My treasured colleague Sylvia is leaving. Over the past few months, she’s been through more than just about anyone could be expected to handle. It’s a big blow to the organization: Sylvia is universally respected and admired. Her direct report, Liz, is particularly upset about her departure, losing not only an exceptionally talented colleague, but also a mentor and confidant.

As Sylvia’s supervisor, I feel like I could and should have done more to keep this from happening. But I didn’t, and now all of us, including Liz and I, have to find a way forward — even as I suspect that Liz is probably feeling some resentment towards me.

A group of us meets for a first conversation on how to divvy up Sylvia’s tasks. Sylvia had many responsibilities, so we have a lot of ground to cover. As we dig into the list, some tasks go to Liz, some to another colleague, and some to me. I know that Liz and the other colleague are both already overworked, so I do what I can to take on tasks I know I can do.

As my list grows, out of nowhere Liz interjects, with a severe tone: “We need to be sure to hold you accountable for doing your part.”

BAM! A punch to the gut. I’m reeling. My brain's gone haywire and I don't know what to do with the noise — like a bunch of radio stations vying for my attention. The loudest channel goes like this: “Who do you think you are, talking to me that way? Do you know who I am?”

I've got the power

Humans have a power problem. Years of studies have shown that acquiring power leads us to think and act in ways that harm others — individuals, teams, and entire organizations. We become overconfident, more focused on ourselves, and less empathetic toward others. We interrupt others more, stop listening to their ideas and opinions, and crave public recognition of our greatness — almost always without realizing we’re doing it. The effects on our colleagues include lower trust and morale, reduced productivity, and higher employee turnover — which themselves are just symptoms of an overall decrease in human well-being.

The feminist poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, “All privilege is ignorant at the core.” It’s a beautiful, simple, and compelling insight: to the extent that we have privilege, we don’t see it or how it operates through us in our interactions with others. Conversely, to the extent that we lack privilege, we see it and its effects everywhere.

Since privilege is a specific form of power, I’d like to suggest a friendly amendment to Rich’s quote: All power is ignorant at the core. We can’t rely on ourselves and our good intentions to understand how our power operates in the world. We can’t just assume that we will use our power in ways that are maximally beneficial. There’s just too much data that shows this to be false.

The good news is that there’s a lot that we can do. Ignorance has an antidote: awareness. We need to constantly ask, and re-ask, how our power affects our understanding of ourselves and of those around us. We need to deepen our empathy towards the lived experiences of others, and welcome the lessons that come with this empathy. And we need to recognize that our understanding will never be complete, so we must keep seeking.

A bridge to somewhere?

In the world of intercultural consulting, we often use the “self-other-bridge” model as a guiding framework. It’s short for “self-awareness,” “other-awareness,” and “bridging.”

Let’s say I’m assigned to a new project team. Let’s also say that I’m the sort of person who likes to jump in and try things, get a sense of what works and doesn’t work, make changes, and try again. There’s this other person on the team — let’s call them Riley — who prefers to plan before acting. Without self-awareness or other-awareness, I might automatically see Riley as a wet blanket, or a bubble-burster, keeping our team from moving forward. Riley might see me as reckless, or even dangerous, leading our team off a cliff. Chances are we’ll butt heads as we try and accomplish our project tasks.

On the other hand, what if I understood that I have something called a “risk orientation,” and that Riley has a “certainty orientation”? And what if Riley also understands this? Instead of seeing the other person as having some sort of character flaw, Riley and I both understand that each of us simply has a different preference for how to approach a new project. That’s the awareness piece.

As crucial as awareness is, it’s not enough. We need to change what we do. Without meaningful action, sustained over time, all the awareness in the world won’t have an impact. Bridging happens when one or both of us changes our behavior towards the other’s preferences. For instance, I might agree to do some initial planning; Riley might agree to keep the plan relatively simple. We could find some sort of happy medium. We’re bridging to each other.

Happy ending, right? Sure, if we can pull it off. The problem is that this scenario leaves out the power dynamics between Riley and me. Does one of us have more organizational authority than the other? Or informal influence? Does one of us belong to one or more empowered or dominant groups, while the other belongs to one or more marginalized groups?

Power is felt and understood even when it’s not named. If Riley and I go along without any explicit discussion or acknowledgement of our power dynamics, then whichever of us feels they have less power is going to do most or all of the bridging. This is the default human condition: more power = less awareness and less bridging; less power = more awareness and more bridging.

We have to flip this dynamic, so that the more power we have, the more bridging we do. But it’s nearly impossible if we don’t first deal with that voice shouting: “Do you know who I am?”

