There is a strange reversal that can happen in an ambitious life.
You spend years trying to enter rooms.
Then one day, people begin trying to enter yours.
You once wondered whether the chairman would return your call.
Now people are wondering whether you will return theirs.
You once prepared carefully before meeting the powerful.
Now people prepare carefully before meeting you.
This is one reason I increasingly think any serious discussion about managing power must eventually turn the camera around.
The question cannot only be:
How do I behave around powerful people?
It must also become:
What happens when I become powerful to other people?
The More People Want From You, the Harder Motives Become to Read
A powerful person faces a peculiar problem.
Behaviour becomes ambiguous.
Somebody laughs at your joke.
Was it actually funny?
Someone sends you an elaborate birthday message.
Do they love you?
Someone insists on visiting.
Do they enjoy your company, or have they been waiting three months to mention a contract?
Someone calls you "my brother."
Would you remain his brother if you could no longer sign anything?
The tragedy of power is that the more people want something from you, the harder it can become to know who simply wants you.
Celebrities experience an extreme version of this.
Millions of people may adore a person they have never met.
But what exactly is being loved?
The individual?
The music?
The beauty?
The lifestyle?
The fantasy?
What the celebrity represented during a particular period of the fan's life?
Public figures can become projection screens upon which strangers place their aspirations, resentment, desire, anger and hope.
They become symbols before they are allowed to remain people.
And adoration is not the same thing as intimacy.
A million admirers cannot necessarily replace one person with whom you are certain you can be ordinary.
Power Can Become Socially Expensive
The cliché says it is "lonely at the top."
Reality is more complicated.
Some research actually finds that a greater subjective sense of power can reduce loneliness. Other work finds that organizational power distance can reduce social closeness between leaders and followers and thereby increase leader loneliness. The relationship appears to depend considerably on context and the person's psychological needs.
That nuance makes intuitive sense.
Power can liberate you from needing everyone's approval.
But power can also make genuine disclosure expensive.
A junior employee can say:
"I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing."
A CEO may wonder who will panic if he says the same thing.
A staff member can complain about the boss.
Where does the boss complain?
A governor can have thousands of people around him and relatively few places where he can safely admit:
"I am frightened."
Leadership loneliness has also been associated in research with emotional exhaustion, depletion and sleep difficulties.
The crown may glitter.
It can still be heavy.
The Powerful Person Is Always "On"
There is another cost outsiders may not see.
Your life becomes increasingly regimented.
Drivers. Security. Protocol. Meetings. Assistants. Briefings. Flights. Events. Ceremonial obligations. Social expectations.
People monitoring where you sit, who you greet, what you wear, what you say and what your absence means.
Success can reduce certain freedoms even while dramatically expanding others.
The unknown entrepreneur can disappear into a restaurant.
The famous politician's arrival changes the room.
The rising professional can skip an event without consequence.
The district chairman's absence may become a political statement.
Every elevation creates obligations.
You may have more control over resources while gradually losing control over your diary.
That is one of power's paradoxes.
Betrayal Changes Too
Power also changes the nature of jealousy.
People can genuinely love you and envy you simultaneously.
The protégé admires the mentor who created opportunities for him.
Years later, he begins resenting the fact that everyone still calls him the mentor's boy.
The lieutenant celebrates the leader's victories until he begins imagining how the organization might look with himself at the centre.
The friend enjoys your success but quietly wonders:
"Why him?"
This does not mean the powerful should become paranoid.
But proximity creates vulnerability.
The stranger usually does not know enough about you to truly damage you.
The intimate does.
Xerxes himself ultimately illustrates the ancient version of the problem: the ruler whom ordinary people could scarcely approach was most vulnerable to the men who could get closest to him.
Power can protect you from distant enemies while exposing you to intimate ones.
The Spiral Into Suspicion
This is how the powerful can become trapped.
You experience betrayal.
You become more guarded.
People around you become afraid to be candid.
So the genuinely honest begin keeping their distance.
The people most comfortable remaining are often those willing to flatter.
You notice that everyone agrees with you.
You conclude that your instincts are extraordinary.
More mistakes follow.
You become even more suspicious when things go wrong.
Eventually, you have constructed an environment that confirms your darkest belief:
Nobody can be trusted.
Part of leadership therefore involves deliberately creating places where truth remains possible.
People who can tell you:
No.
You were wrong.
You are tired.
You are becoming unreasonable.
Go home.
Enough.
Not people auditioning to inherit your power.
People who knew you before it and are not mesmerised by it now.
What Did You Think Power Would Give You?
This question becomes especially important to me because I have thought about happiness for many years.
In 2018, I wrote about sitting after work deeply unhappy despite having degrees, a business and material means that I once assumed should have made happiness automatic.
Watching children dancing joyfully forced me to confront something uncomfortable:
achievement and inner wellbeing were not the same thing.
I ended that reflection with a warning to myself:
Don't let ambition snuff out your joy.
Power raises the same question at a higher level.
What exactly do we expect it to give us?
Respect? Security? Love? Vindication? Freedom? Proof? Attention?
Perhaps power can deliver some of them.
But it is remarkably poor at supplying others.
Power can compel attention.
It cannot compel love.
It can secure obedience.
It cannot manufacture friendship.
It can surround you with people.
It cannot guarantee that you are known.
Marcus Aurelius Had the Same Problem
This is part of what makes the Stoics fascinating.
Marcus Aurelius was not reflecting on detachment from a position of insignificance.
He was emperor of Rome.
His private philosophical exercise repeatedly returns to the instability of reputation, status and other people's opinions.
The problem was not merely how to become emperor.
The deeper problem was how not to allow being emperor to become the entire definition of the self.
Seneca presents another complicated case: philosophy, wealth and proximity to dangerous imperial power living inside the same human life.
The Stoic insight remains useful:
possess external things without allowing external things to possess you.
Christianity pushes the question even deeper.
If identity rests completely upon the applause of men, men possess the power to withdraw identity when the applause ends.
The throne is therefore safest in the hands of someone who knows he is more than the throne.
The Courtier Eventually Becomes the King
This is why I think anyone learning to navigate power should study its loneliness early.
Because if your strategies work, you may eventually become the person they are being used on.
As I take on greater responsibilities in professional leadership, this question feels less theoretical to me.
The people seeking your approval increase.
Your ability to distinguish affection from performance becomes more important.
You must become more deliberate about old friendships, family, faith, private reflection and environments where you are not the most important person in the room.
Otherwise the very thing you spent years acquiring can become the thing that slowly consumes the person who acquired it.
The crown is real.
So is its weight.