Reimagining Leadership with Epic the Musical | Chapter 1 | Part II

We spend a great deal of time assessing what leaders can do. Perhaps we should spend more time asking what leadership is doing to them. Through EPIC: The Musical and the journey of Odysseus, I explore leadership not as a destination, but as a process of becoming.

This is Part II of Epic the Musical Leadership, a series exploring leadership through story, power, consequence and the human experience of becoming.

What Does Power Do to Us?

Early in my career, I was exposed to corporate politics, and the kind of power games people play. I was most disenchanted, until in 2010 when my professional training brought Power and Politics discourses to the learning menu. I needed to understand it deeply, to do the work that I do. I needed to be literate in the concepts and actions that colour crucial covert processes and group dynamics.

When any word gets a bad rep or becomes loaded with unpleasant meanings such that it creates aversion, avoidance or denial, it is time to reclaim and redefine the word, so that we can have a language to work through a system with.

When we talk about leadership and power, what gets the most airtime is how to use power in the right way to lead others. We spend a great deal of time teaching leaders how to become more influential. But we don’t spend enough time discussing types of power and how power changes us when we have it.

We teach leaders how to communicate, how to persuade, how to negotiate, how to make decisions, how to command a room, but I wonder whether we invested enough energy into this inquiry:

What happens to your relationship with others once they can no longer easily say no to you?

That, to me, is a much more interesting leadership question. And it is one of the reasons I find Odysseus such a fascinating character to think with. Not because he is a model leader. He isn't. But because EPIC: The Musical gives us a story about what happens when power, purpose, fear and consequence begin pulling in different directions.

Power changes the room.

One of the things I've noticed about power is that it doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes, it is almost invisible. A conversation becomes shorter. People stop challenging. Someone laughs at something that wasn't funny. A difficult question gets redirected. The person with the most authority speaks last, and suddenly many heads nod and everyone agrees. Nobody has necessarily done anything obviously wrong. Yet something has changed. The room has changed.

I've seen this happen in organisations. Perhaps you have too.

A leader walks into a meeting and everyone suddenly becomes slightly more careful. Not necessarily because the leader is frightening. Sometimes they are perfectly pleasant. But everyone knows that their opinion carries consequences. Their approval matters. Their disappointment matters. Their silence matters. And sometimes, without intending to, their preferences become instructions.

This is one of the strangest things about leadership… the more power we gain, the less accurately we may experience our own behaviour.

Power doesn't simply give us the ability to decide. It changes the cost of disagreement for everyone else. There is a cost to disagreement. And this is easy to miss.

A leader says, "I'm just putting an idea on the table."

The person two levels below hears, “This is probably what the CEO wants.”

A senior leader says, "I'd be interested in your thoughts."

The person thinking about their promotion may hear, “Choose your answer carefully.”

A leader says, "I don't mind being challenged." But if every challenge is met with defensiveness, interruption or a fifteen-minute rebuttal, people eventually learn something very different… They learn to stop challenging. And then something else happens… the leader starts receiving less truth.

Perhaps the critical thing about power is what it can make invisible.

This is where the journey of Odysseus fascinates. His mission is clear. He wants to get home. But as the journey becomes harder, the distance between the goal and the experience of the people travelling with him becomes increasingly dissonating.

The leader sees the mission. The people around him experience the consequences. Those are not necessarily the same thing. And holding that tension is at the heart of leadership.

It is easy to say, “We need to get there.”

It is harder to ask, “What is the journey doing to the people who are getting us there?”

And perhaps harder still, “What is it doing to me?”

I have watched power change people.

At first, they were curious. They asked questions, they listened, they were willing to say, “I don’t know”. But when they saw that someone else’s views and opinions were different to or challenged theirs, they felt the need to secure their authoritative position by reinforcing the power dynamic to be seen as the more competent one. They spoke more, they put others down, they established rules, asked less, received fewer challenges and became more certain. Perhaps they didn’t become a worse person, but they simply became less exposed to the information that might have changed them deeply.

The paradox of leadership.

Herein lies the paradox: The more senior you become, the more important other people's honesty becomes. And yet the more senior you become, the harder it can be for people to be completely honest with you. Your success can therefore create the conditions for your own isolation.

You have more information, more access, more authority, more resources, and yet perhaps, less unfiltered truth. People around you edit themselves. They protect relationships. They manage upwards. They tell you what they think you need to know. And because you are receiving fewer uncomfortable signals, you may become increasingly convinced that everything is fine, until something happens that makes problems impossible to ignore.

So, what does mature power look like?

