This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. Not because it isn’t important — quite the opposite. But because I needed time to properly get my own head around it first. Questions about influence, power, and what happens beneath the surface come up again and again in my work with leaders and HR professionals. Yet every time I tried to write about it, something felt off. Too neat. Too binary. As if it missed the lived complexity of what people were actually