Listen to this Deep Dive, 13 min, read by Simon
Emotional Intelligence Series
Power rarely announces its effect on the person who has it. That is part of what makes it dangerous. It does not usually arrive as cartoon arrogance, a sudden appetite for domination, or some obvious moral collapse. More often, power works quietly. It changes the room before it changes the leader. It changes what people say, how quickly they agree, how carefully they disagree, how often they laugh, how much bad news reaches the center, and how much emotional labor others perform to keep the powerful person comfortable.
Then, slowly, the leader begins to mistake the changed room for an accurate reflection of themselves.
That is how power distorts self-awareness. Not usually by making people stupid, but by making them less reachable by the information that would keep them honest. The more authority someone has, the more difficult it becomes to know how they are actually landing on others. People edit themselves. They soften their feedback. They manage timing. They choose safer words. They avoid unnecessary friction. They tell the truth, perhaps, but not always the whole truth, and rarely with the same bluntness they might use with someone who does not control budgets, promotions, reputation, access, or opportunity.
The leader may still believe they are self-aware. They may even value humility, candor, and feedback. But power changes the evidence they receive. And when the evidence changes, self-awareness becomes easier to perform than to maintain.
Power Changes the Mirror
Self-awareness depends on mirrors. We need people, data, consequences, relationships, and reality to reflect back the difference between who we intend to be and how we actually show up. Without those mirrors, we are left with self-image, and self-image is notoriously generous.
Power changes the mirror because people become more careful around it. The leader tells a joke, and people laugh a little faster. The leader offers an idea, and people find merit in it before they have fully examined it. The leader interrupts, and others call it passion. The leader changes direction, and the organization calls it agility. The leader reacts defensively, and people quietly learn which subjects require softer packaging next time.
None of this may be dramatic enough to trigger alarm. That is precisely the problem. The distortion is subtle enough to feel normal. Over time, the leader receives a cleaner, kinder, more flattering version of reality. They begin to believe they are easier to challenge than they are, clearer than they are, calmer than they are, more trusted than they are, and more central to the company’s success than they may actually be. Psychology Today’s Why Higher Execs Often Have Lower Self-Awareness cites Tasha Eurich’s finding that, in a study of more than 3,600 leaders, those in higher positions overvalued their skills compared with how others saw them on 19 of 20 competencies.
Power does not simply inflate ego. It edits the feedback that might correct ego.
The Intention Trap
Many leaders judge themselves by their intentions. They know what they meant. They know they care. They know they are trying to protect the business, raise the standard, move faster, serve the customer, build the culture, or help people grow. Because their intentions feel sincere internally, they assume their impact should be interpreted generously externally.
But people do not experience your intentions directly. They experience your behavior, your tone, your timing, your consistency, your reactions, your decisions, and the consequences of being honest with you.
This is where powerful people often lose touch. They confuse inner sincerity with outer effect. A leader may intend to challenge a team, but people experience humiliation. They may intend to create urgency, but people experience panic. They may intend to be direct, but people experience contempt. They may intend to clarify, but people experience control. They may intend to help, but people experience intrusion. Kellogg Insight’s Losing Touch describes research by Adam Galinsky and colleagues in which people primed to feel powerful were about three times more likely to write the letter E on their own forehead so that it read correctly to themselves rather than to the person facing them.
The leader then feels misunderstood because the impact does not match the intention. But leadership maturity requires accepting that impact is not cancelled by motive. Good intentions may explain behavior. They do not erase its effect.
Power makes this harder because fewer people are willing to describe the effect plainly.
Confidence Becomes a Closed System
Power also distorts self-awareness by making confidence more socially expensive to question. The more successful or senior a leader becomes, the more their instincts carry institutional weight. Their preferences become strategy. Their habits become culture. Their opinions become signals people organize around.
This can be useful when the leader has strong judgment. But it becomes dangerous when confidence stops being tested.
A leader may say, “I want people to push back.” The team may hear, “Push back carefully, and only if you are prepared to absorb the consequences.” The leader may believe they are inviting debate, while others are measuring whether debate is truly safe. If previous challenges were met with irritation, dismissal, sarcasm, impatience, or subtle exclusion, the organization will remember.
Powerful people often underestimate how long their reactions echo.
