Power Failure: The Hidden Costs of Looking Good

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

I. Blinking Green Lights Everywhere

When I first joined the organization, my initial impression was positive.

I sat in on the weekly project reviews. The format was clean. The cadence was consistent. The dashboards were calm. Every project was green. Sure, there were some problems, but they were minor and all well under control.

I thought it was nice to find myself in a situation where we were on a roll.

Not long after that, I saw the first weekly climate survey.

It was short. One of the recurring questions asked whether people felt supported by their manager. I do remember thinking it was odd that the answers were strongly agree, neutral, or strongly disagree, like a Likert scale that had two options removed.

Amongst other reports, I saw the weekly results Monday morning, which was shared with all of management. Responses were roughly 95% strongly agree, and about 5% neutral.

No noise. No spread. No ambiguity. Just overwhelming alignment.

Again, I paused — not alarmed, just curious. In any sufficiently large organization, sentiment usually varies. Even good managers don’t get unanimous scores week after week. But maybe this was an outlier. Maybe expectations were clear. Maybe the culture really was that strong.

Then I encountered my first real delivery constraint.

A technical team was unavailable for a short window due to an internal offsite. Nothing dramatic. No crisis. Nothing that all of senior leadership would be surprised or concerned about. Just a timing issue that needed to be accounted for as we planned a sales timeline.

So I did what I would expect any of my subordinate leaders to do: Flag the risk, indicate mitigation steps, and communicate.

The response came back fast.

Internal coordination, I was told, could not be a reason to slow potential sales. If internal friction threatened momentum, it should be bypassed. And if anything about this created unnecessary visibility upward, that visibility would become my responsibility to manage.

I remember staring at the message longer than I expected to.

Not because it rubbed me the wrong way, but because it reframed something fundamental: This wasn’t a disagreement about priorities — it was a statement about what was and was not allowed to matter.

I shrugged it off. Adjusted. Took the note.

A few days later, during another review, something odd happened.

One of the survey results showed a strongly disagree response to the manager-support question. Just one. It turned out to be an error — a misclick, quickly acknowledged.

What surprised me wasn’t the mistake. It was the reaction.

Within minutes, multiple senior leaders were involved. Messages flew. Clarifications were issued. Explanations were prepared. And almost immediately, I watched those same leaders rush to get out ahead of it for the executive team — to make sure it was understood that the response didn’t represent reality. That it was a mistake. That it shouldn’t be read into.

I didn’t say anything. I just watched.

Not long after that, I noticed something else. Certain project issues never seemed to surface in front of the same leader who had responded to my earlier message. Risks existed. Complications existed. But they were routed elsewhere. Handled quietly. Smoothed over before they reached a particular line of sight.

The projects were still green. The surveys still looked pristine.

And suddenly, the earlier pieces snapped into focus.

The dashboards weren’t green because nothing was wrong. The surveys weren’t uniform because everyone felt the same. The speed wasn’t coming from alignment.

It was coming from avoidance.

That was the moment it clicked.

This wasn’t an organization that had eliminated problems. It was one that had learned how to keep them out of view. And once I saw that, I understood why everything else looked the way it did — why risks surfaced late, why updates were so carefully phrased, why certain conversations never happened in the room where decisions were supposedly being made.

Nothing was explicitly forbidden. No one ever said, “Don’t tell the truth.”

But it was clear which truths were welcome — and which ones created work.

That was my lightbulb moment.

And once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.

II. What is Power for?

When describing environments like this, it's tempting to frame the problem as culture, communication, or leadership style.

That may be true, but it would be incomplete.

The real issue isn’t tone or temperament. It is how power is used, and to what ends. And more specifically, what power is for—and what happens when it stops doing that job.

In a well functioning team or organization, power is not meant to intimidate, inspire, or dominate. It is not about personality, confidence, or force of will. Power exists for a far more mundane—and far more important—reason:

To make coordinated action possible in the presence of uncertainty, disagreement, and constraint.

That’s it.

Power should be applied to:

terminate ambiguity when opinions differ
force real tradeoffs when capacity is limited
absorb conflict so it doesn’t cascade downward
allocate resources in alignment with priorities
protect the system from fragmentation
make it safer, not riskier, to surface inconvenient truths

When power is healthy, it is almost invisible. Decisions get made. Tensions resolve. Accountability is clear. People may not always agree, but they understand how and why choices were made. The system moves.

When power fails, none of that stops immediately. Instead, it degrades quietly.

Power failure does not announce itself as authoritarianism. It doesn’t require shouting, threats, or dramatic displays of dominance. In fact, the most damaging forms of power failure are often subtle, emotionally sophisticated, and well-defended.

