Leadership changes people in many ways.

It changes the decisions they are trusted to make, the influence they have over others and the responsibilities they carry. What I have come to realise throughout my career, however, is that power can also change something far more subtle. It can change what people no longer feel responsible for.

Early in our careers, accountability is unavoidable. We prepare because we know we will be questioned, we continually learn because gaps in our knowledge are quickly exposed and we remain curious because our credibility depends on it. Our ideas are challenged, our recommendations are scrutinised and our understanding is tested almost every day.

Ironically, those pressures can begin to disappear as people move into positions of authority.

The higher someone rises within an organisation, the fewer people are willing to challenge them. Over time, that can reduce the pressure to prepare, to learn and to remain intellectually curious. Without realising it, leaders can begin relying on their position to compensate for the very habits that helped them earn that position in the first place.

That, to me, is the dangerous comfort of power.

One of my earliest experiences of this came while working for a government corporation, where part of my role involved taking minutes during council meetings. Sitting quietly in those meetings gave me an unusual perspective because I was able to observe senior decision-makers without participating in the discussions myself.

I remember meetings where appointed councillors would spend hours asking questions that had already been answered or debating relatively straightforward issues that contributed very little to moving the discussion forward. Whether intentional or not, their position gave them the ability to consume everyone else's time with very little consequence. Very few people challenged them and the meeting simply continued.

At the time, I assumed that behaviour was unique to that environment.

Years later, after moving into the corporate world, I encountered the same pattern in a completely different form. As someone responsible for digital marketing, I regularly found myself explaining digital concepts to senior leaders. I never expected them to become specialists in my field, nor should they have been. Explaining unfamiliar subjects is part of every specialist's role.

What surprised me was how often the same conversations happened.

The answers had not changed.

The resources already existed.

The explanations had already been provided.

Yet because digital marketing sat outside their immediate priorities, there was very little incentive to invest time in truly understanding it. Whenever the topic resurfaced, they simply asked again.

That experience made me realise that the issue was not intelligence. It was consequence.

Power had become armour against accountability.

Leadership naturally provides access to specialists, analysts, advisors and subject matter experts. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, great organisations depend on people with different areas of expertise working together.

The danger begins when access to expertise becomes a substitute for developing enough understanding to make informed decisions.

Over time, leaders can begin outsourcing more than work; they begin outsourcing understanding itself. Someone prepares the presentation, someone interprets the data, someone explains the technology, someone summarises the report and someone answers the difficult questions. Before long, it becomes possible to occupy a position of significant authority while becoming increasingly disconnected from the knowledge required to lead effectively.

The irony is that the people making the most important decisions often experience the least pressure to continue learning. That should concern every organisation because leadership is not simply about making decisions. It is about making informed decisions.

The best leaders I have worked with have never used their position as a shield. They asked questions because they genuinely wanted to understand, not because they expected someone else to think on their behalf. They welcomed challenge because they recognised that disagreement improves judgement and they invested time in understanding unfamiliar subjects even when they could easily have delegated that responsibility to someone else.

There is an important difference between relying on experts because they possess deeper knowledge than you and relying on experts because you never felt the need to learn in the first place.

One reflects humility. The other reflects complacency.

Power should never become armour against accountability.

It should never protect leaders from preparation, learning, challenge or intellectual accountability. If anything, the higher we rise, the greater our responsibility becomes to remain informed, curious and willing to have our thinking tested.

The greatest danger of power is not that it changes how other people treat us.

It is that, if we are not careful, it changes what we believe we no longer need to do.

Eventually, our position begins to protect us from the very behaviours that earned us that position in the first place.

That is the dangerous comfort of power.

By Vishal Ramlal MISM, CDMP

Keywords: Business Strategy, Leadership, Management

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