280: Are you poisoned by power?

Dear friends

Our last two letters, Self-Doubt and Success, and Excellence and Leadership, went longer than usual, so this week’s letter is briefer.

/strategy

Last week’s letter gave us four catalytic leadership habits courtesy of strategy guru Jim Collins. If Collins gives us the what, Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao give us the why.

In their great book, The Friction Project, they caution us that the more powerful we are relative to our customers and colleagues the more likely we are to develop ‘power poisoning’ symptoms. They identify three:

• Privilege spares you from the hassles, humiliations, and barriers heaped on everyone else
• The belief that, because you are powerful and a connected insider, you automatically know everything that matters about your organization.
• Selfishness: we become unconscious of the burdens we inflict on others with our requests.

If you’re getting a little upset with me reading that, if you’re thinking “I KNOW, Karl is not talking about me” or “Karl better not be talking about me”, pause – that upset is quite probably a clue.

The simple, sad truth is that unless we’re intentional, we all run the risk of power poisoning and simultaneously being blind to the fact that we’re infected. We only get to know we’re infected when it’s too late – when that key staff member resigns, when engagement levels drop and profit follows.

It’s why Collins’ habits are so powerful – they’re a vaccine to the organisational effects of human foibles. We all need them.

(You’ll find more from Sutton and Rao here).

//self
I wanted to share Mauritian author Priya Hein’s just-published essay, A Studio of One’s Own, for a simple reason: in 2024, she participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) Fall Residency and loved the experience.

In late 2025, Hein’s family’s tenant moved out of the studio apartment on their property, and she was struck by the possibility of using the space to create a Mauritian writer’s residency.

She consulted her family; they agreed. She reached out to her literary network; they agreed. Six weeks later, she launched The Tamarin Writing Residency.

There’s so much in her story: the power of being alive to the possibility of contribution and creating the world you want to see; how experience gives us new sight; of seeing the assets we have with refreshed eyes and realising we can them to new ends; how breaking old patterns creates new possibilities, and action creates yet another cycle of possibility.  

I was going to leave it there – a case study capsule – but Hein’s words are too beautiful not to share, “But why did I want to create a writing residency? The thing that I kept going back to is how in my darkest moments, it is always writing that I turn to. Through writing, I try to make sense of the deeply fragmented world we live in and explore what it is to be human. The possibility offered by a blank page, to write our own narratives, in our own language and space, as a form of resistance, becomes a necessity. We do not need permission to write, to question and to challenge institutional power and literary exclusion.”

You might not be an author, but you can benefit from writing and telling your story, both as it is and what you may want it to be.

From time to time, we all find ourselves telling stories about ourselves that don’t serve us. When you find yourself doing so, stop and ask, “What other story could I tell?” You’ll be amazed at its power.

///soul
Poet Marianne Moore once observed, “Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others”, creating a useful tension with Sutton and Rao.

Power holds the potential for unconscious selfishness and, in the paradox of being human, the first step to meaningful impact for others is giving ourselves the attention, care and compassion we want them to experience.

All the best

Karl

PS. Much of my coaching work begins exactly here — what are the stories we tell about ourselves and others? When we lose contact with our stories, we become listless; we don’t know what we’re doing and why. When the situation changes, and we haven’t adapted our story, we find ourselves bumping our heads. When we have forgotten our story, our actions are not aligned and intentional; momentum eludes us. The work I do with senior leaders combines the archaeological work of (re)discovering one’s story, the architectural work of designing a future and strategic rigour to ask and answer, “What does this mean in organisations of immense complexity?” If that sounds like a conversation worth having, I’m at coaching@karlgostner.com, and you can learn more here.