They show up as:

heightened sensitivity to optics
intolerance for ambiguity
aversion to visible failure
insistence on confidence over clarity
urgency without prioritization
and an unspoken rule that certain outcomes must be protected at all costs

At this point, authority stops serving coordination and starts serving self-protection.

This is the defining transition.

Once power becomes self-protective, the organization begins to reorganize itself around that fact, whether anyone intends it to or not. People learn very quickly what is safe to say and what is not. They learn which truths move the system forward and which truths trigger consequences. They learn where decisions are formally made—and where they are actually made.

No policy needs to change. No values need to be rewritten. The incentives are implicit, but they are unmistakable.

Power failure, then, is not primarily about abuse or malice. It is about distortion.

Distortion of information, accountability, and decision-making. And critically, distortion of permission.

Who is allowed to speak plainly?
Who is allowed to challenge assumptions?
Who is allowed to surface risk early?
Who is allowed to be wrong without being punished?

In a healthy system, power expands the space of permissible truth. In a failing one, it contracts it.

This is why power failure cannot be reduced to perception, process, or structure alone.

An organization can:

Have data and still suppress it.
Have process and still bypass it.
Have structure and still ignore it.

Power determines whether any of those systems are allowed to function.

When power is exercised in ways that punish candor, reward performance theater, or prioritize emotional comfort over operational truth, every other system begins to lie—not because people are dishonest, but because honesty has become dangerous. From the outside, this often gets mislabeled as “politics.”

But politics is not the disease. Politics is a symptom.

What people are really responding to is a breakdown in the legitimacy of authority. When authority no longer feels aligned with reality, people stop trusting it to resolve conflict or make sound decisions. They start protecting themselves instead. They optimize for survival. They manage impressions. They buffer. They perform.

And the organization slowly loses the one thing power was meant to safeguard in the first place: The ability to act together, honestly, toward a shared goal.

That is power failure, and it corrupts.

III. How Power Failure Actually Shows Up

Power failure doesn’t arrive with a memo or a reorg. It reveals itself through behavioral patterns—small, repeatable distortions that slowly reshape how people act, speak, and decide.

What follows are not personality flaws or cultural quirks. They are systemic signals—objective signs that authority is no longer serving coordination, but is instead warping the system around it.

1. Fear Becomes a Management Input

One of the clearest signs of power failure is when fear becomes an accepted—or even intentional—tool of leadership.

This doesn’t require yelling or overt threats. In fact, it often presents as intensity, passion, or “high standards.” The tell is not tone, but outcome.

When fear is present:

people optimize for not being noticed
risks surface late, if at all
confidence is rewarded more than accuracy
problems are hidden until they explode
energy goes into appearance management rather than problem-solving

Fear does not increase accountability. It increases deception.

People still work hard—sometimes harder than ever—but they work toward safety, not truth. The organization becomes reactive, brittle, and exhausting to operate within. Performance may look high for a while, but it is built on misrepresentation, not resilience.

2. The Chain of Command Exists—Until It Doesn’t

Another early signal of power failure is the quiet erosion of formal authority.

On paper, roles are clear. In practice, decisions flow through informal paths: side conversations, private messages, or selective escalations. Leaders bypass their own managers. People learn who actually needs to be looped in—and who doesn’t.

This has predictable effects:

managers lose legitimacy
accountability blurs
teams receive conflicting direction
decisions feel arbitrary rather than reasoned

When power bypasses structure, structure stops working. The org chart becomes decorative. Coordination becomes personal. Trust degrades.

3. Veto Power Without Accountability

In power-failed systems, someone often accumulates de facto veto power without formal responsibility.

Everyone knows it. No one names it.

Decisions technically belong to a group or a process—but only until the wrong person objects. At that point, progress halts, direction reverses, or the cost of proceeding becomes intolerable.

Because this veto power is informal, it’s also unaccountable. Outcomes fail, but ownership is diffuse. Responsibility flows downward; authority flows upward—or sideways.

People adapt by avoiding decisions altogether or by preemptively shaping proposals to survive approval rather than succeed in reality.

4. Loyalty Matters More Than Accuracy

Another unmistakable signal: loyalty becomes more valuable than competence.

Not loyalty to mission or values—but loyalty to individuals, narratives, or power centers.

In these environments:

truth-tellers are labeled “difficult”
high performers burn out quietly
people who manage optics advance
dissent becomes reputationally risky

Over time, this creates a leadership layer optimized for reinforcement, not correction. The organization becomes increasingly confident—and increasingly wrong.

