I keep coming back to a question from the stories I grew up hearing: why do the gods keep granting boons to people who turn out to be evil? Maybe the boon doesn't create the villain. It removes the things that were holding them back. A promotion works the same way.
Most of a leader's power is quiet. You decide whose idea gets tried, who gets the interesting problem, what gets cut when time runs out, and whether a mistake becomes a lesson or a story people repeat. Nobody can make you have the difficult conversation, so you can always avoid it.
Easy days don't show any of this. Anyone can lead kindly when the decisions are easy. The real test comes on the hard days: a reorg, a failed launch, a deadline that means someone's work won't ship. That's when your team learns who you are.
What I try to do on the hard days
- Say plainly what's changing and why, early and in person, before the rumour gets there first.
- Protect what matters most and be honest about what can wait, instead of pretending everything still fits.
- Tell people first when their work is cut, with the trade-off behind it, before anyone else hears.
- Keep giving people problems worth their talent, even when it would be faster to decide everything myself.
Why power shows it
We say that with great power comes great responsibility. That's true. But power also does something quieter: it makes you more of who you already are. Power is just the ability to act without obstruction, and when things go wrong, the consequences usually land on the people without it.
Power doesn't have a personality of its own. It borrows yours. So I don't judge leaders, myself included, by the easy days. I watch the hard ones.
Written by Aarti Kava, design leader in Shanghai. More from the journal →