“You Got the Power.”
There is a point in almost every successful executive career when power begins to feel normal.
The first time you are given responsibility for a significant budget, you notice it. The first time a major decision cannot move forward without your approval, you feel the weight of it. Your calendar changes. People who once took several days to return your call suddenly find time that afternoon. You are invited into conversations you used to hear about after they happened, and your opinion carries a different kind of weight because the organization has decided that your position matters.
After a while, however, those things stop feeling unusual. They simply become part of the job.
That is one reason I smile whenever I think about Chill Rob G’s 1990 hit “The Power.” If you were around during that era, you probably remember how difficult it was to hear “I’ve got the power” without immediately recognizing the song. It was a declaration, and a memorable one. But after more than thirty years of leading people in government, healthcare, and business, I have come to believe that one of the most important questions an executive can ask is not whether you have power. Your title has already answered that question.
The more important question is what kind of influence you are building with it.
Those two things are easy to confuse because position creates many of the same outward behaviors that influence creates. People listen when you speak. They respond to your requests. They attend the meetings you call. They move when you establish a priority. From the executive chair, all of that can feel like influence.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes people are simply responding to the chair.
Understanding the difference may be one of the most important transitions an executive makes on the journey from positional leadership to enterprise leadership.
The Room Changes When the Title Enters
I learned early in public service that titles have a way of entering the room before the person does. When you serve in elected office or at a senior level of government, people know what authority comes with the position. The same thing happens in a corporation. A CEO, division president, chief operating officer, or senior vice president does not enter a meeting as simply another participant. Everyone understands that the person occupying that role can affect resources, priorities, careers, and decisions.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Organizations need authority. Someone has to make decisions, establish accountability, allocate resources, and determine direction. The problem begins when leaders mistake the behavior created by authority for evidence of personal influence.
I have watched executives make that mistake without realizing it. A leader speaks and the room becomes quiet, so they assume people are persuaded. They make a request and it is completed quickly, so they assume people are committed. They ask whether anyone disagrees and nobody raises a hand, so they assume the team is aligned.
Maybe.
But authority can produce silence just as easily as agreement. It can produce compliance without commitment and politeness without trust. The title tells people they need to pay attention. It does not tell us what they believe after the meeting ends.
That is where influence becomes easier to see. What happens to your ideas once your authority is no longer present to enforce them? Do people carry the standard into another meeting because they understand and believe in it, or does the standard disappear as soon as you leave the room?
Position can control a moment. Influence has the ability to travel.
Access Can Create the Illusion of Trust
Senior leadership also provides extraordinary access. You are included in conversations because of what you oversee. People make room on the calendar because your involvement matters. Information comes to you that would not be available to someone several levels lower in the organization.
It is tempting to interpret that access as trust.
I have learned to be careful about making that assumption.
The more senior you become, the more likely people are to edit information before it reaches you. That does not always happen because someone is being dishonest. Often, people are trying to be thoughtful about what the executive needs to know. They summarize, prioritize, remove unnecessary detail, and try not to waste your time. Those are reasonable behaviors.
But there is another kind of editing that should concern every executive. People begin removing the information they believe you do not want to hear.
That is when access becomes ceremonial.
You may still be in every important meeting. You may receive every report and have more information available to you than anyone else in the organization. Yet if people have learned to bring you only the safest version of reality, your position has given you access without connection.
Trust looks different. People bring you bad news while there is still time to do something about it. They are willing to say, “I think we may be getting this wrong,” before they have assembled a forty-slide presentation proving the point. They ask for your judgment because experience has taught them that the conversation will make their thinking better, not simply because your approval is required.
A leader can have access to every room in the organization and still be trusted in very few of them.
That distinction becomes increasingly important the higher you go.
Visibility Only Matters When Experience Supports the Message
Modern executive leadership places a great deal of emphasis on visibility, and much of that emphasis is appropriate. Employees want to hear from senior leaders. During periods of uncertainty, silence from the executive suite creates its own problems. Customers, community partners, shareholders, and employees all benefit from understanding what leadership believes and where the organization is going.
But visibility can also create another illusion.
Being seen is not the same as being believed.
Over the years, I have watched leaders deliver excellent messages about accountability, transparency, respect, inclusion, or employee well-being and then unintentionally weaken those messages through ordinary decisions. They say accountability matters, but an influential executive receives a different standard. They promise an update and never close the loop. They talk about empowering leaders while continuing to pull every important decision back to themselves.
Employees notice these inconsistencies because they experience leadership differently from the way executives sometimes describe it.
Credibility begins when those two experiences match.
If I tell people that a value matters, they should be able to see evidence of that value when honoring it becomes inconvenient. If I say I want candor, my reaction to difficult feedback matters more than the invitation I extended before receiving it. If I promise transparency, I have to communicate when the news is uncomfortable, not only when the story is favorable.
Visibility gives leaders an opportunity to communicate what they stand for. Credibility is what happens when people discover that the message remains true after the microphone is turned off.
That is when visibility begins turning into influence.
The Need to Remain Indispensable Can Become a Leadership Trap
One of the more complicated transitions in executive leadership involves changing your relationship with being needed.
Most of us rise through organizations because we are good at solving problems. We develop expertise, demonstrate judgment, and become known as the person who can get difficult things done. Those qualities are rewarded, and rightly so.
The challenge is that the behaviors that helped you become an executive can eventually limit your effectiveness as one.
