Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / What Power Reveals: The Real Test of a Leader's Character
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled, What Power Reveals the Real Test of a Leader's Character. Here we go. There's a question most leaders never think to ask themselves, not, Am I resilient enough to handle failure, but rather am I grounded enough to handle success? We spend enormous energy preparing for the hard lessons in life. The downturns, the setbacks, the crises that demand we find reserves we didn't know we had. And that preparation matters. But there's a quieter, more dangerous test that arrives not in failure, but in ascent. It arrives the moment the power is placed in your hands. Abraham Lincoln said it plainly. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. Let's think about that again. Not catastrophe, not failure. Power. Lincoln had seen enough of both to know the difference. And what he observed was this. Adversity strips things away from a leader. Power adds them. Authority, access, deference, resources. And in that addition, something else often quietly disappears. Accountability. Think about the leaders you've admired most in your career, the ones who earned lasting trust. My guess is that when they were promoted, when they were given more authority, they didn't become harder to reach. They became more deliberate about staying reachable, more intentional about seeking feedback that challenged them, not just feedback that confirmed them. They used influence to clear paths for others, not to protect their own position. That's the distinction Lincoln was pointing to. not whether a person can endure hardship, but whether they can hold on to their values when hardship is no longer required. Here's where a lot of leaders get this wrong. They interpret this idea as a warning about corruption or abuse of power. And yes, those are real failures. But Lincoln's insight runs much deeper than the dramatic fall. The more common failure is subtler. It's the leader who stops asking hard questions because every question now gets an easy answer. It's the executive whose calendar no longer includes conversations with the people closest to the front line. It's the manager who used to be a great listener and somehow over time became someone who mostly speaks. Power didn't corrupt them. It simply revealed what they stopped working on. So the reframe here is this. Power is not just a test of who you are. It's an amplifier of what you've been building all along. If you've been building self-awareness, power amplifies that. If you've been building entitlement, Power amplifies that too. This means the work of character is not something you do before you lead. It is something you do while you lead, continuously, and especially when no one is requiring it of you. The leaders I respect most treat power the way a careful builder treats load-bearing weight. They know what is resting on them. They don't add to that weight carelessly. And they regularly inspect the foundation. Not because someone told them to, but because they understand what's at stake if they don't. Before you close this out today, I want to leave you with one question worth sitting with. Not for a few seconds, for a few days. The question is this. What has power revealed about your character that adversity never could? Not what you've done with authority, what it has done to you. Where has it made you more generous? And where has it made you more guarded? Where has it drawn out the best version of your leadership? And where has it allowed a less disciplined version to quietly take hold? You don't have to answer that to anyone else, but you do have to honestly answer it to yourself because the people around you are already watching the answer play out in real time. Lincoln understood something that most leadership frameworks overlook. The real test of a leader is not crisis. Crisis is equalizing. Crisis removes choice and demands response. Power, on the other hand, expands choice. And in that expansion lives both the greatest opportunity and the greatest risk of a leader's career. Character under adversity earns respect. Character under power earns trust. And trust, earned over time in the presence of authority, is the foundation of everything that actually lasts in leadership. Not the title, not the track record. It's the trust. Start there. Return there. And never stop building there.