What I'm Sitting With

As you may know, I’ve been preparing for a DisruptHR talk (this week! Thursday!), and while it has disrupted (ha) my content plans a bit, it’s also been filtering some things to the surface.

A few months ago, I sat down with one of the event organizers. She told me the event would be loosely themed around getting HR into a more strategic position. I haven’t worked in HR, per se, but I do have a lot of experience being in a supportive function. The first thing that came to mind was that we can’t talk about being “more strategic” without addressing power dynamics.

I know all too well how out of reach strategy feels when you don’t have access, opportunity for greater impact, or when the system is optimized for something else entirely. Power has an emotional texture to it, and these days, it feels almost inescapable.

It was, perhaps, a topic a long time in the making. Two years ago, I attended a group call called “Dialogic Drinks.” It was one of those things I somehow stumbled into, but we were talking about vertical development when someone in my small group brought up power. He lived outside the U.S. and was able to see things from a different perspective. At one point, he said something like, “Americans have this obsession with power, but all the wrong kinds of power.”

I haven’t been able to unsee it since.

At the time, it felt revelatory. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that even before I had language for power dynamics, I had certainly felt them.

The other day, I made the rather bold declaration that power dynamics are at play in every interaction, and I’ve been trying to prove myself wrong ever since. It doesn’t feel good when someone pulls rank. It also doesn’t feel good when someone acquiesces, pot-stirs, or applies passive-aggressive emotional pressure. Which has me wondering: are there forms of power that don’t feel awful?

My talk focuses on three types of organizational power: power over, power under, and power with. I suspect that most of them are probably at play all the time. They don’t predictably follow the org chart, and societal power dynamics seep into organizational ones, which makes all of this far more layered than we tend to acknowledge.

Where we sit in an organization shapes both how empowered we feel and how we empower others. Most of the time, my desire is to lessen the power differential between myself and the person I’m talking to, but doing that well requires noticing where power exists and how it’s showing up.

Which is especially tricky, because two people can experience the same exchange and both walk away feeling disempowered.

So lately, I’ve found myself pondering: what helps people feel seen, capable, informed, trusted, and able to affect the outcome of what’s happening around them? The more I think about it, the more I suspect that healthy power dynamics are less about flattening hierarchy and more about increasing mutual agency alongside a sense of reciprocal care.

Even outside the organizational context, I can’t help but think that this elusive “power with” requires us to loosen our grip on comparison: who is smarter, more accomplished, more important, more worthy of being heard. Maybe this kind of power begins the moment we stop trying to win the interaction and start staying in it long enough to understand how another person sees the world.

If that’s true, then maybe the real “strategic” move is not tied to power over people, but the ability to create enough trust, perspective, and shared understanding for people to move forward together.

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I’ll be speaking at the upcoming DisruptHR Baltimore on May 28, where I’ll be exploring these ideas around power dynamics, strategy, and “power with” leadership a bit further.
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DisruptHR events are designed to spark bold conversations around the future of work, leadership, and organizational culture, and I’m excited to be part of this one!
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If you’d like to attend, you can RSVP here. And if cost is a concern, please feel free to reach out — I’d be happy to register you as my guest.

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(You can hit reply if you want to unpack it—I read every message—or you can set up a time to connect with me here.)

P.S. A lot of what I explore in these newsletters comes back to the leadership patterns that emerge under pressure. The way you lead in those moments isn’t random. If you’re curious which pattern you tend to default to, you can take the diagnostic here.