I've coached hundreds of leaders over the years, and there's one derailer that shows up almost universally, no matter the industry or title: People confuse power with leadership.
Power is control and authority over a person or a situation. Sometimes you need it. If you're accountable for an outcome, there are moments where a top-down call is the right call. But making controlling decisions is not the same as leading.
Leadership is something you build through credibility, integrity, and relationships. Real leaders know when power is necessary and treat it as a last resort. Power should never be a default setting, you’ll run out of trust in your bucket really fast.
I see this confusion show up most often in leaders who built their whole identity around being the one who handles it. “The fixer.” That instinct is valuable in the right situations, and it's probably earned the “fixers” a lot of trust and responsibility. But when being useful becomes the only setting, it's easy to start mistaking control for leadership, because control feels like proof that you're still needed.
At Bold Font, we define leadership as using your intent and your impact in service of something beyond yourself. A few of the behaviors we coach toward:
Treating power as a tool, not an identity
Listening to understand, not just to respond
Seeing the people around you as capable, able, and powerful on their own
Holding empathy and accountability at the same time
Committing to other people's growth, even when it doesn't benefit you directly
Compare that to what it looks like when someone holds power but hasn't done the personal work to lead:
Taking credit for other people's work
Deflecting blame when things go wrong
Treating every decision through a "what's in it for me" filter
Building empires instead of building people
Perhaps this resonates, and you’re “the Fixer” who has spent years being rewarded for having the answer and fixing the problem. It makes sense that control starts to feel like the job. Most leaders aren't operating from a place of bad intent; it’s just hard to change when you’ve spent years doing it a certain way.
But leadership and control aren't the same skill. The leaders who figure that out early get further, with people who actually want to follow them instead of people who just comply.
Where to start changing your perspective
Pay attention to how your relationship with power shifts depending on the role you're in: Boss. Parent. Spouse. Friend.
Where do you default to control?
Where do you feel powerless?
Where do you actually share power well?
You don't need a perfect answer. You just need to start noticing.
In fact, I've had Aaron Tippin's "You've Got to Stand for Something" on repeat this week. The song fits here perfectly, with its line about never compromising what's right, even when the easier path is right there.
That's the whole tension of integrity-based leadership in one sentence. You can hold power and still choose not to use it, and that choice is where leadership actually starts.
Talk soon,
Lauran Arledge
Founder, Bold Font
P.S. Untangling power from leadership is exactly the kind of work we do inside Leader as Coach. Nine months, six people, one hour a week.