One bad response to hard feedback can teach a room more than ten speeches about openness. People may forgive the moment, but they adjust. They bring fewer uncomfortable truths. They wait longer. They involve intermediaries. They rehearse. They soften. They decide which truth is worth the risk.
The leader still receives input, but the input has been filtered through self-protection. Confidence then becomes a closed system, not because no one has doubts, but because doubts no longer reach the leader in time to matter.
The Addiction to Being Central
There is also an emotional distortion that power creates. Being central feels important because it is important. People need you. They ask your view. They want your approval. They include you in decisions. They turn to you in crises. They seek your interpretation of events. Over time, this can create a dangerous dependency, not only in the organization, but in the leader’s identity.
The leader begins to feel that if they are not involved, something essential is missing. If they are not consulted, standards may slip. If they are not in the room, the decision may be weaker. If people move without them, they may feel excluded from the very organization they are supposed to be developing.
That feeling can be disguised as responsibility. Sometimes it is responsibility. But sometimes it is ego wearing operational clothing.
A self-aware leader must ask a difficult question: am I entering this decision because the company truly needs my judgment, or because my identity still needs to feel indispensable?
The answer is not always obvious. Powerful people can always produce reasonable explanations for remaining involved. Quality. Brand. Risk. Culture. Speed. Customer experience. Accountability. Those reasons may be valid. They may also become the language of control.
Power distorts self-awareness by making control feel virtuous.
Distance From Consequence
Another danger of power is distance. The higher a leader rises, the more consequences are often experienced by others first. A poor decision becomes extra work for the team. A vague priority becomes confusion for managers. A reactive comment becomes anxiety for the person receiving it. A last-minute change becomes weekend labor for people who had no voice in the decision.
The leader may see the final output, not the emotional and operational cost of producing it. They may see the polished deck, not the nights required to fix the confusion. They may see compliance, not the resentment underneath it. They may see execution, not the exhaustion caused by avoidable churn.
This distance can make leaders less aware of their own impact because the system absorbs them. The more capable the organization, the more it can hide leadership dysfunction for a while. Strong people compensate. Loyal people protect. Talented people translate chaos into deliverables. The leader may conclude that the system is working, when in fact the system is overworking to protect the leader from seeing what their behavior costs.
That is one of power’s quietest distortions: it lets you confuse other people’s coping with your own effectiveness.
Humility Has to Become a Practice
Because power distorts the room, humility cannot remain a personality trait. It has to become a practice. A leader cannot simply believe they are humble. They must build mechanisms that make honesty more likely. Greater Good Magazine’s Three Reasons for Leaders to Cultivate Intellectual Humility reviews research showing that leaders who respect other people’s viewpoints have more satisfied followers and practice more servant leadership.
That means asking better questions and waiting for real answers. It means separating loyalty from agreement. It means rewarding people who bring inconvenient facts. It means apologizing clearly when your reaction made truth harder to tell. It means creating settings where people can speak before your opinion shapes the room. It means staying close enough to customers, frontline employees, and operational reality that truth does not arrive only through polished layers.
It also means watching your own emotional reactions with unusual seriousness. What feedback irritates you most? Which people do you mentally discount? Which topics make you impatient? Where do you keep saying you want ownership, while subtly punishing decisions made without you? Where do people agree with you too quickly? Where has the organization become fluent in your preferences but less confident in its own judgment?
These questions are uncomfortable, which is why they are useful.
The Leader’s Real Test
The real test of power is not whether people obey you, admire you, or seek your approval. Those things may happen for reasons that have little to do with wisdom. The real test is whether power has made you more truthful or less. More curious or less. More accountable or less. More willing to be corrected or less.
Power can mature a person, but only if they refuse its seductions. It can expand perspective, deepen responsibility, and sharpen moral seriousness. But left unexamined, it narrows the leader while making that narrowing harder to see.
That is why the most self-aware leaders are often the ones most suspicious of their own certainty. They understand that authority changes the weather. They know the room may be responding to power, not just merit. They do not treat agreement as proof, silence as alignment, or praise as evidence of impact.
Power quietly distorts self-awareness because it changes what comes back to you. The work of leadership is to keep rebuilding the mirror, especially when the reflection has become too flattering to trust.
