Ascending to positions of authority creates a peculiar trap: it obscures your own impact on others, and the further you advance, the less likely anyone is to offer you honest feedback.
At first glance, this seems contradictory. Those who reach the summit of their organisations typically possess strong interpersonal instincts and the ability to read situations accurately, yet many turn out to be strikingly blind to their own behaviour, their limitations, or how they influence those around them. The contradiction vanishes when you recognise that self-awareness is not what propels people upward; rather, the ascent itself gradually undermines it. Research points to an uncomfortable truth: the psychological and organisational dynamics of leadership systematically dismantle the foundations on which self-awareness rests.
Power narrows your ability to see beyond yourself
The first factor involves how authority reshapes mental focus, typically in unhelpful ways. Experiments conducted by Adam Galinsky and his team demonstrated that individuals primed to feel powerful showed reduced inclination to adopt another person's visual perspective, were more prone to presume others possessed their own knowledge, and performed worse at interpreting emotional cues. These findings suggest that authority causes people to anchor themselves firmly to their own viewpoint while making insufficient adjustment for alternative perspectives.
Self-awareness extends beyond introspection; it fundamentally involves perceiving yourself through others' eyes, a skill requiring you to step outside your own mental frame and adopt an external vantage point. This is precisely the capacity that authority undermines. An executive who has spent years consolidating power has, often unconsciously, been reinforcing their tendency to privilege their own interpretation while discounting everyone else's—nearly the inverse of what genuine self-perception demands. The journey upward quietly suppresses the very mechanism that would allow someone to recognise their actual effect on others. Consequently, as individuals achieve greater success, they naturally become less inclined to examine the disparity between their self-image and how others perceive them.
Power also amplifies confidence in your own judgment
A second dynamic intensifies the first: authority not only restricts perspective but also magnifies certainty. Studies by Nathanael Fast, Niro Sivanathan and their team found that power consistently generated overconfident choices across multiple experiments, with heightened feelings of authority prompting individuals to place excessive trust in their own reasoning, sometimes leading to significant mistakes.
This mechanism directly undermines self-awareness because genuine self-evaluation requires a degree of self-doubt—an openness to the possibility that you might misjudge your own capabilities or overlook your own shortcomings. Authority erodes precisely this openness. When people feel powerful, their own judgements seem self-evidently sound, leaving minimal space for the questioning that would drive self-examination. Combined with the perspective-limiting effect, the outcome is a mind that simultaneously grasps others' viewpoints less accurately and has greater faith in its own conclusions—a dynamic almost perfectly calibrated to generate confident blind spots. An organisational dynamic compounds this psychological effect: as individuals advance, candid input becomes scarce, since staff recognise that contradicting someone in power carries danger. The leader loses access to external perspective just as their internal perspective is becoming distorted.
Why this represents a genuine cost, not a competitive edge
It would be incorrect to interpret these findings as suggesting that blind spots facilitate advancement, and this distinction carries weight. The research does not claim that blind spots are beneficial; rather, it demonstrates that the mechanisms of gaining and exercising power tend to produce them as an unintended consequence. In fact, evidence on leadership effectiveness points in the opposite direction: leaders with greater self-awareness typically make superior decisions and foster more productive teams, making the self-awareness erosion described here a genuine drawback of success rather than a concealed advantage. Numerous leaders do maintain self-awareness; the distinction is that they do so in opposition to the current, not because success naturally preserved it for them.
This reframing reveals the actionable insight. Since self-awareness naturally deteriorates as authority increases, sustaining it requires deliberate effort rather than passive maintenance. Leaders who remain grounded deliberately engage in practices that authority makes difficult: they actively seek unvarnished input and incentivise rather than penalise it, they nurture a small circle of trusted advisors willing to challenge them, and they intentionally adopt the viewpoints of those they supervise instead of presuming alignment with their own. At senior levels, none of this comes naturally—which is precisely the point. The genuine surprise is not that numerous successful leaders display limited self-awareness given how thoroughly success conspires to erode it. Rather, it is remarkable that any of them manage to preserve it at all.
Source: Silicon Canals
