Building genuine power *NEWSLETTER*
I was not on the head-hunter's list.
Thomas Cook was in crisis. There was £1.6 billion of debt to raise inside two years, the banks were losing faith, and the media was openly wondering whether anyone suitable would take the job at all. The search had been running for months, and it had not once occurred to anyone to call me. I was not from the travel industry. I was not on anybody's shortlist.
So I did the only thing I could do. I emailed the new chairman directly, set out exactly what I thought the company needed in a chief executive, and why I was the right person for the role. I finished the email with a single line: "This is why you need me." He forwarded it to the head-hunter. I heard nothing. So I wrote to him again. "You still haven't hired anyone. I am interested." That time, he saw me.
Nobody handed me that power. I built the case for it, then I asked for it, twice, when the first ask went nowhere.
I have been thinking a great deal about power lately. Not the kind that comes with a title on a door or a line on an org chart. The kind that gets built, slowly and deliberately, over decades, through the choices nobody sees.
Because here is what I have learned, sitting in chief executive chairs for a fair chunk of my career: the job carries weight. The weight of people's jobs and investor expectations. The weight of crises you cannot predict and the ones you can see coming from a distance. It is decision after decision, many of them imperfect, made under pressure, with incomplete information. You do not get to opt out because of doubt, or loneliness, or mistakes. What you do get is the chance to decide how much of your real self you bring to those challenges. That, I think, is the actual substance of power. Not the title. The choosing.
Power built over time, not positioned
The truth is, the habit of building power quietly started long before any boardroom. I was fourteen when my father died after a long illness, and as the eldest of my siblings, responsibility, and the weight of leadership, came to me early. I led my brothers and sisters into the house after school, made supper, walked the dogs, did the jobs that needed doing so my mother could work and care for my father at once. Some months after he died, my mother was in a serious car crash. My headmistress called me and my younger sister into her office, told us the news, and then simply said, "You're in charge now. You're the eldest." I was fourteen.
I did not choose that kind of power. It was placed on me, and I carried it because there was no one else to. But I learned something from it that has never left me: that responsibility taken on early, whether you asked for it or not, becomes a kind of strength if you let it, rather than a burden you resent. Every piece of power I have built deliberately since then, in every boardroom, has that same shape to it. You do the work nobody is watching. You hold things together because they need holding. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing the moment it happened, you find you have built something real.
Years ago I came across Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments, and one has stayed with me ever since:
"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
I have always felt eccentric in my attitude, my mindset and my ambition. I have never let anyone get in the way of doing things my way, or dancing to the beat of my own drum. Looking back, that eccentricity was not a personality quirk. It was the first brick of power. Long before anyone was giving me permission to lead, I was giving myself permission to think differently.
I saw the truth of it again years before Thomas Cook, when I was one of four internal candidates being considered for chief executive of Arrow, a large American company. I asked my mentor Steve what he thought my chances were. He would never simply tell me the answer. Instead he asked me questions, the kind designed to make me think it through myself. "The real question," he said, "is how the board views the candidates." So I went away and did the sums honestly. The board was old-school American, and my main rival was a former college footballer, six foot three, two hundred and thirty pounds, a classic fit for what they were used to appointing. I was five foot three, British, and in my mid-forties. I concluded, correctly, that I was a long shot.
I trusted my judgment and acted on it. Rather than wait around hoping to be chosen, I decided to look for a chief executive role in a British company instead. That decision led me, before long, to Premier Farnell, a company recovering from a near-disastrous transatlantic merger, in need of someone to rebuild it from the ground up. The head-hunter who put me forward described me, in his own words, as "the perfect left-field candidate." The phrase amused me then and it amuses me now, because it turns out to be true of nearly every significant step in my career. I have rarely been the obvious choice. I have almost always had to make the case.
That, to me, is what it means to say power is built over time rather than positioned. Positioning is what happens to you. Building is what you do, deliberately, often when nobody is watching and nobody is expecting you to succeed.