Mature power is becoming more conscious of what your power does to other people. This is the growth journey for every leader.

Can you make it safe for someone to disagree with you? Can you hear an uncomfortable truth without immediately defending yourself? Can you change your mind without feeling diminished?

Can you give someone else the room to be right? Can you allow someone junior to know something you believe you ought to know but you don’t?

Can you create a team that eventually needs you less, rather than one that constantly needs you or your approval?

These disciplines of power, not soft leadership qualities.

The strongest leader in the room may be the person making the most space.

I've known people who could walk into a room and make everyone else more capable. They didn't necessarily speak the most. They didn't need to demonstrate that they were the smartest person there.

They listened. They asked the question nobody else had thought to ask. They noticed who hadn't spoken. They made disagreement possible without making it personal. And somehow, people left the room standing a little taller. That is a form of power that I call Generative. It gives power without removing its own. It is not power over but power for, and it is truly empowering.

Power that creates agency. Power that enables other people to exercise judgement. Power that doesn't need to be constantly demonstrated because it is secure enough to be shared.

What happens to people's agency around you?

As discussed in Part I, this is increasingly the leadership question I ask. I care less about how influential the person is, not because influence is unimportant, but because the important definition of a leader who deserves to be followed, is what happens to other people's agency in their presence?

Do people become smaller, or bigger? Do they wait for permission, or take responsibility?

Do they tell you what you want to hear, or what you need to hear?

Do they become followers, or are they leaders in their own right?

I ask because there is a significant difference between creating loyalty and creating agency.

Loyalty can sometimes mean, I will follow you, whereas Agency says, I can think, decide and act, and I know you trust me to do so.

The latter is harder to build, but infinitely more valuable to humanity.

And then there is the question of truth.

A leader can be an entirely honest person and still create a culture where people don't tell them the truth. That is the fascinating relationship between power and truth, and the uncomfortable part.

The problem isn't always the leader's integrity. It can be the architecture around them, i.e. who gets access, who gets heard, who feels safe enough to disagree, who controls the information, who has something to lose, who is allowed to say, I think you're wrong, and what happens when they do?

Because if nobody can safely challenge the leader (or for that matter, someone who thinks they are the leader due to the seniority), then the leader's view of reality becomes increasingly dependent on the people who are willing to speak. And those people may not be the people who know the most, they may simply be the people who feel safest.

Perhaps leadership is less about control than conditions.

If you’ve followed me long enough, you will know that I’m interested in the deeper stuff. I'm interested in what sits beneath visible performance, not simply what is the leader doing, but what conditions are producing this behaviour… and what conditions is this leader producing for everyone else?

Because a leader can be highly capable and still create a low-agency environment. They can have impeccable communication skills and still create silence. They can talk about empowerment while making every important decision themselves. They can genuinely value honesty while making honesty too costly. The contradiction is often where the real story is.

If you have authority over other people, I think there are some questions worth asking periodically as a personal audit.

What do people tell me that they wouldn't tell someone else? What don't people tell me?

Who challenges me? Who has stopped challenging me? What happens when they disagree with me?

Do people come to me for answers, or with better questions? Am I building dependence or capability?

And perhaps the hardest one, if I am wrong, how quickly would I know?

That last question tells us more about the health of our leadership than any competency framework.

Power itself isn't the problem. Leadership requires power… the ability to decide, to allocate resources, to set direction, to protect people, to take responsibility, to act when others cannot. The question is what we do with it. And even more importantly, what does having Power do to us?

Does it make us more certain, or more curious? More controlling, or more trusting? More protective of our position, or more generous with opportunity? Does it make other people smaller, or does it give them room to become more of themselves?

I began with the question, what happens to your relationship with other people once they can no longer easily say no to you?

I'm still sitting with it, because perhaps mature leadership isn't about becoming powerful enough that people follow you, but it is about becoming secure enough that people can disagree with you and still thrive around you.

It is about creating enough agency that your people can eventually make decisions without you. It is about making truth easier to tell, not harder. And perhaps it is about recognising that every time we exercise power, we are creating a lesson for the people watching us.

They are learning what power looks like, what leadership feels like, what disagreement costs, what truth is worth, what kind of person they might need to become if they want to survive in your system.

That is why I don't think leadership is simply about what we achieve. It is about what our power makes possible… And what it makes impossible. That, to me, is the deeper leadership journey.

Perhaps the next question is even harder, what are we willing to sacrifice to achieve what we want?

I'll explore that in Part III of Chapter 1, What are you willing to sacrifice to win?

#ETMLeadership #ReimagineRevolution