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By Root 422 0

a consultant and executive coach to senior Swiss executives, says that the best way to hold on to your position is to maintain your perspective and balance. She commented that “unless you understand yourself pretty well, you’re going to lose control of yourself.” Seeman told me that a former chairman of Swiss Re had this advice for maintaining a sense of perspective about oneself: “What you have to do is every now and then expose yourself to a social circle that really doesn’t care about your position.” So this brilliant and powerful senior leader would go back to his primary school, somewhere in a village in the Alps—to the people to whom he was just the same person he was when he was seven years old.

Unfortunately, people who arrive at high-level positions with lots of power often do not like to be reminded of what and who they once were and how far they have come. They will sometimes divorce the spouses who were there at the beginning of their careers and take on a trophy companion. They will leave behind associates who can remind them of the time when they did not have so much power. To the extent that you can resist such tendencies and the behavioral changes that come with power, you are more likely to keep your influence.

MISPLACED OR TOO MUCH TRUST

When you are powerful and successful, you are overconfident and less observant—and one specific manifestation of such tendencies is to trust what others tell you and rely on their assurances. As you become less vigilant and paranoid about others’ intentions, they have the opportunity to take you out of your position of power.

When NationsBank, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Bank of America, headquartered in San Francisco, merged in 1998, it was to be a merger of equals with shared governance between the managements of the two institutions. David Coulter, the Carnegie-Mellon business school–trained Bank of America CEO, had entered the merger thinking it was great for both companies. Approaching the transaction as an intellectual challenge to increase shareholder value and improve the organization, Coulter believed the assurances about shared power and did not see the power play unfolding. He trusted the promises provided by Hugh McColl, the CEO of NationsBank, about Coulter’s significant role in the merged institution. David Demarest, director of White House communications under the first President Bush, was vice president and director of corporate communications at BankAmerica Corporation at the time of the merger. He related what happened:

It was really an amazing phenomenon. I went to a media roundtable with the Charlotte Observer, with David and Hugh in which Hugh almost got teary-eyed talking about how great David Coulter was and how he [Hugh] might just retire a little early because he sees the value of this guy. And it was really quite a performance. And within weeks, many of the commitments about how things were going to be—“we’re just going to pick the best person for each slot”—started to unravel. At this point, the rumor has it he [Coulter] checked with some legal counsel as to whether we could unravel the deal. And when that got around, that’s when Hugh said, “Enough of this” and then you could see the press stories that were coming out from Charlotte about, “Wow, there’s this screw up in the old Bank of America and we didn’t know that this program was so poorly funded,” and you could see the building of the case for why they were going to get rid of Coulter.

David Coulter trusted what Hugh McColl, a man who kept an allegedly live hand grenade on his desk, told him—and it cost him his job. Less than three weeks after the merger, Coulter resigned as president of BankAmerica Corporation. As one press reporter noted, “McColl and his lieutenants blew away the trusting BankAmerica folks, who forgot that war can be brutal.”13

Coulter’s not alone. People will do lots of things to acquire power—but you shouldn’t necessarily rely on them to keep their word once they have it. Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime prime minister of Singapore, came to power