Proximity To Power And The Culture It Creates

Have you ever watched someone completely transform the moment power walked into the room?

In this episode of Leadership After 5, Kim opens with a scene from a church hallway that never left her, and unpacks what it revealed about one of the most quietly destructive dynamics in organizational life. Proximity to power.

From DC events to Miranda Priestly, Kim traces how the instinct to perform for power shows up everywhere, and what happens to an organization when that performance becomes the culture. The creativity that dies. The innovation that stops. The honest feedback that never makes it into the room.

Kim also gets honest about the leaders who enable it, sometimes without even realizing it, and what it actually takes to build a culture where people show up for the work instead of the worship.

Transcript

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Welcome to Leadership After Five, where leadership gets real. I'm Kim. And today we are talking about proximity to power, what it does to people, what it does to organizations, and what it costs a leader who enables it without even realizing it. I want to start with a scene. So many, many years ago, I remembered I was walking down a hallway at a church I attended. I saw someone I recognized, so obviously I smiled, I gestured hello, and they looked right through me. No acknowledgement, nothing. Whatever, I kept walking. But unbeknownst to me, the pastor was walking in behind me. And that same person who had just looked through me like I wasn't even there completely transformed. The smile, the warmth, the energy. I looked back and it was like watching someone flip a switch. And I kept going, went about my day, but I remembered thinking, I just watched someone perform an entire personality because power was walking down the hallway. That moment never left me because I have seen it everywhere since. Before we get into the organizational piece, I want to make something clear. This is a human behavior problem that shows up everywhere. Case in point, I remember when I used to frequent a lot in the DC area, you know, going to different events, I would go, I would meet people. And I think if you're from the DC area, you know what I'm about to say. The very first question before you even finish shaking someone's hand is, hey, where do you work? And I want to be fair. Sometimes that question is genuine curiosity. Sometimes people are just making conversation. But more often than not, it was a sizing up, a quiet calculation. What is your proximity to power? Which power specifically? And what does knowing you do for me? That behavior, that instinct to assess someone's value based on who they know and where they sit in a hierarchy is deeply human. It starts long before we ever walk into an organization. But here's the thing: when it shows up in leadership, it stops being a quirk of human nature and it quickly becomes a cultural crisis. Here's what I want you to understand about proximity to power inside an organization. When people perform their values, their kindness, their inclusivity, their engagement only in the presence of leadership, you don't have a culture. Ladies and gentlemen, you have a performance. And the most dangerous thing about that performance is what is happening underneath it. The culture looks exactly the way you designed it to look on the surface, but the surface is all it is. Underneath that surface is an organization that is genuinely struggling. People who can't even stand each other, tensions that never get surfaced, problems that never get knee, all of it carefully concealed because the only agenda anyone has is to make sure leadership is happy. Because leadership not being happy threatens their proximity to power. And here's the part that leaders don't always want to hear. Some of them enable this intentionally. There is an element of self-gratification in being the person everyone performs for, being the person who makes people nervous, being the person whose approval determines the temperature of the entire room. Now, listen, I'm not here to judge that. I'm simply here to name it. Because a leader who enjoys that dynamic, consciously or not, is actively unraveling the heart and soul of the culture they're supposed to be building. I want to talk about the Devil Wears Prada for a moment. One, because it's one of my favorite movies, but also I think about this movie a lot when I think about proximity to power and what it does to an organization. So if you haven't watched it, this may or may not make sense. Maybe you can connect the dots, but it would help it would help if you would watch it. It's a good movie, so you should actually watch it. But Miranda Priestley is probably one of the most studied leadership archetypes in popular culture. And I want to be honest about something that most people miss when they talk about her. Miranda built excellence. In the first 20 minutes of that film, you see a team that operates at the highest possible standard. Nobody's mediocre, nobody's casual. The level of execution in the environment is remarkable, and that is real. There are leaders who create that kind of standard through sheer force of expectation and consequence, and the output can be genuinely extraordinary. But here's the cost. Watch what happens to Andy when she first walks into that office. She doesn't fit. She doesn't know the rules, she doesn't have the right clothes, the right references, the right proximity to the people that matter. And the way she's treated by everyone around her, not just Miranda, but the entire team, tells you everything you need to know about the culture underneath that excellence. It is not inclusive. It is not safe. It is not a place where someone who doesn't already belong can find their footing and grow. And Andy's entire arc is the story of what happens when someone tries to earn proximity to that power. She transforms herself. She sacrifices her relationships. She becomes someone she doesn't even recognize. And the moment she realizes what it has cost her, she walks away. She tosses her phone into the fountain and walked away. That walk away moment is the reframe because Andy didn't leave because she couldn't do the job. She left because the culture required her to become someone she wasn't in order to survive in it. And no level of proximity to Miranda's power was worth that trade. That is the excellence trap. You can build a team that performs at the highest level and simultaneously build a culture that only the right people can survive in. Excellence without inclusivity is not a culture worth keeping. I want to be specific about what proximity to power worship actually kills inside of organization. And yes, I said worship because that's what it is, a power worship. And it's actually not abstract. That type of behavior, it kills creativity. When people are focused on managing your reaction rather than solving the problem, they stop bringing you their best ideas. They bring you the ideas they think you want to hear. It kills innovation. Nobody takes a risk in an environment where being wrong means losing their standing. Innovation requires the freedom to fail. And that freedom does not exist when proximity to power is the currency. It kills honest feedback. This is one of the probably the one that costs organizations the most. When the entire team is performing agreement, right, when nobody will tell you what is actually happening because they are too focused on keeping you happy, you lose the ability to see clearly. And a leader who cannot see clearly cannot lead effectively. You end up surrounded by people who are excellent and managing you and completely unable to tell you the truth. So what do you do about it? The first thing is to model humanity deliberately and consistently, not just in the big moments, in the hallway, in the meeting before the meeting starts, in the way you acknowledge the person who has no power and nothing to offer you politically. Because your team is watching everything you do. And there's no room for you saying, oh, I'm not comfortable talking to this person or that person. As a leader, you should be comfortable talking to people on your team. And the way you treat people who have nothing to give you tells them more about your character than anything you say in a town hall. If you want a culture where people treat each other with dignity regardless of title or proximity to power, you have to be the living example of that every single day. The second thing is to decentralize decision making. Power worship thrives in environments where all the decisions flow through one person, where access to the leader is the only path to influence, where people compete for proximity because proximity is the only way to matter. Break that dynamic intentionally. Push decisions down. Invite people into the room who wouldn't normally be there. Make it clear that your approval is not the only currency in this organization. And the third thing, demonstrate inclusivity in a way that invites everyone into the moment. Not performative inclusivity. Not the kind that shows up in the all-staff photo and disappears in the hallway. The kind that says your presence here matters, regardless of your title, your tenure, or your relationship with me. That is a trust-building lever, and it is one of the most powerful things a leader can do to dismantle a culture built on proximity to power. Here is what I want you to walk away with today. Hierarchy is not the same as respect. And if you believe that people need to worship the position in order to respect the leader, I want to offer you a different possibility. They are the ones who make people feel seen, who makes it safe to bring the real problem into the room, who smiles back in the hallway, whether the pastor is standing behind them or not. Break down that superiority. Model the humanity, decentralize the power, and watch what your culture becomes when people show up for the work instead of the worship. This one landed somewhere personal for me, and I want to hear if it landed somewhere personal for you too. Share your thoughts with me. Find me on LinkedIn. Hey, send me an email. I want to hear from you. This is Leadership After Five, and we are always going to keep it real over here. I'll see you in the next episode. Take care.