Everyone wants power. The influence, the resources, the status, the ability to shape outcomes and make things happen—these are compelling rewards. But Jeffrey Pfeffer’s research at Stanford Graduate School of Business, documented in “Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t,” reveals an uncomfortable reality that most leadership books ignore: power comes with substantial costs that many people aren’t willing to pay.
Understanding these costs is essential for two reasons. First, you need to decide whether you’re willing to make the trade-offs required to acquire and maintain power. Second, if you do pursue power, you need to be aware of the pitfalls so you can protect yourself from the corrupting influences that accompany positions of authority.
Cost One: The Visibility That Makes You a Target
The higher you rise, the more visible you become—and the more vulnerable. When you’re in a position of power, your mistakes are magnified, your weaknesses are scrutinized, and your every move is watched by people who may benefit from your downfall. This visibility is both an advantage and a liability.
CEO turnover rates have increased substantially over recent decades. The people at the top face intense scrutiny from boards, investors, employees, regulators, and the media. A single misstep can end a career that took decades to build. The pressure is relentless, and the margin for error is thin.
This visibility also means that powerful people become lightning rods for criticism. When organizations face problems, those at the top are blamed regardless of whether they actually caused the issues. Leaders inherit problems created by their predecessors but face consequences as if they were responsible. The visibility of power makes you an easy target for those looking to assign blame.
Cost Two: The Time and Energy Demands
Power is demanding. Getting to positions of power requires extraordinary time and energy, and maintaining those positions requires even more. Frank Stanton, president of CBS and a huge influence in the news and broadcasting world, worked prodigious hours including on the weekend and typically got five hours of sleep a night. Rudy Crew, the school system leader, is an insomniac, often up at three in the morning. He was typically the first person to arrive in the New York City chancellor’s office.
Pfeffer notes that he knows of almost no powerful people who do not have boundless energy. This isn’t coincidence—building and maintaining power requires sustained effort that most people are unwilling or unable to provide. You’re always on. You’re always networking. You’re always working. The demands never stop.
Nick Binkley rose through the ranks at Security Pacific Bank, eventually becoming vice chairman responsible for all nonbanking subsidiaries. When Bank of America purchased Security Pacific, Binkley took early retirement at 50. As he reflected on his career, he commented that he loved many aspects of his work but never really had time to pursue his musical interests. He had been good at his financial career, but he was never truly committed to it in the way he was to music. The price of his success in finance was foregoing what he loved most.
Binkley’s experience illustrates a fundamental trade-off: the pursuit of power often means sacrificing other interests and passions. The time and energy required to climb organizational hierarchies leave little room for hobbies, creative pursuits, or simply relaxing. Many people reach high positions only to realize they’ve spent decades doing things they never truly cared about, sacrificing what mattered most for what they thought they should pursue.
Cost Three: Family and Personal Life Sacrifices
Jack Valenti ran the Motion Picture Association of America for 38 years. Reflecting on his career, Valenti expressed his concern that his ambition had been a “dark thread” throughout his life that had taken him away from his family. He worried, even while keeping a busy schedule into his eighties, that he had not spent enough time with his children. Valenti had a house in Washington and an apartment in Los Angeles. His wife had not wanted to move to California, and the arrangement worked well given his job—but it also meant significant time apart.
Getting and keeping power takes time away from friends and family. This is a price that some people are willing to pay, but it is an inevitable cost of pursuing powerful, high-status positions that require time, energy, and focus for success.
Research consistently shows that being married and having children has either no effect or a positive effect on men’s careers, while most studies show a negative impact on the careers of women from being married and having children. Studies of graduates of leading professional school programs in law, medicine, and particularly business document that most women 15 years after graduation have dropped out of the labor force, at least temporarily, at some point in their work lives.
The trade-offs between having a successful career and a family are real, and social policies in most industrialized countries don’t provide much help navigating this situation. Put simply, you can’t have it all, and the quest for power entails trade-offs, including in one’s personal life. Men also confront the choice of how to spend their time—there are only 24 hours in a day. Being successful exacts a price for men also.
Cost Four: Trust Dilemmas and Constant Vigilance
Here’s a simple truth: the higher you rise and the more powerful the position you occupy, the greater the number of people who will want your job. Consequently, holding a position of great power creates a problem—who do you trust? Some people will be seeking to create an opportunity for themselves through your downfall, but they won’t be forthcoming about what they are doing. Some people will be trying to curry favor with you by telling you what they think you want to hear so you will like them and help them advance. And some people will be doing both.
Gary Loveman, former Harvard Business School professor and CEO of Harrah’s Entertainment, commented that the higher you rise in an organization, the more people are going to tell you that you are right. This leads to an absence of critical thought and makes it difficult for senior leaders to get the truth—a problem both for the company and its leaders, as you can’t address problems if you don’t know about them.
Loveman tried to overcome this problem by regularly and publicly admitting the mistakes he made so that others would be encouraged to admit where they had messed up too. He placed a lot of emphasis on the process by which decisions got made—particularly, the use of data and analytics—and almost no emphasis on who was making the decision.
No one in a position of power is completely immune from palace revolts. Patricia Seeman, a Swiss executive coach and adviser to numerous high-ranking executives, particularly in the financial services industry, told Pfeffer that in the typical senior management team, all the people reporting to the CEO believe they could hold the CEO position, many think they could do better than the incumbent, and most direct reports aspire to their boss’s job.
