Power Isn't The Problem. It's What Power Does To You
Why the leadership conversation has been asking the wrong question all along
Most leaders know this meeting.
You walk in with a clear purpose. A project that matters, already stalled long enough, and today is finally the day to move it forward. Then something changes.
One person makes a comment that lands just slightly off — passive aggression at its most effective. Before you’ve processed that, someone else comes in harder. Direct hostility, not bothering to disguise anything. Two people, two very different tactics, and within minutes, the meeting has stopped being about the project entirely.
You scan the room. Silence.
Everyone is waiting. Watching you. As if the fact that the meeting broke down is somehow your responsibility to fix. Which, at that instant, it is.
This is what nobody teaches you about leadership.
When things come apart, the emotional load doesn’t distribute itself fairly. It lands on the leader. You absorb the passive resistance from one side, the open hostility from the other, and underneath all of it, the discomfort of everyone who has gone quiet and is hoping you’ll sort it out. It’s a lot to hold while you’re also trying to think straight.
And so you do what leaders do. You take charge. You speak with more authority. You narrow the options and pull the room back toward you. It feels like leadership.
But at some point in that meeting, you stopped leading and started reacting.
A whiff of exposure. A moment where control slipped, just slightly. Your instinct kicks in — immediate, practised, and entirely understandable. Stabilise. Move toward clarity. Reassert the frame.
Except that what’s driving things isn’t only the needs of the agenda. It’s also yours. The move toward control isn’t purely strategic — it’s also, quietly, a way of managing your own discomfort under the guise of managing the meeting.
This is not a criticism. It’s a pattern that shows up in the best leaders, not only the struggling ones. Still, it raises a question worth facing now, in the room, in the moment itself:
What am I using power for right now?
Strategies of Defence
Simon Walker has a precise name for what just happened in that room.
In The Undefended Leader, in a chapter he calls “Strategies of Defence II: Power,” Walker makes an observation that is simple, uncomfortable, and difficult to argue with: leaders don’t only use power to lead. They use power to defendthemselves.
Power, in its proper form, is plain enough — the capacity to act, to decide, to influence. But Walker’s insight is that power shifts its purpose depending on the internal state of the person wielding it. When a leader feels exposed, uncertain, or suddenly out of control, the power is still being exercised but no longer primarily in service of the task.
It is in the service of the self.
Not consciously. Not cynically. But the move toward control, toward narrowing the options, toward speaking with greater authority than the moment perhaps requires — these are not only leadership responses. They are, Walker argues, defensive ones. Ways of restoring an internal equilibrium that has been quietly threatened.
Which reframes everything that happened in that meeting. The question is no longer simply whether you handled the room well. The question is: what, underneath the handling, were you actually trying to protect?
Power Isn’t the Problem
Walker is careful here, and it’s worth us being careful, too.
Power itself is not the issue. Walker identifies five forms of power every leader carries into every room: personality, resources, experience, expertise, and position. You cannot lead without them. They are the tools of leadership.
The real issue is what your power is doing for you — because under pressure, each of these modes shifts. Quietly, and often invisibly.
Your personality — your presence, your relational influence — acts as a tool for emotional control when you need others’ responses to stabilise you. Your resources become leverage when you use them to secure outcomes that also secure you. Your experience hardens into rigidity the moment you stop genuinely listening. Your expertise becomes a need to be right. And your positional authority tips into domination — what people more bluntly call pulling rank.
None of this declares itself so that you can immediately consider it. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to catch. All these movements feel like leadership.
Walker doesn’t soften the blow. When power is used defensively, trust erodes. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily. People in the room sense it, even when they can’t name it. They comply, but something in them disengages. The discussion continues, but genuine thinking stops. Creativity, which depends on a particular kind of safety, quietly evaporates.
And here is Walker’s keenest observation: the more you reach for power to secure yourself, the less real authority you actually carry. The two move in opposite directions. Positional power can be asserted indefinitely — the title remains, the decisions stick. But authority, the kind that sincerely moves and motivates people, drains away in direct proportion to how power is used defensively.
You can hold the people in the room. But you may have lost something in that mode of holding.
Why Things Are Getting Worse
The conditions Walker described have worsened considerably since he wrote.
What we face now is not the occasional difficult meeting, the periodic loss of control. The challenge is that instability has become the baseline for us. Cultural fragmentation, relational breakdown, information arriving faster than it can be processed, pressure that is constant but rarely accompanied by clarity — these are no longer exceptional circumstances. They are our day-to-day environment.
Chaos is no longer something that intrudes from the outside. It is ambient. It is the atmosphere we now lead in.
And that changes everything Walker identified, because the triggers he described — exposure, uncertainty, loss of control — are no longer occasional. They are continuous. Which means the defensive use of power is no longer a response to particular moments of pressure. For many leaders, it has become their default mode. Their resting state. The water they swim in without noticing.
This is not a failure of character. It is a predictable human response to a perpetually hostile environment and is far from harmless.
The Affective Layer
What Walker mapped behaviourally, neuroscience now describes from the inside.