5. Accountability Without Authority

Power failure is also visible when people are held responsible for outcomes they are not allowed to influence.

They are told to:

deliver results
manage risk
keep clients happy
hit targets

But they are not allowed to:

change scope
adjust timelines
reallocate resources
surface tradeoffs
challenge assumptions

When outcomes inevitably suffer, blame flows downward. Authority remains insulated. This is not empowerment—it is entrapment.

People learn to comply without committing. They do just enough to survive. Initiative disappears.

6. History Becomes Flexible

In power-failed systems, the past is unstable.

Decisions are reinterpreted after the fact. Rationales shift. What was once approved is later denied. Failures are reframed to protect authority. Documentation quietly loses relevance.

This prevents learning.

If the organization cannot agree on what happened, it cannot improve what happens next. Mistakes repeat. Patterns persist. Everyone feels stuck, but no one can say why.

7. Buffering Becomes a Role

Finally, one of the most telling signs of power failure: the emergence of buffers.

Certain people—often high-integrity middle leaders—spend their time translating, softening, sequencing, and absorbing. They manage information not to improve decisions, but to prevent damage.

They rewrite emails. They choreograph updates. They shield teams. They shield executives. They absorb blame.

This work is invisible, exhausting, and unsustainable. It also signals that authority can no longer tolerate unfiltered reality.

When buffering becomes necessary, power has already failed.

None of these patterns require bad intent. They don’t require cruelty or incompetence. They don’t even require awareness.

They emerge whenever authority becomes more concerned with protecting itself than enabling the system.

And once they appear, they don’t stay isolated. They reinforce one another:

Fear feeds silence.
Silence feeds distortion.
Distortion feeds bad decisions.
Bad decisions further an impulse to assert more control.

By the time leaders notice something is wrong, the organization has already learned how to lie convincingly.

IV. Why Power Failure Makes Everything Else Worse

By itself, power failure is destabilizing. In combination with other failures, it is catastrophic.

This is the part that often gets missed.

Most organizations do not fail because they lack intelligence, talent, or even good intentions. Many have data. Many have process. Many have structure. Some even have strong values, at least on paper. Yet they still collapse.

The reason is that power failure doesn’t just add another problem—it disables the organization’s ability to correct any of the others.

Once authority becomes self-protective rather than system-serving, every downstream mechanism begins to degrade in predictable ways.

Power Failure Turns Perception Into Theater

In earlier sections, we talked about perception failure—the inability of leaders to see what is actually happening.

Power failure is how that blindness becomes permanent.

When people learn that surfacing inconvenient truths carries risk, perception doesn’t simply weaken—it becomes performative. Data still exists, but it is curated. Status reports still circulate, but they are smoothed. Dashboards still show progress, but only of the safest kind.

Reality doesn’t disappear. It just stops traveling upward without being sanitized.

Over time, leaders stop noticing the gap between what they are told and what is real—not because they are incapable, but because the system has trained everyone to maintain the illusion.

Perception failure becomes a stable equilibrium.

Power Failure Freezes Processing

Even when truth does manage to surface, power failure prevents it from turning into action.

Decisions stall. Tradeoffs are avoided. Accountability diffuses.

Why?

Because processing information requires authority to do uncomfortable things:

say no
disappoint someone
absorb blame
admit uncertainty
accept short-term pain

When authority is optimized for protection rather than coordination, these moves become too costly. Leaders hesitate. Choices get deferred. Everything becomes urgent, but nothing is resolved.

The organization keeps moving—but without direction.

Processing failure isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s a lack of permission.

Power Failure Hollowes Out Structure

Structures—roles, processes, governance—are only as strong as the authority that enforces them.

In power-failed environments, structure remains visible but loses legitimacy. Processes exist, but exceptions proliferate. Roles exist, but decisions ignore them. Governance exists, but only when it’s convenient.

People learn that structure is optional, and optional structures do not scale.

This is why organizations in power failure often feel chaotic and rigid at the same time. Rules are enforced selectively. Flexibility flows upward; constraint flows downward.

Structure becomes theater.

Power Failure Corrupts Incentives

When authority prioritizes protection, incentives follow.

People stop optimizing for outcomes and start optimizing for survival. They choose actions that minimize exposure rather than maximize impact. They manage impressions instead of risk. They escalate late, not early. They align with individuals, not objectives.

None of this requires explicit instruction.

In a power-failed system, the incentives are ambient. People absorb them through observation. The organization trains itself.

Power Failure Locks Identity in Place

Perhaps most importantly, power failure prevents identity from evolving.

