How power changes relationships: what happens when you hold a senior position

“Since I took this job, everyone laughs at my jokes. Even the bad ones.”

The sentence is said in passing, a remark in the corridor. But there is more in it than a joke. It holds the first sign of a change that almost everyone who reaches a position of influence goes through: the people around them start behaving differently. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, they start behaving differently too.

This post is about what power does to relationships — with colleagues, with friends, with a partner and children. I am not writing it to judge leaders. Most people in important positions are not there because they craved power, but because they were good at what they did and others trusted them. I am writing it because the changes power brings are often quiet — and they are easier to see from the outside than from within.

What power actually is

In everyday speech we link power with titles: director, president, head of department, head teacher. Psychologists define it more simply and at the same time more broadly. In 2003 Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld and Cameron Anderson wrote that power is control over resources that others need — money, jobs, promotion, information, attention, approval — and the ability to give or withhold those resources.

This definition has an important consequence: power is not something a person has, but something that happens between people. It is a property of a relationship. The same person can be very powerful at work and, at home with an elderly father, once again a son waiting for approval. And precisely because power is relational, it changes relationships — not only the person who holds it.

The power paradox

Later, in his book The Power Paradox, Keltner described something that seems almost cruel. In groups, power tends to go to people who are attentive to others, who know how to listen, connect and look after the common good. Research on groups, from student halls to work teams, shows that people grant respect and influence to those who benefit them.

But once we have power, exactly these qualities start to wear away. Someone who has power depends less on others. Someone who depends less no longer needs to read so carefully what others feel and think. And because they don’t need to, they slowly do it less. Power thus weakens the very abilities for which we were given it.

This is not a new finding. As early as 1972, David Kipnis gave participants in a simple experiment the role of a supervisor who could reward and punish workers. Participants with more power intervened more often in their subordinates’ work, rated that work lower and wanted more distance from them. Kipnis titled his article with a question: Does power corrupt?

Less room for other people’s perspective

One of the most cited studies in this field is surprisingly simple. In 2006 Adam Galinsky and colleagues first prompted participants to recall a time when they had power over someone — or a time when someone had power over them. Then they asked them to draw a capital letter E on their forehead with a finger.

You can draw the letter so that someone looking at you can read it, or so that you could read it yourself while the other person sees a mirror image. Participants who had recalled their own power were almost three times as likely to draw the letter oriented towards themselves — that is, without taking the viewer into account. They took the other person’s perspective less spontaneously.

A few years later Jeremy Hogeveen, Michael Inzlicht and Sukhvinder Obhi looked at what happens in the brain with power. When we watch someone squeeze a ball, our motor system partly fires the same pattern — as if we were doing it ourselves. This is called motor resonance and is linked to understanding others. In participants who felt powerful, this resonance was weaker.

These findings need to be read with care. They come from laboratory experiments with small effects, in which power was only a memory or a role for half an hour, not years in a position. Some effects from power research have been harder to confirm in replications. But the direction is consistent enough that I take it seriously: power does not take away our empathy, but it reduces how automatically we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. What used to be spontaneous has to become intentional. In the knowledge base we call this ability mentalising.

Flattery and the silence around you

Power changes not only the person who holds it but everyone around them. When you have influence over other people’s jobs, promotions or budgets, people near you start — quite understandably — to behave more cautiously. They laugh at the jokes. They agree more quickly. They deliver bad news later, more softly, or not at all.

This isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. Mostly it is plain human caution: people protect themselves and their families. But the result is that the information reaching you passes through an ever finer sieve. What you hear is filtered. What you ought to hear often gets stuck two levels down.

Flattery is insidious because it feels good. We all want to hear that we decided well. And because it is pleasant, we find it hard to tell apart from genuine praise. After a few years a leader may sincerely believe that people value them — and be surprised to find out what they really thought.

If you also recognise the other side in this — that you fall silent in front of a superior — you may find How to say what you think without the relationship falling apart useful. And because the relationship with a boss often repeats the relationship with our parents, there is also Attachment at work: how the pattern shows with your manager and colleagues.

Isolation: who is still a friend?

One of the most common burdens of people in senior positions is a question they rarely say out loud: Who is with me because of me, and who because of my position? Old friends sometimes withdraw because they no longer feel like equals. New friends appear — but you are not quite sure why. Trust that used to be taken for granted becomes something that has to be checked.

This is how power connects with loneliness. There are many people around you, but few with whom you can talk without a role. I wrote about why leaders so often end up with no one to talk to in Loneliness at the top: why leaders have no one to talk to. How this loneliness affects difficult decisions is the subject of Decision-making under pressure: when the stakes are high and the responsibility is yours.