Under sustained pressure, our nervous systems shift into a protective state. Our bodies tighten up. Peripheral awareness narrows. Our capacity for openness, curiosity, and genuine responsiveness contracts, and the drive toward control increases. Not as a conscious choice, but as an automatic response to a system that has registered a threat and is trying to restore some sense of equilibrium.
Which means that when you see a leader becoming more controlling under pressure, i.e sharper, more directive, less willing to hear dissent, you may not be seeing strength. You may be seeing a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they feel unsafe.
Defensive power is not only a strategic or psychological pattern. It is an affective regulation strategy. The reaching for control, the narrowing of options, the reassertion of authority, are, in part, the body’s attempt to manage an internal state that has become too difficult to bear.
The leader who dominates the room may be doing so not because they have too much confidence, but because something in them is working very hard not to fall apart.
Once you see this, you cannot unsee it. And once you name the pattern, its cruelty becomes visible:
Chaos → Anxiety → Control → Distance → More Chaos.
Every intervention designed to reduce instability actually increases it. The harder the leaders grip, the more the system strains. The more control is exerted, the more the relationships that might genuinely stabilise things are quietly eroded. All of which raises the anxiety, which tightens the grip again.
Most leaders have lived in this cycle so long that it no longer feels like one. It feels like reality. Like the unavoidable texture of leadership in difficult times.
The pattern cannot be broken from within itself. Which means the first move is simply this: to see it for what it is.
The Real Issue
The assumption, when leadership goes wrong, is usually that someone misused power — too aggressive, too self-interested, too willing to override others for personal gain. And sometimes that is true.
But Walker points us to something more subtle, and considerably more common.
The deeper issue is not the misuse of power. It is the need for it. The moment a leader can no longer remain genuinely present — open, attentive, willing to not know — without first securing themselves, power steps in to fill the gap. It becomes what makes the anxious presence of others bearable. The mechanism by which a leader manages their own internal state well enough to stay in the room with everyone else.
Which means the problem is not, at root, behavioural. It is a problem of interiority.
This is a reversal that changes everything. We have been asking the wrong question. The question is not how leaders use power. Rather, it is what they need power to do for them. Because the moment power becomes what makes you feel safe enough to function, authority has quietly become your coping strategy. And no amount of leadership development that addresses only surface behaviour will touch what is actually driving it.
Power becomes dangerous not when people reach for it out of ambition. It becomes dangerous when they reach for it out of need and protection.
So let’s get specific and move beyond leadership in the abstract, to yours, right now.
Where are you tightening your grip? Where are you needing to be right — not because the evidence demands it, but because something in you does? Where are you leaning on your role, your expertise, your experience, in ways that are closing down the room rather than opening it? Where are you, quietly, making yourself harder to reach?
These are not comfortable questions. They are not meant to be.
But they’re not questions of judgement either. The pattern we have been tracing is not a character flaw. Underneath every place where the grip has tightened, there is something that feels at risk — your credibility, your sense of competence, your ability to hold things together. Or something older than your current role, something perhaps you learned long ago: that control is safer than vulnerability.
Whatever it is, it is worth naming. Not to dismantle or undo you, to make your impossible situation even worse. But because you cannot lead well, and you cannot be well from a place you refuse to look at.
What feels at risk in you right now?
The Jesus Way: The Power of Noticing
Here is where the Christian understanding of leadership parts ways, quietly but radically, with almost everything else on offer.
Christ does not lead by securing himself. He does not manage his exposure or protect his position. He does not reach for control when the room turns against him — and it does turn against him, repeatedly, in every way imaginable. He remains present. In misunderstanding, in instability, in apparent failure, in the kind of loss that looks, from the outside, like total collapse.
And he does not stand outside our instability and call us toward him. He enters it, in his life, in his suffering, in the fullness of what it means to be human under pressure without withdrawing into self-protection. And he continues to enter it now, through his body in the world.
Which means the invitation to the Christian leader is not what we might expect. You are not asked to stabilise yourself before you lead. You are not asked to resolve your anxiety, master your nervous system, and then show up. You are invited to remain present — with him, within it — in the unresolved, uncomfortable, destabilised reality of the room as it actually is.
This is not a technique. But it does have a practice.
In your next moment of pressure, before your grip tightens — notice what is happening in your body. Name what you are feeling. Ask which form of power you are about to reach for, and why. Then pause — just a few seconds — and turn: Christ, be present with me here. Then choose to stay open one moment longer than feels safe. Ask instead of assert. Listen instead of closing.
It is a small movement. But it interrupts the cycle. And over time, it forms something.
Because the most dangerous leaders are not, in the end, the most powerful — they are the most anxious. And the most trustworthy, the ones people will genuinely follow through genuine difficulty, are those who no longer need power to feel safe.
That is not a leadership competency. It is a kind of freedom.
But power is only one of the ways we defend ourselves. In the next piece unpacking The Undefended Leader, we follow Simon Walker into another of his insights — and it may be the one that hits closest to home.
How control becomes a strategy of defence—
and why it is often even harder to recognise than power.