Three Ways That Having Power Changes Us

I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life growing into roles of increasing influence -- as a business school dean, Fortune 500 board member and management commentator. This fall, I’ve made a very intentional choice to step back from being a dean, to reflect on what I’ve learned, how I’ve been changed, and where and how I might want to lead next.

Having this time, I feel very lucky and very human. Working as a social psychologist before I took dean jobs at NYU and then Kellogg, I was familiar with the laboratory-based research that documents the short-term effects that the perception of having power has on people’s thinking and behavior. Reflecting now after several years as a dean, I won’t say that power necessarily corrupts. But I can see more clearly how the contextual complexity and long hours of being “on” distort a leader’s thinking over time, often in ways that you as the leader cannot fully see.

Watching myself and other C-suite leaders I know, I’ve begun to categorize some of the longer-term manifestations that having power can take.

The power context

First, let me outline the context. I’m talking about the power that comes with roles where you have responsibility for a lot of resources (people and money), as well as the overall reputation and competitive standing of an organization. Leaders with this type of scale and scope “do” their work through others. That means that meetings and strategic decision-making are the leader’s primary work.

Now, in my experience, people in these roles won’t typically admit to having “power.” (Consider, for example, Larry Fink who said to BusinessWeek in 2017, “I don’t identify as powerful.”) Instead, they’ll talk about “influence,” the importance of “the team” and “culture” around them, and they strongly favor the pronoun “we.” That said, the ability to influence people and the of allocation resources is, by definition, power, so that’s the word we’ll use here.

The powerful leader’s work is typically enacted through a daily schedule of tightly orchestrated interactions with direct reports, at speaking events (internal and external), board meetings, or customer (in my case, donor) visits. The days often span 12 or more hours, beginning with breakfasts and extending well into the night. And after that, there is the daily influx of e-mail and documents to review before the next day begins.

Three power-shift biases

This is a contorted existence, and living it for extended periods is what creates a “power-shift” in a leader’s thinking. There are at least three biases that, I would argue, characterize power-shift thinking.

Leader attention disorder. The first is what I call leader attention disorder, LAD for short. It is a natural outgrowth of one’s mind jumping from topic to topic across dozens of meetings every week, in addition to the dozens of balls a leader may be juggling outside the meeting room – between e-mails that need responses, thorny situations that may be occurring backstage, and, yes, their own private life and personal needs.

LAD is different from ADD because successful leaders are typically quite capable of penetrating focus at will, but what happens over time is that they become more selective about when they expend that energy. The effect is that LAD produces constraints, ones that are not always conscious, on how much deep listening the leader does. Not every interaction necessarily gets it. So, the people around you gradually learn that they need to think carefully about how and when to present information to you and begin to jockey for access to your “best” brain time.

Bullet-point thinking. An outgrowth of LAD is what I refer to as bullet-point thinking. It’s a form of what Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman calls “fast” thinking. It happens over months and years of being charged with managing a lot of ongoing complexity and information. Leaders find themselves having less and less patience for unclear agendas and poorly run meetings.

My ability to quickly sort through complexity was and is a strength, but the longer I was a leader, I now see that I tended to engage less with direct reports who didn’t do their part to help with the processing. I’d frequently ask people to start meetings by helping me to understand their goal or purpose, outlining what decisions they were hoping I could help them get made, and what our time constraints were. It wasn’t conscious, but I realize now that I became less attentive over time to people who gave me incomplete briefings or long, single-spaced e-mails that didn’t start out by explaining why reading it would be a good use of time.

The consequence of these first two power-shift biases is that the stylized context and preference for certain individuals ends up narrowing what information the leader actually sees and how the leader processes it.

People-dependency. Lots of people have addictions and dependencies. Well, I’d argue that leaders with long-term power develop “people-dependency.” Here, I don’t mean the direct reports it takes to run the organization they’re leading. Depending on those people makes complete sense. No, I’m talking about the small team of people who, while the leader is sitting in the meetings every day, are fielding and answering hundreds of e-mails and calls, managing the calendar, preparing briefings for key meetings, and addressing all the logistics related to the leader’s near-constant travel.

With this type of support, after several years in a job, a leader can forget how to do the simplest of things. Case in point: When I landed in Iceland on holiday this past summer to find my adult daughter’s plane delayed by a day, I realized that I had arrived with no money, no map, no guidebook and no plan. Only then did I truly reflect that it had been years since I had managed my own travel. That was an unsettling realization. But the real point wasn’t just that I hadn’t done it, it was more the fact that I’ve seen many leaders get comfortable with this level of dependency. The challenge is how to stay grounded while living through it and finding the grace needed to unwind it afterward.

Conclusion

Leadership is not for everyone, nor I would argue, should it be for anyone forever. Whether we like it or not, research shows that the human leader’s “power-shift” is hardwired and, I would attest, situationally reinforced. Having formal authority for a large group of people and broad scope of operations changes you. There is a growing body of psychological research that shows that people with power tend to become more “disinhibited” over time. That is, they become less sensitive to others’ interests and experiences; they begin to feel unconsciously entitled to efficiencies designed to meet their needs over others’.

As tendencies toward LAD, bullet-point thinking and people-dependency grow over time, they can limit our creativity and willingness to engage with certain types of people and in certain types of problem-solving. So, it’s important that we, as human leaders, periodically step back and test how truly open and flexible our minds are.

This article originally published in Forbes. Sally Blount is Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.