the thing that makes someone go to bat for you when you're not in the room.

The second component is harder to build and harder to fake. It's the perception — earned through actual behavior — that you're capable of putting other people's interests ahead of your own when it counts. This requires visible acts of generosity that aren't transactionally obvious. It requires, occasionally, saying no to something that would benefit you in order to serve someone else's need. It requires being the kind of person who, after doing something significant for a colleague, doesn't wave it off with "no big deal" — because that's actually throwing away the moment. "Of course — it's what we do for each other" isn't manipulation. It's naming the social reality that now exists. There's a difference.

What most people underestimate is how much the second component matters specifically at senior levels. The default assumption for someone with formal authority — and research on this is fairly clear — is that they're self-interested. People have learned to expect it. Which means senior leaders have to actively correct for a perception bias that lower-level people don't carry. The leader who says "I actually need your help with this" is doing something structurally powerful precisely because it disrupts the expectation. That disruption generates loyalty that no performance review process has ever reliably produced.

Influence is a skill. It can be learned, practiced, and applied deliberately. The people who most need to learn it are almost never the ones who are already winning.

Organizational power is not distributed according to merit. It never has been. It's distributed according to visibility, relationships, sponsorship, and structural access — none of which are equally available, and none of which are fixed. The game has rules that aren't posted anywhere. Learning them is not a moral failure. For anyone starting from a position of structural disadvantage, it's a practical necessity.

One of the most durable principles of social influence is reciprocity. People help people who have helped them. This sounds obvious until you watch how rarely professionals invest in others before they need something. Most influence-seeking is reactive — I need this now, who can I call? The people with genuine influence built the relationship long before the ask. They've been paying into an account they'll eventually draw from, not because they were calculating, but because they understood something basic: organizations are social systems, and social systems run on exchange.

A related principle, one that gets misused more often than it gets used well, is the role of peers in shaping decisions. People facing uncertainty — which describes most significant organizational choices — don't look inward for answers. They look at what credible peers are doing, what respected colleagues believe, what the people they trust seem to think. A leader who understands this stops trying to win resistant audiences through logic alone. They start asking who is already trusted in the room, what those people already believe, and whether the case can be made through voices that are closer to the audience than theirs is. An executive pushing a change initiative directly to a skeptical team will often accomplish less than a respected team member saying the same thing with their own credibility behind it.

None of this is manipulation. Manipulation is using these principles to move people toward outcomes that aren't in their interest. Influence is using them to move people toward outcomes that genuinely serve a shared goal — more efficiently than you'd get otherwise. The distinction matters beyond ethics. Organizations where influence is systematically abused tend to select, over time, for people who are comfortable with dishonesty. The people who aren't comfortable leave. Eventually, the culture is run by those who stayed — and they cheat the organization too. It's not a question of if. It's a question of when the bottom line registers it.

The leaders I've watched use power effectively over the years share something. They're not primarily focused on accumulating it. They're focused on what it enables. They spend it — on their team's projects, on their people's visibility, on the organizational problems nobody else wants to touch. And the thing about power used this way is that it doesn't deplete. It compounds. The person who clears obstacles becomes the person talented people want to work with. The person who spends political capital on a good idea gets an easier hearing for their next one. Power used in service of something larger than yourself tends to generate more power. It works like that.

The alternative — power hoarded, every interaction optimized for personal return — tends to work. For a while. It stops working at the exact moment when you need people to believe in you rather than just comply with you. By then, you've built an organization of compliers. They'll do what you say. They won't tell you what you need to hear. This is the exit ramp that leaders don't see until they've already taken it.

There's a version of leadership development that's become very popular — lead from your values, bring your authentic self, be genuine. And the instinct underneath it is good. But authenticity divorced from responsibility is just self-expression. What the people around you need is not your authentic self. It's the version of you that shows up for what the situation requires — which is sometimes more demanding, and more interesting, than anything you'd naturally produce.

The most significant transformations I've observed in leaders weren't moments of self-revelation. They were moments of choosing something larger than their own comfort. The CEO who says "I don't know — what do you think?" when they could absolutely have performed certainty. The person with formal authority who defers visibly to someone with better expertise, even when it costs them something. These aren't performances of humility. They're investments in the kind of trust that competence alone never builds.

A few questions worth sitting with — genuinely, not just reading past:

When you've needed something from someone with no formal obligation to help you — what was the basis on which they said yes? What does that tell you about where you've invested, and where you haven't?

Where in your organization are good ideas dying — not because they're wrong, but because the person carrying them doesn't have the standing to carry them? What would it take to fix that, and who would need to spend some power to do it?

What do the people around you need from you that you're not currently giving because it doesn't come naturally? Certainty when you feel uncertain. Deference when you hold the authority. Visibility when you're inclined to stay in the background. That gap between what's natural and what's needed is where the actual work of leadership lives.

And:

The answer to that question shapes every interaction you have. People can generally feel which one it is.