A verb that became a noun
The world teaches us that power means to dominate or conquer, tied to money, influence, authority and position. But there is a power that does not need the verb to have. The word goes back to the Latin posse: to be able. Before becoming a noun, before turning into structure, power was simply the capacity to act, choose and become. Something born as potential.
Over time, we shifted that meaning. The verb became a noun. Capacity became domination. Potential became conquest. Power came to be seen as something external: something to reach, accumulate and defend. The swap seems small, yet it organizes almost everything we feel when we think about power at work and in life.
What a role grants and what it does not
At work, the confusion shows up constantly. We call someone powerful and immediately point to the role, the place in the hierarchy, the decisions the person is authorized to make. These are real sources of power. But they do not represent everything someone is capable of doing.
David R. Hawkins, in Power vs. Force, locates power in integrity and in the willingness to take responsibility for one's own actions, instead of seeing oneself as a victim of external forces. The idea moves the conversation from the position we hold to the way we conduct our actions. A role can grant authority. It cannot guarantee integrity, nor make someone take responsibility when something goes wrong.
Three questions that won't let go of me
I keep returning to them. Why do people in positions of authority lose the sense of power when they leave those roles? Why do others, recognized, influential and successful, still not feel powerful? And why do some people, with no role, status or recognition, carry a strength that seems to depend on none of that?
All three point to the same place. Power is more than what we acquire or possess. It also lives in who we are, in how we read the world and place ourselves in it, and in how we turn that reading into action.
What the next generation is revealing
In the interviews on my podcast with executives of different generations, some questions repeat, especially among the younger ones. Why does this rule exist? What is this guidance for? Why should I follow it? Formal authority gets people to follow a decision. It does not produce respect or admiration.
Perhaps it is a generation showing us that our roles are worth less than we are used to believing. The power we were convinced to have may be losing force, especially when compared to more human values and inspirations. This does not make hierarchy irrelevant. Organizations still need clear responsibilities and the authority to decide. But leaders who prepare the next generation must go beyond the command models they inherited: explain their reasoning, connect the work to something that matters, welcome questions, and demonstrate, through their own actions, the responsibility they expect from others.
What remains when authority is no longer the reason
Setting the role aside does not mean abandoning the responsibilities that come with it. It means asking what remains when authority is no longer the reason people listen. That is the practical question for any executive: what relationships are we building inside our organizations, and what impact do we generate as human beings?
The power worth building is the one people recognize by your worth, by the relationships you establish and by the consequences of your actions. It has more force and more permanence than the role you hold. That is precisely the crossing I investigate in the Estrutura Consciente de Poder: moving from a strength conditioned to what we need to have, to a strength that does not vanish when what we have changes. Leaving Ter Poder and learning to Ser Poder.