Guest post by Nik Kinley, author of The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It.
Power does not just enable leaders to move faster. It tunes their minds toward action, and dials down the cautionary parts of their brains. In neuroscientific terms, power activates the brain’s behavioural activation system (BAS), which heightens their focus on rewards, pushes decisive action, and sustains persistence. The good news is it can be massively helpful in moderation. But it can quickly become unbalanced, and when it does, it rarely ends well.
The Power Trap, things to watch out for
That BAS tilt shows up most clearly in attitudes to risk. Across experiments and field studies, people who have power – or even just feel powerful – concistently take more risks. They push further in games of chance, disclose more in negotiations, and back bolder commercial bets. Under pressure or stress, the effect intensifies, too. A few profiles resist it – especially the highly anxious or those guarding threatened status – but for most leaders, power nudges the risk dial upward.
Power also edits perception. It narrows attention to goals, strips out context, and encourages high-level, abstract framing. That can speed triage in a noisy environment, yet it also invites blind spots, generalisation, and over-reliance on pre-existing beliefs. In practice, leaders seek less new data, sample fewer viewpoints, and anchor to the story they already hold. The outcome is classic confirmation bias.
Confidence compounds this tilt. Power lifts self-esteem and heightens people’s sense of control. Some confidence is essential. And even a little overconfidence can sometimes be useful. But persistent overconfidence is not. And with power, three forms of overconfidence become more likely: overstating one’s knowledge, overstating one’s skill, and overestimating personal control over outcomes. That trio drives optimistic forecasts, premium-priced acquisitions, and schedules that mysteriously ignore reality. In the short-term, this overconfidence can drive higher average returns because bolder bets sometimes pay. But over the longer term, variance in those returns almost always increases.
Finally, insulation kicks in. Because power creates distance – physical, structural, and psychological. People edit what they tell you. Dissent drops. Context vanishes. Even empathetic leaders read social cues less accurately when tasks are not overtly interpersonal. Information up the line gets cleaner, not truer. So the same force that heightens risk appetite simultaneously degrades the risk signal. And that is hugely dangerpous to decision-making leaders.
If you lead an innovative business, this is double-edged, too. Because successful innovation needs asymmetry: lots of ideas, with good learning from mistakes, and a few outsized wins. But the BAS-overconfidence-insulation combo skews decision-making and weakens error-correction. Learning slows, subsequent bets get larger and less examined, and so performance becomes a roller coaster.
What to do about it
What then, can leaders do to help mitigate the effects that power can have upon them? Four things stand out.
Install structural brakes. Make a ‘risk quorum’ group mandatory for non-reversible or high-leverage decisions. Define in advance which spend, strategic moves, or policy shifts require second opinions and independent review. Process beats intention when your BAS is running hot.
Engineer decision machines. Structured tools like pre-mortems (imagining why a choice fails) or red teams (challenging with alternatives) help unlock candour. You don’t need them for every call, only the big ones. The aim is to build a decision machine where input is systematically gathered to strengthen your choices.
Avoid and discourage binary views. People can worry that if they say something different to you they will be opposing you. So it’s important to avoid sounding too black-and-white and to use qualifiers, as this makes it easier for people to say something different to you. For example, rather than saying, “It is like this”, say, “The most likely thing is this”. Anything to remind people that there are rarely 100% correct or 100% wrong answers.
Build Confidence. Finally, you need to do all you can to build people’s confidence to speak up and voice their real opinions. So, ask them for their views. Ask questions. Lots of questions. Do all you can to encourage them. Praise them. Thank them, publicly, where possible. And, most importantly, when someone says something stupid or irritating (which, sooner or later, they will), respond positively. This can be really hard. But it’s also essential, because people remember these moments. Adam Neumann, former CEO of WeWork, was reported by the US business magazine Fast Company to call executives who tried to convince him to take fewer risks, ‘B players, ‘ and allegedly barred them from meetings. Maybe they were being too cautious (though history suggests otherwise). But even so, this kind of reaction can kill confidence and dissension.
The core message for decision-makers is simple. Power will not turn you reckless. It will make you a little more certain, a little quicker, and a little less curious. Those are precisely the conditions under which risks compound silently. Build systems that drag you back to context, restore dissent, and slow the confident hand at the moment it most wants to move. Do that and power’s magnification can favour disciplined boldness rather than costly bravado. Otherwise, the wins may be big, but the losses will be bigger.
Nik Kinley is a London-based leadership consultant, assessor and coach with 40 years’ experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies. An award-winning author, he has written eight books, the latest of which is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It, available now.
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