I learned the same lesson years earlier, in Asia, in a job I was not remotely qualified for. When our chairman there wanted to step back, the board needed a new CEO for the region. I had no specific qualifications for it. I did not speak a word of Mandarin. But I lobbied for the job anyway, and they offered it to me. Rather than wait to feel ready, I found a teacher and took two hours of Mandarin lessons a day until I could stand up and give my first speech to the chinese team in shanghai entirely in their language. They applauded. I turned to my Chinese assistant afterwards, rather pleased with myself, and said it had gone better than I expected. She told me flatly that my tones had been terrible throughout. Then she added, more kindly, that they had really appreciated the effort.
That is the honest truth about building power over time. It is rarely elegant while it is happening. It is lessons badly pronounced, decisions made without full information, and people around you who can see your effort even when the execution is rough. What they are responding to is not your polish. It is your willingness to try.
Power built on trust, or it is not power at all
Everything I have built since has rested on one belief: power without trust is just authority, and authority without trust does not last.
Professor Frances Frei's work on this has shaped how I think about it more than almost anything else. I have had the privilege of meeting her and discussing the clarity she brings to the subject, and I use her formula in my everyday life and work:
Trust = Empathy + Authenticity + Logic
Three components. All of them actionable. And crucially, when trust breaks down, it almost always traces back to a weakness in one of the three.
Empathy. Do people believe you care about them, or do they feel like a means to an end?
Authenticity. Are they getting the real you, or a version curated for the room?
Logic. Do they trust your judgement, or are they quietly questioning the direction?
What I find so useful about this framing is that it turns something vague into something diagnosable. Instead of saying "we need to rebuild trust," which could mean almost anything, you can ask a sharper question: where is the wobble?
Because there is always a wobble. You can be highly logical and still lose a team if empathy is missing. You can be deeply empathetic and still lose credibility if your logic is unclear. You can have both and still lose people if they do not believe you are authentic.
Trust is not built in the big moments. It is built in how you listen, how you explain your decisions, how you show up when things are difficult, and how you follow through. Most tellingly, it is built in how people experience you when you are not in the room. That, for me, is the real test of leadership.
I would add one thing to Frei's formula from my own experience: trust in others starts with trust in yourself, and that is not always freely given. When I first became a chief executive, I had absorbed a belief, without ever quite noticing it, that women were not naturally suited to big-business mathematics. For years I told myself I was not a finance person, that the scale of balance sheets and profit and loss statements in a global business was beyond me. It took the Harvard Business School Finance Director programme, and then years of running large, complex businesses, to prove to myself that I could not only manage it, but excel at it. That blind spot became a strength once I saw it clearly. It taught me that the limits we place on ourselves are usually far easier to dismantle than the ones other people place on us.
You cannot extend real trust to a team, a board, or a partner, if some part of you still privately doubts your own competence. So the wobble is sometimes internal before it is ever external.
I saw all three elements of Frei's formula tested at once during one of the most difficult periods I led through as a chief executive, in the middle of a genuine global crisis. We ran a control room monitoring revenues and cash flow in real time, twenty-four hours a day. No one on the board panicked, because they had knowledge under their belts and they trusted that I was giving them the truth of the situation, however uncomfortable, rather than a version designed to keep them calm. That is logic holding under pressure. But it only worked because the empathy and authenticity had already been banked in the years before the crisis arrived. Trust, I learned then, is not something you can manufacture in the moment you most need it. You either did the work earlier, or you did not, and the crisis simply reveals which one is true.
I learned something else about trust from an unlikely source. Early in my career, a new chief executive asked me to work with a business and life coach to improve what he rather clumsily called my "followship" skills. I was sceptical of the corporate psycho-speak at the time. But Dr Paul Ofman, the psychiatrist he sent me to, went on to coach me for two decades, and his honesty, wisdom and kindness remain with me to this day. What he taught me, in essence, was that leadership is inseparable from followership. You cannot ask people to trust your direction if you have never practised trusting someone else's. The empathy and authenticity Frei describes are not things you perform downward, from a position of power, onto a team. They are muscles you build first by being led well yourself.