If every significant decision still requires your interpretation, your team may be performing well while remaining dependent on you. If you are the only person who can manage an important relationship, the organization has access to that relationship without truly owning it. If work repeatedly stalls until you step in and rescue it, your effectiveness may be masking a lack of capacity elsewhere in the system.
I understand why leaders can become attached to that dynamic. Indispensability feels a lot like importance.
But I have come to believe that one of the best measures of senior leadership is not how much work requires your involvement. It is how much sound judgment exists because of your involvement over time.
Influential leaders teach people how they think. They explain the principles behind decisions, share context that helps others understand tradeoffs, and give capable people opportunities to exercise judgment while the stakes are still manageable. They allow leaders to make decisions differently from how they might have made them, provided the decision reflects sound reasoning and the organization’s values.
That kind of leadership can feel uncomfortable because it requires giving up some control.
What you receive in return is capacity.
And capacity is far more valuable to an institution than an executive who must remain at the center of everything.
The People Who Challenge You May Be Demonstrating the Greatest Loyalty
Power also changes disagreement.
Early in your career, colleagues may tell you fairly quickly when they think you are wrong. As your authority grows, that becomes less predictable. People become more thoughtful about when and how they challenge you because disagreement with a senior executive can carry consequences, even when the executive never intended to create them.
This is one reason I become cautious when a senior leader tells me they have an executive team that is “completely aligned.”
I want to know how they got there.
Healthy alignment is usually the product of honest disagreement. People challenge assumptions, surface risks, and debate alternatives before committing to a direction. Once the decision is made, they move together because they had a genuine opportunity to improve the thinking.
There is another kind of alignment that looks very similar from the outside. People agree because they have learned disagreement is expensive.
That is not influence.
It is compliance wearing a nicer suit.
Influential leaders define loyalty differently. They understand that the person willing to protect the mission from a bad decision may be demonstrating more loyalty than the person willing to protect the leader from discomfort. They create enough relational safety for someone to say, “I think we are missing something,” without that sentence becoming a career event.
If everyone around you agrees quickly, the right response is not always satisfaction. Sometimes it is curiosity. Has your leadership created genuine confidence in the direction, or has your position made honest disagreement harder than you realize?
You cannot answer that question by looking at the organizational chart.
You have to look at the culture around your authority.
Influence Expands When You Stop Needing to Be the Center
Perhaps the clearest distinction between position and influence is what leaders do with other people’s visibility.
Leaders who are primarily protecting position tend to keep important relationships close. They remain central to information flows, make sure they are represented in consequential conversations, and sometimes become uneasy when another talented person begins developing influence beyond their immediate role.
I have never believed leadership should work that way.
One of the responsibilities of senior leadership is to create more centers of strength throughout the organization. That means introducing talented people to relationships they will eventually need. It means sponsoring someone into a room where their perspective can contribute, even if you will not be there to receive credit. It means supporting a good idea when someone else’s name will become associated with its success.
This becomes especially important as leaders begin thinking beyond their own function and toward the enterprise. Enterprise leadership requires asking a different question. Instead of wondering, “How do I remain central to this work?” you begin asking, “What would make the mission stronger?”
Sometimes the answer will involve you.
Sometimes the most influential thing you can do is connect two other people and get out of the way.
That is a different relationship with power. It treats authority as a resource to be invested rather than a possession to be protected.
The Real Test Begins Where Your Authority Ends
After thirty years in leadership, I have become increasingly interested in what happens outside a leader’s formal span of control. That is often where influence becomes easiest to distinguish from position.
Do peers seek your perspective when you have no authority over their decision? Do people carry your standards into rooms you will never enter? Can you change someone’s thinking without controlling their budget, access, or career? Have you developed leaders who can disagree with you honestly and still know they have your respect? Does your influence continue when somebody else receives the credit?
Those questions can be uncomfortable because they remove many of the advantages a senior title provides.
They are also useful.
Every executive role is temporary. One day the organizational chart changes, the office belongs to someone else, and the authority that once made people respond to your email immediately belongs to another person. That is not a failure of leadership. It is the natural life cycle of every position.
What matters is what survives the transition.
If people continue seeking your judgment because they trust it, that is influence. If leaders you developed continue making strong decisions because you taught them how to think, that is influence. If standards you modeled continue shaping behavior when you are no longer there to enforce them, that is influence. If relationships you built continue creating value without requiring you to remain at the center, that is influence.
As Chill Rob’s back up singer told us, “I’ve got the power.”
Every senior executive with sufficient authority can say the same thing for a season.
The more important leadership question is what you do with that power while you have it. You can use it to protect your access, preserve your control, and make yourself increasingly central to the organization. Or you can use it to build trust, earn credibility, develop capacity, invite honest challenge, and create influence capable of traveling farther than your title ever will.
Your position gives you power for a season.
Your influence is what remains when the season changes.
Build Influence That Outlasts Your Position
The most effective executives do more than exercise authority. They use authority to build trust, strengthen other leaders, improve organizational judgment, and create cultures that can perform without requiring them to remain at the center.
Through keynote presentations, executive retreats, and strategic advisory engagements, I help senior leaders move from positional authority to enterprise influence, strengthening the relationships, credibility, and leadership capacity required to create impact that lasts beyond the title.
If your organization is ready to develop leaders whose influence travels farther than their authority, let’s talk about doing an event together. .