POWER can cause DRAIN BAMAGE!

Leaders lose mental capacities -

most notably the ability
to read other people

the skill responsible for their rise to power

in the first place.

POWER can intoxicate, corrupt, even made Henry Kissinger believe he was sexually magnetic.

Science now says it can cause 
brain damage! 

 

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, 

when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”

 Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities

 we needed to gain it in the first place. 

WORSE:

 Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. 

  Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate.

 It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing 

and provides a window into where they are coming from. 

Powerful people stop simulating the experience of others leading to an “empathy deficit.”

Leaders need to stay grounded and to do that they need someone to hold up a mirror occasionally.

 For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write:

“My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; 

you are not as kind as you used to be.” 

Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, 

the letter was not a complaint but an alert: 

Someone had confided to her, she wrote, 

that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that 

“no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.” 

HUBRIS SYNDROME

A disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, 

held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.

Its 14 clinical features include: 

Manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. 

Do you see any of those symptoms 

in the current leaders 

on the world stage? 

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?