Giving yourself permission to be you
Somebody who knows me well said to me recently, "You would say this, Harriet, you're the ultimate left-field candidate, always dancing to the beat of your own drum." I have sat with that.
It speaks to an independence of spirit and mind, but it also connects to something more physical. This past year I started singing out loud and dancing with real vigour, often indoors, sometimes not. I am not gifted at either. But I feel the benefit enormously. Dancing is good for balance and coordination. Singing, unexpectedly, is deeply stress-relieving, whatever the neighbours might think.
Both have reconnected me to my childhood, to ballet and tap classes, to amateur dramatics. And both are, in their own small way, an exercise in power: the power to be unmistakably yourself, without waiting for anyone's approval to do it.
Those classes mattered more than I realised at the time. They belonged to a period of my childhood before responsibility arrived early and asked me to grow up faster than I was ready for. Returning to singing and dancing all these years later feels less like nostalgia and more like reclaiming something that got quietly set aside while I was busy being the reliable one. There is a kind of power in going back for it.
I think of this as the quietest kind of power there is, and also the hardest to hold onto. Boards, chairmen, investors, colleagues, all of them will have opinions about who you should be. The power to stay recognisably yourself while meeting every one of those expectations is not given to you. You have to keep choosing it.
Power built on grit and grace
Nobody builds real power without a few scars. I have broken through glass ceilings in my career, and I have also stood on a glass cliff, appointed into a moment of crisis where the odds were never generously stacked.
The lessons from both have stayed with me:
Learn everything you can from mentors and allies who are wise, trusted, and rich in both success and failure.
Only work for people you like, can learn from, trust, and have genuine chemistry with.
Never be the "only" in a room. Only is lonely, particularly if you are the token voice at the table.
Innovation-led growth is a theory many understand and few have actually delivered. Seek out the people who have done it, not just talked about it.
Be wary of single-industry practitioners who have done the same job in different companies within the same sector. They rarely know how to change.
The glass cliff is real too. Women are more likely to be appointed to senior roles during crisis, given less time, less flexibility, and shorter tenure than their male counterparts to prove themselves. And when a woman CEO is removed, she is more often than not replaced by a man. The research calls it the saviour effect. I call it something I have lived.
Grit got me through those moments. Grace is what let me build power out of them rather than resentment.
Leadership isolates in ways people rarely admit. There are decisions you cannot share with your team, doubts you cannot take to your board, struggles that feel inappropriate to voice out loud. The higher you rise, the fewer peers you have around you, and the more successful you are, the more isolated you can feel. It is a strange thing, because loneliness has been shown to damage health, and it certainly provokes self-doubt. Women leaders in particular report greater isolation as their careers advance, a consequence of being the only one in rooms where power is still unequally distributed, and because vulnerability is so often mistaken for weakness, many of us armour up, project strength, and carry on rather than admit it.
I do not think grit means pretending the isolation is not there. I think it means building the resilience to carry it honestly, rather than performing an invulnerability nobody actually possesses.
One practice has helped me more than most: worry less, get bolder. When we release some of the worry that consumes our energy, we free up space to act. When we dare to step into boldness, even while feeling shaky, we discover reserves of resilience we did not know we had.
Giving power to others
Power that stays with you alone is not power, it is hoarding. One of my guiding principles as a leader has always been that anyone who works with me should feel more capable, more motivated, and more valued afterwards than when they arrived. That requires empathy, deep listening, and, sometimes, apologising when you have missed the mark.