The knowledge base has a short explanation of how trust is built and how it is lost. For people with power it often turns out that this is the greatest loss: not time, not privacy, but the ease with which you once believed people liked you for yourself.

At home there is no position

Power shows itself most painfully where we least expect it — at home. Someone who spends the whole day deciding, assigning tasks and expecting them to be done can’t always leave that mode behind on walking through the door. A partner is not a colleague, children are not a team. But the habit of deciding quickly and having the last word likes to move in there too.

This is how a scene at home might sound (composite, not a real person):

“You’ve decided where we’re going on holiday again.”
“Because nobody else suggested anything.”
“I did. Last week. And you said you’d have a look.”
“… I did have a look. And I found something better.”
“You see. That’s why I don’t suggest anything any more.”

There is nobody bad in this scene. But there is something that repeats: the partner in a senior position decides efficiently, while the other slowly withdraws from deciding because it feels as if their voice doesn’t count. Over the years this can lead to a relationship in which one carries all the decisions and the other quietly resents it. At the level of the system, a role suited to work has spilled over into the family.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we would say that the boundaries between systems have blurred. It helps to separate the roles consciously: at work I am the one who decides, at home I am the one who asks. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. More about how boundaries protect relationships rather than threaten them is in Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it, and the concept is briefly explained in the knowledge base under boundaries.

The children of people in senior positions often describe something else: a parent who is physically present at home but mentally still in the meeting. Here power is not about deciding, but about whose attention matters more. For a child the answer is simple — and it is not always the one they would wish for.

Power doesn’t corrupt everyone

It would be easy to conclude that power corrupts people. But research says something more interesting. In 2001 Serena Chen, Annette Lee-Chai and John Bargh showed that power amplifies what was already in a person. Participants who in relationships cared mainly about others acted even more responsibly when they felt powerful — they took more of the work on themselves. Those who in relationships mainly calculated their own benefit acted more selfishly with power.

So power is not just a force acting on us from outside. It is also a magnifying glass. It shows who we were — and perhaps also what we have not yet learnt.

Here is another limit of this post. Not every change in relationships after a promotion comes from power. Sometimes people withdraw because of their own envy or their own old wounds, which you awaken as an authority figure without doing anything. People often bring to a position the expectations and fears they hold towards their parents. What they feel around you is not always about you — more on this in Countertransference outside the therapy room. And the reverse: if you always feel small around people with power, part of that may be your story, not theirs.

And this too: in an organisation that rewards coldness and punishes vulnerability, one individual cannot change everything alone. Sometimes the honest answer to the question “how do I stay human in a position of power?” is that the environment needs to change — or that you need to leave it.

What keeps you in touch

If power automatically narrows attention to others, the answer is for that attention to become intentional. From research and from the experience of people who have held responsible positions for a long time and kept good relationships, a few things come up again and again.

• People you are not in charge of. Friends from before the position, siblings, people from a completely different world. With them you are not the director, you are you.
• At least one voice that may disagree. A colleague, adviser or partner whom you explicitly allow to tell you what you don’t want to hear — and whom you don’t punish for it, not even by quietly cooling off.
• Questions instead of answers. When you are in a role where answers are expected of you, asking questions is the counterweight. “What do you see that I don’t?”
• Awareness of your own influence. Your bad mood in a meeting is not just your bad mood. For the people who depend on you, it is a weather forecast.
• Separating roles. A transition between work and home that you make consciously — a walk, a few minutes in the car before you go in. In psychotherapy we also call this differentiation: the ability to stay yourself without merging with a role or a relationship.

Exercise: a map of your relationships

You can do this exercise today. Take a sheet of paper and give yourself fifteen minutes.

1. Draw a circle with yourself in the middle. Around yourself, write the names of the people you have talked to most in the past month — at work and at home.
2. Mark the relationship next to each name. Does this person depend on you in any way (job, money, approval)? Mark them in a different colour.
3. Count. How many people do not depend on you? When did you last talk with them about something that really worries you?
4. Recall the last objection. When did someone last tell you your judgement was wrong? How did you respond — and what did that person conclude from your response?
5. Choose one small step. One call to a friend you haven’t heard from in a long time. One question to a colleague: “What would you do differently?” One decision at home that you leave to someone else.

The map is not a test you can fail. It only shows where your world has lately become narrower than you would like.

What to remember

• Power is a property of a relationship — control over resources others need. That is why it changes relationships, not just the person.
• The power paradox: we gain it through attention to others, and then that attention is the easiest thing to lose.
• Research shows that power reduces the automatic taking of other people’s perspective — the effects are small but consistent. What was spontaneous has to become intentional.
• Around people with power, flattery, silence and isolation gather; what helps most is someone who may disagree with you and people who don’t depend on you.
• Power doesn’t corrupt everyone — it amplifies what was already there. And at home there is no position.