Thoughts are...thoughts

We love to imagine ourselves as the hero of whatever story we’re telling. We like — maybe even need — to think of ourselves as good people. The problem is, people are messy. We are all people, and therefore we are all messy. This is a simple truth; it’s not an easy truth.

I can’t deny what I heard in my mind that day when Liz said what she said to me. It was there. It was real. In that moment, that voice told me I was better than Liz. That voice told me she did not have a right to say what she said. That voice told me that I was up on a pedestal, entitled to something Liz was not. Does that make me a “bad person”?

It’s a useless question.

First, it’s binary. No one is purely “good” or “bad.”

Second, what defines how “good” or “bad” someone is? Think about someone you see as a “good person.” Do you have any idea at all what they’re actually thinking at any given moment? Of course not. You judge their “goodness” based on their actions.

To label someone as “good” or “bad” based solely on their in-the-moment thoughts is preposterous. Turning again to my reaction to Liz: whatever you might want to call that nasty voice in my head, it just was. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less. What matters is what we do in response to our thoughts.

At least in the U.S., we’re so caught up in the perceived need to be a “good person” that we can’t even admit how nasty some of our thoughts can be. We might feel shame, guilt, fear, or a host of other emotions. Those emotions keep us from taking even the first, most basic step toward dealing with our thoughts: acknowledging their existence.

This all leads me to one conclusion: we have no alternative but to flex the muscle of seeing ourselves from outside of ourselves. We need to learn how to study our own patterns of thinking just as they are, not as we wish they were. I didn’t make this up; it’s a central tenet of many meditative spiritual traditions: thoughts just are. The better we get at seeing them as just thoughts, the less we will be ruled by them, and the more agency we will have in choosing, with intentionality, if and how to act in response to them.

In the case of Liz, it took everything I could muster in the moment, not only not to say anything, but to try not to let my dismay show at all. I’d had enough years of experience as a leader to have trained myself to maintain posture and facial expressions when upset, especially in the presence of colleagues with less power. I paused for a bit, said something like, “Sure, okay,” and then we continued through the list. Over the coming weeks and months, Liz and I were able to build a relationship of mutual trust as we gradually recovered from the organizational traumas that had led to Sylvia’s departure.

Out of the shadows

The skill of recognizing and naming our most unsavory thoughts — especially as they relate to power — and choosing not to act on them is something we don’t talk about enough. We’re not built for it. For evolutionary reasons, we’re wired to react to the world in split-second fashion, especially when we feel threatened. The line from perceived threat to amygdala-activation to nasty thought to nasty action is straight and fast. As long as we’re limited in this way, more often than not we will act before we have even the faintest idea what thoughts led to the action.

Power amplifies the problem. The more power we have, the more we feel entitled to our perceptions, and the easier it is to dismiss others’ perceptions. The more power we have, the more harm we do when we act on our self-justified perceptions. The more power we have, the harder it is for others to bring to our attention the ways in which our perceptions may be inaccurate or incomplete, and the ways in which our actions cause harm.

It all points back to the same thing: directing our attention to what's happening in our own minds, and dealing with it honestly, so that we can exercise agency in the actions we take, rather than being at the whim of our power-hungry unconscious minds.

Systems and humans

What role do systems play in all of this? Approaches to power that focus on individual awareness and action — sometimes referred to as “changing hearts and minds” — are often criticized for being ineffective in the long run. Individuals come and go; systems remain. Besides, individual agency can only go so far if the systems surrounding the individuals don’t support the desired forms of change.

This is all true. It’s also incomplete. If we change laws and systems, but we haven’t done the hard, inner work of understanding, as deeply as we can, why the changes to laws and systems are needed, then how lasting can the change be?

In 2020, Krista Tippett interviewed racial awareness pioneer Resmaa Menakem for her podcast, “On Being.” The conversation turned to the ways in which the 1960s civil rights movement came up short of many of its loftier goals, despite its successes. Tippett said: “I felt like we changed the laws, but we didn’t change ourselves.” I’m suggesting that we need to approach all of these vital questions around inclusion, equity, and belonging not solely from the standpoint of systems, but also through “changing ourselves.” This creates a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: deepened awareness + tools for action leads to the use of agency to change systems; changes to systems are supported by deepened awareness + tools for action, leading to further changes in systems.

By this model, every single human interaction is a chance to make a difference. Each time we’re with someone, we can recommit to tuning into our thought streams and learning more about how our own minds operate. We can listen to others from our hearts, taking in their lived experiences directly, quieting our judging minds. And we can take one more step towards a world in which we all feel like we belong fully and completely, just as we are, in this big tribe called humanity.