Disclaimer: The views on this site are entirely my own and do not represent those of any employer, past or present. This post reflects on a graduate course work assignment. All workplace references are generalized composites drawn from across my career, with details altered; no specific organization, team, or individual is described, and no internal company information is used.
What follows is my reflection on a power audit assignment from my course work — shared because I think more people should do this audit, and then talk about what they find.
My professor once gave me an assignment that made me uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Reflect on your current level of power within your organization. Then identify what opportunities you have to develop it further.
One page. Double-spaced. I had spent years in roles where influence mattered more than title. I assumed this would be straightforward. I was wrong.
What I Found
The assignment asked me to assess my top ten professional relationships — to honestly evaluate how much I gave versus how much I took from each one.
What I found surprised me. I perceived almost all of those relationships as holding legitimate power over me. That was not accurate — but it was true to how I felt. The intensity of a task, the newness of a request, how quickly I had to respond — all of it colored my perception of where power actually lived. I was not auditing reality. I was auditing my anxiety.
I also found something harder to sit with: over the course of my career, my expert power had a shelf life. Not because I had stopped learning. But because I have always shared freely — documentation, frameworks, processes, anything anyone asked for. People I once mentored grew. They caught up. Some moved past me. That is exactly what mentoring is supposed to produce, and it still stung to see it written down as a line item in my own audit.
I had, without fully realizing it, traded away one dimension of power — while, I hope, becoming more trusted in another.
The hardest pattern to name was this: across a career, the relationships that drain you most are the low-clarity ones — where information moves slowly, where a straight answer takes several follow-ups, where you leave a conversation more tired than you entered it. Everyone has worked inside relationships like that at some point. Naming the pattern — rather than any person — was the useful part of the exercise.
What I’m Proud Of
I wrote in that assignment: “I am proud of modeling good organizational citizenship.”
I still am. Even when generosity cost me expert power. Even when resources I created quietly gathered dust. Even when the invisible labor never appeared in a job description.
I kept giving because I believe that is how trust is built — not hoarded.
What I’m Doing Next
The audit taught me that influence without positional authority has real limits. You can build systems, coach people, and create frameworks others depend on — but shared ownership requires structural support, not just individual effort. That is a lesson about organizations in general, and it holds everywhere I have tested it.
So the question the assignment left me with is the one I keep returning to: how do you grow your power without losing the thing that made you trustworthy in the first place?
I do not have a clean answer. But I have stopped waiting for one to arrive on its own.
The audit is not a one-time assignment. It is something you have to keep doing — and then act on.
Power does not recognize itself. You have to name it. And then you have to negotiate for it.
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