Ross Johnson, formerly CEO of Nabisco, excelled at maneuvering himself into CEO jobs and eliminating rivals who naively trusted him. When Johnson engineered the merger of Standard Brands into Nabisco, he was ostensibly in the number two role and faced numerous internal rivals. Johnson would support rivals, help them build their empires, and then turn around and use that against them to have them removed. He would flatter CEOs, ensure buildings were named after them, and gradually push them aside until he held the top position himself.
When you are in power, you should probably trust no single person in your organization too much, unless you are certain of their loyalty and that they are not after your job. The constant vigilance required by those in power—to ensure they are hearing the truth and to maintain their position vis-à-vis rivals—is yet another cost of occupying a job that many others want.
Cost Five: Power as an Addictive Drug
Research in social psychology has clearly documented that power and status affect the power holder. Having power diminishes the extent to which people notice others’ suffering or care about what they do to others. Power increases people’s willingness to express their true feelings, which may include anger, and diminishes social and behavioral constraints that might limit what people do to obtain their goals.
Such behavior is a logical consequence of what happens to people in power. The obsequious and less powerful flatter the powerful to remain on their good side. Those with power have their wishes and requests granted. They get used to getting their way and being treated as if they are special. Although the powerful may be conscious that the special treatment comes from the position they occupy and the resources they control, over time these thoughts fade.
As one friend who works at a senior position in British Petroleum and has observed its CEOs at close range told Pfeffer, “No matter what the original intentions and aspiration, eventually power goes to everyone’s head.”
Studies of the effects of power on the power holder consistently find that power produces overconfidence and risk taking, insensitivity to others, stereotyping, and a tendency to see other people as a means to the power holder’s gratification. David Kipnis put research participants in a simulated work situation with a subordinate. Some people in the managerial role had little formal control over resources, while others were given the power to reward and punish those working for them.
The more control participants had over levers of power such as pay increases or decreases, the more attempts they made to influence their subordinates. Moreover, those with more power came to see their subordinates’ job performance as resulting from their control and less from the efforts or motivation of those they were supervising. Because the supervisors with power saw themselves as superior to those they were supervising, they evidenced less desire to spend time with their subordinates and wanted to distance themselves from those less powerful—even though who was a supervisor and how much power that person had was randomly determined and temporary.
One lesson from the growing number of studies on the effects of power is how little it takes to get people into a power mind-set where they engage in all kinds of disrespectful and rude behavior. In the Berkeley cookie study, groups of three strangers discussed a boring list of social issues for 30 minutes. One member of the group was randomly chosen to fill the role of assigning experimental points to the other two. When the experimenter arrived with a plate of cookies, each person naturally took one. The individual randomly assigned to give points to the other two was more likely to take a second cookie, more likely to chew with his mouth open, and more likely to scatter crumbs on his face and the table.
Protecting Yourself From Power’s Corrupting Influence
Overconfidence and insensitivity lead to losing power, as people become so full of themselves that they fail to attend to the needs of those whose enmity can cause them problems. Conversely, not letting power go to your head and acting as if you were all-powerful can help you maintain your position.
Safra Catz came to Oracle in 1999 with an undefined role; today she is president of the large software company. Oracle has regularly gone through high-profile senior leaders. The company seems to particularly reject senior executives whose profiles get too big. Catz avoids publicity and anything that might upstage Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison. Although she is rich and powerful, she has always known her place. Initially, she didn’t even have an office, working instead at a round table near Ellison’s.
Patricia Seeman, a consultant and executive coach to senior Swiss executives, says that the best way to hold on to your position is to maintain your perspective and balance. She commented that “unless you understand yourself pretty well, you’re going to lose control of yourself.” Seeman shared that a former chairman of Swiss Re had this advice for maintaining a sense of perspective about oneself: “What you have to do is every now and then expose yourself to a social circle that really doesn’t care about your position.” This senior leader would go back to his primary school, somewhere in a village in the Alps—to the people to whom he was just the same person he was when he was seven years old.
Unfortunately, people who arrive at high-level positions with lots of power often do not like to be reminded of what and who they once were and how far they have come. They will sometimes divorce the spouses who were there at the beginning of their careers. They will leave behind associates who can remind them of the time when they did not have so much power. To the extent that you can resist such tendencies and the behavioral changes that come with power, you are more likely to keep your influence.
Making the Decision With Eyes Open
The costs of power are real and substantial. Before pursuing positions of great authority and influence, you need to honestly assess whether you’re willing to pay the price. Can you handle the constant visibility and scrutiny? Are you willing to invest the extraordinary time and energy required? Will you sacrifice personal relationships and interests? Can you navigate the trust dilemmas and maintain constant vigilance? And perhaps most importantly, can you hold on to your humanity and perspective when power begins to corrupt?
These aren’t rhetorical questions—they’re practical considerations that will determine whether the pursuit of power brings satisfaction or regret. As Pfeffer’s research makes clear, power comes with substantial costs. The successful acquisition and maintenance of power requires understanding these costs and deciding consciously whether the benefits justify the sacrifices. Only then can you pursue power with full awareness of what you’re signing up for and what you’ll need to give up along the way.