The Outward Signs vs. the Reality of Power
Power has always fascinated us, possibly because we have become very good at recognizing its outward signs. We associate it with position, influence, wealth, access, and the authority to make decisions that affect other people. Every profession develops its own vocabulary for it. In law, seniority, reputation, designation and the size of one’s practice can all signal where a person stands in the hierarchy. Spend enough time in the profession, however, and you begin to notice that the outward appearance of power and its actual exercise are two quite different things.
I have seen people with considerable authority who need everyone around them to remain conscious of it, and others whose influence is evident without any such effort. The distinction has become more interesting to me as I have grown older in the profession, particularly because seniority eventually forces you to confront a question that is rarely asked when you are busy acquiring it: once you have power, what exactly are you going to do with it?
Knowledge, Judgment, and the Use of Authority
For me, its most enduring source has always been knowledge. Law is particularly unforgiving of the assumption that designation can substitute for substance. You may occupy the most senior chair in the room, but if someone else has understood the facts better, studied the documents more carefully, or identified the legal issue everyone else has missed, the hierarchy can become irrelevant rather quickly. Knowledge creates a confidence that does not require much performance, which may explain why some of the most formidable professionals I have encountered have also been among the least interested in demonstrating how formidable they are
Knowledge, however, creates its own imbalance. A person who has practiced for thirty years will naturally know more than someone who has practiced for five. There is no particular achievement in proving this to the younger person. The more interesting question is what the senior professional chooses to do with the advantage. Expertise can expose another person’s inexperience, or it can accelerate their understanding. Both demonstrate knowledge, but only one gives that knowledge a purpose beyond the individual who possesses it.
Most professionals can probably remember an early encounter with someone senior who appeared to take unusual pleasure in pointing out what they did not know. The legal profession has certainly never been entirely free of this tradition. There was once an assumption that being intimidated by one’s seniors was almost part of the training. One survived the experience and was expected, in due course, to inflict a respectable version of it on the next generation. I am not convinced that professional excellence has ever depended upon maintaining this inheritance.
Seniority inevitably changes the weight of one’s words. A correction from a colleague and the same correction from the managing partner may contain identical words and have completely different effects. A casual observation from someone in authority can stay with a young professional long after the person who made it has forgotten the conversation. This makes how authority is exercised important. Experience should sharpen our judgment about people as much as it sharpens our judgment about work.
Leadership Beyond Ego: Building Others
This is also where I think arrogance is frequently mistaken for power. We have all encountered the executive who acquires a title and appears simultaneously to lose the ability to say please, or the senior professional for whom disagreement becomes increasingly indistinguishable from insubordination. These behaviors may establish hierarchy very efficiently, but they reveal little about leadership. If authority has to be reinforced by making another person conscious of their lesser status, the authority itself begins to look surprisingly fragile.
The better use of seniority is to create capability around oneself. In professional practice, this means letting younger colleagues develop judgment rather than merely teaching them to follow instructions. It requires giving people enough responsibility to discover what they can handle, while remaining available when experience is genuinely required. Senior professionals are understandably tempted to stay involved in every important decision, especially when years of experience mean they can often arrive at an answer more quickly. Yet an organization in which every difficult question must travel to the same desk has not necessarily created strong leadership. It may simply have created an impressive bottleneck.
The Quiet Strengths: Listening, Grace, and Dignity
I have found that one of the harder adjustments that comes with seniority is learning to listen differently. Lawyers are trained to speak, argue, persuade, and advise, so that we can become rather attached to the sound of a well-constructed position. Listening requires a different discipline. A junior colleague may have noticed a detail that experience has caused us to overlook. A client may be describing one problem while actually being concerned about another. Someone opposing our view may, inconveniently, have a valid point. None of these possibilities diminishes authority. They simply improve the information on which we exercise it.
The difficulty is that power can gradually insulate people from precisely this kind of candor. As people become more senior, those around them often become more careful. Disagreement is softened, uncomfortable information is edited, and bad news acquires an inexplicable tendency to arrive late. A leader who interprets agreement as proof of good leadership can therefore find themself in the pleasant but dangerous position of being surrounded by people who have learned what is safe to say. Creating an environment in which someone can disagree without fearing the consequences is not a surrender of authority; it is one way authority becomes better informed.
Grace and dignity matter for much the same reason. They are often treated as personal virtues, but I regard them as practical professional qualities. There will inevitably be situations in which a person in authority must reject an idea, correct a mistake, take an unpopular decision, or hold someone accountable. None of these requires humiliation. Firmness and courtesy are perfectly capable of occupying the same sentence. The ability to preserve another person’s dignity while exercising one’s own authority is particularly important when the balance of power is unequal.
“Grace does not weaken power, nor does dignity make a leader less decisive. If anything, they show that the person exercising authority is secure enough not to turn every interaction into proof of where they stand.”
The Revealing Nature of Power in Unequal Relationships
The true character of power is often clearest in such unequal relationships. It is easy to be gracious to someone whose approval, business, or influence matters to us. How a person treats someone who offers no obvious advantage is far more revealing. Offices offer ample opportunity to observe this, from interactions with the most junior employee to how mistakes are handled when there is no reputational benefit in being magnanimous. Power has the useful habit of revealing qualities that ambition can temporarily conceal.
Composure is part of the same equation. Years of practice do not remove difficult people, difficult negotiations, or difficult days; they should, however, improve our ability to decide which situations deserve a reaction. Ego tends to regard every challenge as something that must be answered. Judgment is more selective. The ability to disagree without becoming disagreeable, to hear criticism without immediately reaching for rank, and to change one’s position when the facts warrant it are not signs that authority has weakened. They suggest that it has become secure enough not to require constant defense.
None of this argues against hierarchy. Organizations require clear authority, and leadership involves making decisions that are not always popular. Experience deserves respect, expertise has value, and accountability ultimately has to reside somewhere. The issue is not whether power should exist, but whether having it changes how we regard those who have less of it.
Power as Capacity, Not Status
After several decades in the legal profession, I have become less interested in power as status and more interested in power as capacity: the capacity to know enough to make sound decisions, to build people rather than diminish them, to remain open to a better argument, and to exercise authority without requiring arrogance, ego, or superiority to support it.
Grace does not weaken power, nor does dignity make a leader less decisive. If anything, they show that the person exercising authority is secure enough not to turn every interaction into proof of where they stand.
A title tells the world what authority has been given to us. The more consequential question is what happens to other people when we use it.