The Power You're Not Using

We were deep into our Sunday coffee session when something my friend said stopped me .

She was describing her role, and how often people are surprised by how few decisions she actually gets to make. She's senior. She's respected. She has a seat at tables that matter. And still, the decisions she owns outright are fewer than people assume.

"I'm a convener," she said. "Not really a decider. I orchestrate flow, processes, not decisions."

That stuck with me well after we left our favorite Bronzeville spot.

It got me thinking. Not just about the conversations I'm currently having with clients, but about my years leading teams. The frustrations I've witnessed when people wanted ownership. They wanted to make decisions. When they realized how little of that actually belonged to them, some would check out. The rare few hustled harder.

What dawned on me as I mulled over our coffee convo was that very few stop to ask whether they've been misreading power the whole time.

Influence and intelligence matter more than you think

We conflate making the final call with being in the ultimate power position.

Think about a DARCI chart for a second. Most people want the D. Decider. The one whose name is on it. And if they don't have the D, they assume they don't matter much. But that framing misses something.

The C (contributors) and R(reviewers) who all have significant opportunities to provide input, data, bring clarity, raise risks, and help work towards the final decision actually bring significant influence. They bring the intelligence to the decider shapes the decision. Full stop. If you have context no one else has, if you can read a situation from the inside and translate it clearly, you are not peripheral to the decision. You are the reason it can be made at all.

Not having the D doesn't make your contribution less valuable. I spent years as a managing director running my own P&L, and there were still decisions I didn't own. New go-to-market strategies, acquisitions, layoffs. Even client work that felt wrong but arrived as a given from above. My teams probably didn't understand how few of those calls were actually mine. But it never stopped me from speaking my mind, ensuring that the decision-makers had all of the data I could give them, so that at the end of the day, I knew that I'd influenced whatever I possibly could in the outcome.

So much of leadership, real day-to-day leadership, is not deciding. It's convening. Gathering the right people, moving the process, translating intelligence into something the actual decider can use. That's not a consolation prize. That's the work. And the leaders who understand that tend to be far more effective than the ones waiting to accumulate enough authority to finally matter.

But they only matter if leaders value them openly

All of that is true — and none of it matters if people don't believe it.

Our third coffee clutch member shared a different perspective. A member of the team is sitting on a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective. Senior leadership would take a recommendation from her seriously. They'd probably act on it. And she's not offering it.

Because she doesn't believe she has the power because her boss has recently left, and she's not the 'decider.' And maybe more importantly, if she writes it, and the executives do say yes, she'll get to own what comes next. She becomes Responsible. But then who is Accountable? Who has her back if something goes sideways?

It's worth saying that sometimes we abdicate power not because we don't recognize it, but because we do - and we don't trust it. We worry that if we get the green light and we fail, we could be out there on our own. Trust is a fragile thing in many teams, and when we celebrate decision-making as a singular event more than a process people get to contribute to, a clear signal is sent about what is valued.

A leader in an engineering organization told me recently that his teams want transparency, almost to the point of voyeurism. Not just to be informed, but to be 'in the room where it happens'. Sure, some of that is because folks just feel entitled to know. But I don't think that's naivety, even if it looks like it. I think it's what happens when trust erodes so completely that people stop believing a decision is real unless they witnessed it being made.

The answer isn't to put everyone in the room. It's to value intelligence, input, and influence openly. To name the decider, yes. But to be candid about your process for getting to "here's who/why/what/how/when." And to stay accountable to those who have to go and execute.

What would you do differently this week if you actually believed your influence was real — even without the D?