You worked for it. For years, probably. The title. The promotion. The room at the table you were never quite invited into before.

And when it finally came, it felt like permission. To lead. To decide. To have the kind of authority you’d watched others wield for your entire career.

So you led the way you’d been taught.

Here’s what nobody told you: that playbook has an expiry date. And for many women in leadership, the moment it runs out isn’t a dramatic breakdown. It’s quieter than that. It’s a hum. A low-level, hard-to-name sense that something isn’t adding up.

The Seduction Is Real — And It’s Structural

We need to say this plainly: the pull toward Power Over leadership isn’t a character flaw. It’s a structural feature of how most workplaces have been built and who they were built by.

When you enter an organisation where power is exercised through dominance — where the loudest voice wins, where certainty is rewarded over curiosity, where vulnerability is mistaken for weakness — the feedback loop is clear. Behave this way. Get promoted. Repeat.

Researcher and author Brené Brown has spent decades studying exactly this. In her work on leadership, she draws a direct line between fear and the kind of power that controls and dominates. As she writes in her research, Power Over is driven by fear. It motivates through coercion and protects itself by hoarding authority. It gets results. In the short term, it often gets very good results.

So it gets rewarded. And when it gets rewarded, it gets replicated.

For women navigating male-dominated leadership, the seduction runs even deeper. Organisational psychologist Adam Grant has documented the bind women face in workplaces: when men speak assertively, they are described as decisive leaders. When women do the same, research consistently finds they are judged as too assertive, aggressive, or difficult. The message, spoken or not, is: adapt or be overlooked.

So women adapt. They watch who gets promoted and they mirror what they see. They armour up. They perform a version of leadership that wasn’t built for them — and for a while, it works.

The Moment the Armour Stops Fitting

Here’s what the promotion literature rarely covers: the cost of sustained performance.

You can lead with Power Over and get results. You can hold the room and drive decisions and hit your numbers. But over time, something starts to fracture — not in your performance, but in you.

You notice the gap between who you are at work and who you are everywhere else. At home, you’re warm. Curious. You laugh easily and ask questions because you actually want to know the answers. You’re a full human being.

At work, you’re a version of yourself that you have to consciously construct every morning before you walk through the door.

The research on this is unambiguous. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that six in ten senior-level women report frequently feeling burned out — higher than any other group surveyed. The Centre for Creative Leadership has found that behaving in ways misaligned with personal values is not just uncomfortable — it is genuinely exhausting and unsustainable.

This isn’t about struggling women who can’t handle pressure. This is about talented, high-performing leaders who have been running on a system that was never designed to sustain them nor include them.

When the Feedback Shifts

One of the most disorienting experiences for women who’ve been leading with Power Over is when the feedback changes.

For years, the message was: be more confident. Be more assertive. Drive harder results. That feedback shaped how you showed up. You believed it. You acted on it. It worked.

And then, somewhere — in a performance review, in a hallway conversation, in an engagement survey you never see directly — the language shifts.

“Confident” becomes “arrogant.”

“Assertive” becomes “aggressive.”

“Results-driven” becomes “your team engagement is low.”

It feels like a trap. Because in many ways, it is. The system told you to lead one way, you did, and now the same system is penalising you for it.

But here’s what I want you to hold alongside that very valid frustration: the feedback, infuriating as it is, is also data. Not about your worth. Not about whether you’re cut out for this. About whether the strategy you’ve been running is the one that’s actually going to take you — and the people around you — where you want to go.

The Lie at the Heart of Power Over

When women are told that leadership means having power over others — or simply that their title grants them more power than those they lead — it’s a lie. Not a malicious one, necessarily. But a lie nonetheless.

Here’s the truth: your team members are whole people. They are autonomous adults who bring their full selves to work whether you account for that or not. They have lives, values, fears, and ambitions that exist entirely independently of you and your title.

Power Over operates on the assumption that people can be controlled. But control is a finite resource. The more you reach for it, the more lands on your plate. The tighter you hold, the more you have to be less of yourself to sustain it. You become the single point of failure for everything, because you’ve built a system that requires you to hold all the threads.

Brown’s framework is useful here. She identifies that daring, transformative leaders don’t protect their power — they distribute it. They operate from Power With: collaborative authority built on shared respect, mutual support, and genuine empowerment. This isn’t a soft option. It’s a fundamentally different operating model.

What Power With Actually Looks Like

Power With is not about being liked. It’s not about consensus on every decision or abandoning your authority.

It’s about leading in a way that doesn’t require you to hollow yourself out to sustain it.

It means you stop performing certainty you don’t feel, and start building the kind of trust that means your team will actually tell you the truth. It means Adam Grant’s research on psychological safety stops being a concept you agree with in theory and starts being something you can actually build — because you’ve stopped making it unsafe to disagree with you.

It means you lead with your peers instead of around them. You lead upward, too — lifting the people above you while they support you — instead of managing them from a defensive crouch.

And perhaps most importantly: it means you bring yourself back into the room. Not the armoured version. Not the performance. You.

Research shows that authentic leadership — where behaviour is aligned with values — not only reduces burnout but builds the kind of trust that drives real team performance. The leaders who create cultures where people want to show up are not the ones who had the most authority. They are the ones who made it safe to be human.

The Question Underneath All of This

If you recognise that hum of disconnection — if you’ve been leading in a way that gets results on paper but costs you something you can’t quite name — I want to offer you this:

That feeling is not weakness. It is not evidence that you’re not built for leadership. It is your system telling you that the strategy has run its course.

Power With doesn’t mean you stop leading. It means you lead in a way that’s built to last. That’s built for you. That doesn’t ask you to leave pieces of yourself at the door in order to belong.

That’s the work. And it’s worth doing.

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Bron Stephens is a leadership coach working with experienced women leaders who are ready to stop performing power and start leading with it. To explore working together, book a free call here.