I saw the clearest proof of this during one of the most difficult periods I led through as a chief executive, when the business faced a genuine global crisis and the human factor became decisive. You can have all the intelligence and analytical skill in the world, but it counts for nothing without the character to act on it. What made the difference was the relationship between myself and my chairman. He never once tried to intervene in the running of the company, even though he had run it himself before I arrived. He asked questions, discussed the problems, made constructive suggestions, and then let me and my executive team get on with it. That, I have come to believe, is what genuine power sharing looks like at the top of an organisation: two people, each secure enough in their own role, giving the other room to use theirs fully. Harmony between a chief executive and a chairman means two brains are always better than one, and it is built on respecting the other person's power rather than quietly wishing you had it instead.
I saw the flip side of this early in my career, when a chairman I respected fought to get me onto a leadership programme at Harvard, even after one of his own board members remarked that if I needed training to be a chief executive, perhaps they had hired the wrong person. I offered to pay the fee myself and use my own holiday entitlement to attend, rather than let the objection win. In the end it was his quiet support, not mine, that settled the matter. I never forgot what it felt like to have someone spend their own credibility on my behalf. It is a small story, but it taught me that giving power to others sometimes means standing behind them in rooms they are not in, not just praising them in the rooms they are.
The women and men I have mentored over the years, including two brilliant Gen Zs I am working with right now, have taught me as much as I have taught them. Imposter syndrome comes up constantly in these conversations: guilt, insecurity, the nagging sense of not deserving the seat. Even Maya Angelou and Albert Einstein admitted to feeling like frauds at points in their extraordinary careers. My own way through it:
Mentorship, both giving and receiving.
Networking with peer groups who understand exactly what you are wrestling with.
A clear personal philosophy and set of goals, so you can measure yourself against your own standard rather than someone else's noise.
Keeping a record of positive feedback, and returning to it deliberately when you need it most.
The power of learning, unlearning, and relearning
The skills that had powered my business career, fast decision-making, galvanising high-performance teams, planning and executing at speed, were not the skills I needed for the next chapter of my life. I had to unlearn some of them deliberately, and acquire others in their place.
Rather than giving orders and expecting them to be carried out, I had to learn patience, which took a fair amount of self-control. Listening to the emotional undercurrents beneath what people were saying became as important as listening to their words. Success stopped being measured in share prices and turnarounds. It began showing up instead in the warmth and appreciation I felt when something I had done made a genuine difference to the people and places around me.
That is relearning in practice. Not adding a new skill on top of the old ones, but being willing to set some of them down.
I notice the same unlearning happening again now, at this stage of my life. The instincts that built a business career, control, speed, the need to be the one with the answer, are exactly the instincts that get in the way of good mentoring, good grandparenting, and the quieter work of giving back. When I sit with a young person I am mentoring, or spend time with my grandchildren, the power that matters is not the power to direct. It is the power to be fully present, to ask a better question rather than supply a faster answer, and to let someone else's thinking take the time it needs. That, too, had to be learned. Nobody teaches you how to put down authority gracefully. You have to work it out for yourself, usually rather late, and usually after getting it wrong a few times first.
Where is your wobble?
Power built quickly is rarely power that lasts. The power I trust, in myself and in the leaders I admire, is the kind assembled over years, out of eccentric thinking, hard-won trust, unapologetic selfhood, grit, and a genuine determination to lift others as you climb.
I did not become a chief executive because someone decided I should. I became one because I decided I should, and then went about proving it, in an email, in a boardroom, in a decision to walk away from odds that were never going to favour me and go and build better ones elsewhere. That, in the end, is what genuine power looks like. Not a title bestowed. A case built, argued, and lived out daily, long after anyone is still checking your workings.
It is also, I think, cumulative in a way that positional power never is. A title can be taken away from you in an afternoon. Nobody can retroactively remove the years spent building trust, the mentors you gave time to, the languages badly learned, the responsibility shouldered before you felt ready for it. That is the power that stays with you after the job ends, after the board changes, after the title on the door belongs to somebody else. It is the only kind, in my experience, worth spending a life building.
So my question for you this month is the same one I ask myself: where is your wobble, and what are you doing about it?
Warmest
Harriet