The Truth About Power

I was at a consulting client’s office watching the boss move through a PowerPoint presentation when one woman in the room raised her hand.

She asked a question about something in the presentation that didn’t make sense to her. The boss answered and continued. A few minutes later, she raised her hand again.

Something changed.

People around the room began looking at her. The boss was still standing at the front, still in control of the meeting. But she had something he didn’t. She was asking the questions everyone else was thinking. She’d connected with the room. She’d become the voice for the people who weren’t speaking.

Without a title, without authority, and without ever asking for it, she had taken over the leadership of the room. She hadn’t competed with the boss or challenged him. She’d simply done something he wasn’t doing. She was listening.

She wasn’t trying to take over. She was trying to understand. But in a room full of people who weren’t saying what they were thinking, asking honest questions out loud was the most powerful thing anyone did that day.

We usually know what power looks like. It’s the CEO at the front of the room. The politician behind the podium. The person signing the check. We associate power with money, position, titles, authority, and influence. Those things matter. But sometimes the person who appears to have the most power has the least of it, and sometimes the person saying the least has the most.

The Power Nobody Puts on a Spreadsheet

A few years ago, working as a consultant in mortgage banking, I was involved in discussions between two companies considering merging their businesses. Both believed they had the upper hand.

One was considerably larger. It had a bigger servicing portfolio, more salespeople, a larger advertising budget, and infrastructure built around purchased leads. On paper, it looked like the more powerful company.

The other company was smaller. But most of its business came through referrals from a network of real estate professionals it had cultivated over many years. Its loan officers were known. They were trusted. When a real estate agent had a buyer who needed a mortgage, they knew which loan officer would pick up the phone, give an honest read on a file, and follow through on what they said they’d do. That relationship had been built through years of small moments that nobody tracked on a dashboard.

You can buy technology, hire salespeople, and purchase leads. What you can’t easily buy is a relationship someone has spent twenty years building. In the negotiations between these two companies, the smaller company held the stronger position. It had something the larger company needed and couldn’t replicate on a short timeline.

My mother used to say: “Treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.” Simple advice, not always simple to follow. But I’ve come to believe you can tell a great deal about a person by how they treat people who can’t do anything for them to advance their position in life. The person working the deli counter in the morning, the receptionist, the building maintenance worker.

The most powerful people I’ve been around are often the ones who make everyone around them feel seen. That’s a form of influence that compounds over years and can’t be manufactured.

Baby Pictures

Years ago, my business partner and I sat across the table from the president of a company we were considering doing business with. He spent most of the meeting telling us about his life. How he’d built the company. His accomplishments. His story.

It went on for quite a while.

When the meeting finally ended, I turned to my partner and said, “I was waiting for him to break out his baby pictures.”

We laughed. But the meeting stayed with me because of something my father had told me years earlier.

We’d been sitting listening to someone brag about a recent achievement. When it was finally over, my father said: “It’s okay to toot your horn a bit, to a point. But if you’re really doing something great, you won’t have to tell them. They’ll know. And if you’re not, they won’t believe you anyway.”

People who spend most of a meeting recounting their accomplishments may be demonstrating something. It probably isn’t power. More often it’s insecurity in a good suit.

The person who doesn’t need the room to know they’re important is free to do something different. They listen. They ask questions they don’t already know the answer to, admit they were wrong about something, change their mind without it feeling like a concession. They don’t need to win every conversation.

That isn’t weakness. It’s one of the most underestimated forms of confidence there is. And confidence, in my experience, is closer to real power than a title will ever be.

Owning the Relationship

This dynamic shows up in the entertainment business in a way that’s easy to miss.

Independent filmmakers often think their biggest challenge is finding someone to distribute their film. It isn’t. The real challenge is creating enough value that you don’t have to surrender control to get the film seen.

Tyler Perry’s story illustrates this. Perry didn’t begin with Hollywood behind him. He started by serving an audience that Hollywood largely wasn’t paying attention to. He wrote plays for that audience, financed them, toured them, and kept coming back. He wasn’t trying to convince everyone to like what he was doing. He was trying to serve the people who already did.

He built an audience before he built the empire. That audience became one of his greatest sources of power. When you own the relationship with your audience, you have something more durable than attention. Perry retained ownership and control of his content as his career expanded. He eventually built Tyler Perry Studios. He didn’t succeed within the existing system by playing by its rules. He built a system large enough to operate by his own.

What made Perry’s path different wasn’t talent or ambition. Both exist in abundance in the entertainment business. What made it different was the sequence. He didn’t go to Hollywood and ask for permission to reach his audience. He reached his audience first, and let that permission become irrelevant.

Most filmmakers pour everything into making a film and only afterward start thinking about how to find an audience. By that point, whoever controls access to the audience is the one with the power. Perry understood the order of operations. He came to the table with something. And that meant he came to the table on better terms.

The Power of No

For most of my career, I believed that taking on more was the way to build influence. More projects, more responsibilities, more roles. It took me a long time to realize it was doing the opposite. The more I piled on, the less effectively I could manage any of it.

In my years as a founder in business and as a consultant, I’ve had to shift gears based on where the demand was. That’s just how business works. But the harder lesson was learning to let go of things I was good at and had enjoyed working on, when they no longer served where I was going. When the market shifted, or my own interests changed, holding on to what had worked before only got in the way of what needed to come next.

You have to clear out the old to make room for what’s next. Selling a business you built, exiting a venture that no longer fits, walking away from work you’ve done well for years. None of that is giving up. It’s recognizing that the power to move forward often begins with the decision to stop.

The negotiator who can walk away from a deal is in a stronger position than the one who can’t. The consultant who can tell a client something they don’t want to hear, without losing sleep about whether they’ll be asked back, has more influence than one who manages the relationship by carefully managing what they say.

Options give you standing. And options come from doing the work to make yourself difficult to replace, building relationships that don’t depend on any single outcome, and being honest with yourself about what you’ll accept and what you won’t.

Power can also change people over time. The more authority you accumulate, the more likely the people around you are to tell you what you want to hear. Employees stop raising concerns. Advisors begin pulling their punches. The dangerous moment isn’t the agreement itself. It’s when someone with real authority starts confusing compliance with respect. Someone can obey you without respecting you. Someone can agree with you in a meeting and believe nothing you said. Authority can make people listen. It cannot make them believe.

When the people around you are afraid to say what you don’t want to hear, your power may be making you weaker.

What Power Actually Looks Like

My father’s advice has held up better than most things I was taught about business. If you’re really doing something great, you won’t have to tell them. They’ll know.

I’ve watched that hold up. The woman in the meeting who took over the room by listening. The smaller mortgage company that held the stronger position in a merger because of trust no one could buy. Tyler Perry, who built an audience before he built an empire.

The people who seem to understand power most clearly are the ones who’ve stopped trying to prove they have it. Not because they stopped caring. Because they’re spending that energy somewhere else.

The room already knows.