Most people think power shows up when someone raises their voice, controls a meeting, or signs off on a decision.
By then, it is already too late.
Power usually enters quietly. It settles into routines, incentives, and assumptions long before anyone names it. Titles matter less than proximity. Volume matters less than timing. The person who frames the problem often has more power than the person who solves it.
This is why “just doing good work” stops being enough at a certain point in your career.
Good work is table stakes. Power determines which work gets seen, which risks are forgiven, and which mistakes become defining.
Ignoring power does not remove its effects. It only removes your ability to respond.
Many professionals resist this idea because it feels uncomfortable. Power sounds manipulative. Political. Unclean. But power is not a personality trait. It is a property of systems. If you work inside organizations, you are already inside power structures whether you participate consciously or not.
Why power is so easy to miss
Power is hardest to see when it is working smoothly.
When decisions feel obvious, when priorities seem natural, when outcomes appear inevitable, power has already done its work. The system no longer feels contested, so it no longer feels political.
This is especially true in technical environments. Logic, data, and correctness create the illusion that decisions are objective. In reality, those inputs are filtered, weighted, and interpreted by people with incentives and constraints.
When power is functioning well, it disappears into normalcy. That invisibility is what makes it so difficult to challenge later.
Career health depends on seeing the room as it is, not as you wish it were.
This does not mean chasing influence for its own sake. It means developing the situational awareness to know who decides, who advises, who blocks, and who absorbs risk. It means noticing patterns instead of personalities.
Power is already in the room. The only real question is whether you can see it.
Tomorrow we will talk about what happens when you start to see it clearly and choose not to look away.