In healthy systems, authority allows leaders to confront uncomfortable questions:

Are we still who we think we are?
Are our values reflected in our behavior?
Are we protecting the right things?
Are we willing to change course?

In power-failed systems, those questions feel existential. To acknowledge them would threaten the very identity power is protecting.

So the organization doubles down.

Values become slogans. Strategy becomes narrative. Self-image becomes brittle. Any signal that challenges the story is treated as disloyalty or incompetence.

Identity failure doesn’t cause power failure—but power failure ensures it cannot be corrected.

The Compounding Effect

This is why power failure is so destructive: it amplifies every other failure mode.

It makes perception unreliable
It makes processing impossible
It makes structure performative
It makes incentives perverse
It makes identity fragile

Each failure reinforces the others. The system becomes internally consistent—and externally disconnected from reality.

From the inside, this often feels like exhaustion, frustration, or quiet despair. From the outside, it can look baffling. “Why don’t they just fix it?” people ask.

But once power has failed, fixing it requires confronting the very dynamics that are being protected. By that point, it is often so far down the path that it is difficult to turn back.

And that is the hardest move of all.

V. The Quiet Human Cost

Power failure doesn’t just distort systems. It reshapes people.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. But slowly, predictably, and often invisibly.

In power-failed environments, most people don’t burn out because they’re lazy, fragile, or incapable. They burn out because they are constantly asked to carry contradictions they are not allowed to resolve.

They are asked:

To be accountable without authority.
To speak up without consequence.
To take ownership without control.
To project confidence while managing uncertainty they can’t name.

Over time, this creates a particular kind of strain—not physical exhaustion, but moral and cognitive fatigue.

People begin to monitor themselves constantly. They replay conversations. They script updates.

They pre-empt reactions. They optimize tone instead of substance.

Work becomes less about building something and more about not triggering something.

This is especially costly for conscientious leaders in the middle of the system.

They see what’s happening. They understand the risks. They know which truths matter. And they also know exactly how dangerous those truths can be when delivered plainly.

So they buffer:

They absorb pressure from above.
They shield teams below.
They translate reality into something survivable.
They carry blame to preserve relationships.

This work is invisible. It’s rarely acknowledged. And it’s profoundly unsustainable.

Over time, something has to give.

Some people leave early, quietly, with vague explanations that protect everyone except themselves. Others stay longer and slowly harden. They become more guarded. More strategic. Less curious. Less generous. Less themselves.

It is evocative of "The Dark Knight": "You either die (exit) a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

That isn’t cynicism. It’s pattern recognition.

Power failure doesn’t just drive attrition. It selectively removes the very people an organization needs to grow: those with judgment, integrity, and the ability to see around corners. What remains is often a leadership core optimized for survival inside the system, not stewardship of the system itself.

This is why power-failed organizations struggle to scale.

Scaling requires trust. Trust requires truth. Truth requires safety. Safety must be provided by power.

When power makes safety conditional, everything else becomes fragile.

From the outside, this can look like bad luck or poor execution. From the inside, it feels like constantly rowing against an invisible current. And eventually, people stop trying to swim upstream.

The deepest cost of power failure isn’t reputational damage or lost revenue—though those follow. It’s the quiet erosion of possibility:

The loss of imagination.
The loss of shared purpose.
The loss of belief that things can actually get better.

Once that goes, even success feels hollow. And no amount of control can bring it back.

VI. When the System Starts Protecting Itself

Power failure rarely begins with cruelty or incompetence.

It begins with protection.

Protection of momentum. Reputation. Revenue. Authority.

Protection of a story that has already required too much sacrifice to question easily.

Once authority shifts from enabling coordination to preserving that protection, the system begins to bend around it. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Quietly.

Truth becomes conditional.
Risk becomes reputational.
Decisions become political.
Structure becomes optional.
Performance becomes theater.

None of this requires bad people. It requires only a system that learns—incrementally—that confronting reality feels more dangerous than managing appearances.

This is why power failure is so difficult to address from within. It doesn’t just distort outcomes; it stabilizes distortion. It turns perception failure into habit. It turns processing failure into paralysis. It turns structural failure into bureaucracy. It makes every other problem harder to see, harder to name, and harder to correct.

Over time, the organization becomes internally consistent while drifting further from reality. Confidence increases even as resilience declines. Control tightens even as adaptability disappears.

At that point, the system is no longer asking, “What’s true?” It is asking, “What keeps us safe?”

That question feels responsible. It feels prudent. It feels like leadership.

But it is also the moment when organizations quietly lose the ability to tell the truth about themselves.

Are you a senior leader struggling with signs of power failure in your organization? Let's talk →