WHAT UNTESTED POWER ACTUALLY COSTS

Why leadership that never gets its hands dirty fails the people depending on it.

Bruce Eickelman

Drawn from The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism, forthcoming

When I moved to the Central Coast of New South Wales in 1996, I came across a man whose job was to bring business to the region.

He worked for a government-backed business development agency — the kind of organisation funded by public money to produce economic opportunity, create jobs, attract investment, and support the operators already working in the area. The mandate was real and the need was real. The Central Coast had plenty of capable people trying to build things, and a well-run agency with genuine relationships and a willingness to do the work could have made a meaningful difference.

What the agency had instead was this man.

He had grown up being told he was special. He had moved through his career in the way that people move through careers when nobody ever requires them to prove it — upward, steadily, on the basis of presentation and confidence and the ability to fill a room with the impression of competence. He was a delegator. He was excellent at telling people what to do. He had never, as far as I could observe, been required to get his hands dirty.

In a private business that would have caught up with him quickly. The market has a way of delivering honest feedback to people who produce the appearance of activity rather than the thing itself. But this was not a private business. The funding came from government. The consequence for underperformance — for meetings held instead of businesses attracted, for reports written instead of operators supported — did not land on him personally. It dissolved into the system.

The businesses that needed help during that period got the appearance of assistance instead. And he was eventually replaced by a new head of development, the agency continued operating, and nobody who had been waiting for real support got an explanation or an apology.

He moved on. The cost was absorbed by everyone except the person responsible for it.

The mechanism

The book I am writing, The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism, spends a chapter on what I call the cost of untested power. The argument is this: authority does not become dangerous primarily when it is abused. It becomes dangerous when it goes untested — when the person holding it has never been required to carry the full weight of what they are responsible for.

Most people understand the obvious version of this. The corrupt official. The fraudulent executive. The leader who takes credit for other people's work and assigns blame downward when things go wrong.

What is harder to see — and more common — is the version that does not look like abuse at all. The leader who is not corrupt, not fraudulent, not even particularly selfish. Who simply has never been required to do the difficult thing personally. Who has always had someone below them to absorb the operational reality. Who genuinely believes that the role of leadership is to direct rather than to do.

That belief is not always wrong. Delegation is real and necessary. Senior leadership in a large organisation cannot and should not be doing every task personally.

But there is a difference between a leader who has earned the right to delegate — who has been close enough to the work to know what they are asking of the people below them, who has felt the consequence of a bad decision, who has stood in a room and owned a failure — and a leader who delegates because they have never been required to do otherwise.

The first kind knows what the work actually costs. The second kind does not. And that gap — between the leader's picture of reality and reality itself — is where the people who depend on them pay the price.

Getting paid for your education

I have built several businesses across my working life. Before I opened my mortgage broking company in 2003 I spent eighteen months working inside the industry first — learning the products, the compliance, the client relationships, the things that go wrong that nobody tells you about before you have committed your own capital.

I learned that approach from a man I knew in the United States in the 1980s who was planning to open a bed and breakfast. Before he signed a lease or spent a dollar he got a job at a Holiday Inn and became their best employee. He was getting paid for his education.

That discipline — the willingness to start at the bottom of the thing you want to lead, to understand it from the inside before you presume to direct it from the top — is not humility for its own sake. It is structural intelligence. It means that when you make decisions, your picture of what is actually happening matches what is actually happening.

The man at the government agency had never done that. Not in that role and, from what I could observe, not in any role before it. His picture of what the work required and what the work actually required were two different things. And the gap between those two pictures was filled by the people below him working harder to compensate, and the businesses outside waiting longer for help that did not arrive in the form they needed.

Nobody told him. Or if they did, the feedback never landed close enough to change anything. Because the consequence for the gap between his picture and reality was not his to carry.

What this looks like in a business

Government agencies are an easy target for this argument. Public funding, bureaucratic insulation, limited accountability to market outcomes — the conditions for untested power are built into the structure.

But I see the same pattern in private businesses every week.

The founder who built something in the early years by being close to everything — the product, the customers, the staff, the numbers — and then, as the business grew, moved further from all of it. Who now runs the business primarily through meetings and reports. Who has not spoken directly to a customer in two years. Who is making decisions about the product based on what their team tells them rather than what they have seen themselves.

That is not a failure of intelligence or commitment. It is a failure of proximity. The founder's picture of the business has drifted from the business itself, slowly and without announcement, because nothing in the daily structure of their role requires them to stay close.

The cost lands on the customers who receive a product that is drifting from what they need. On the staff who can see the gap between the leader's picture and reality and have learned it is not worth the trouble to say so. On the business itself, which begins to optimise for the picture rather than the thing.

Untested power fails late and expensively. That is what makes it so dangerous. The gap between the leader's picture and reality accumulates quietly for months or years before it becomes visible in the numbers. By the time it is undeniable the correction is harder and costlier than it would have been if someone had said something honest eighteen months earlier.

What honest leadership actually requires

I am not arguing that every leader needs to personally do every task. That is not the point.

The point is that effective leadership requires earned proximity — a close enough understanding of what the work actually involves that decisions are grounded in reality rather than the picture of reality that filtered reports produce.

That means staying deliberately close to the customer. Doing the occasional task personally that your role would normally delegate — not as a performance of humility but as a genuine recalibration. Building systems that deliver honest feedback rather than comfortable feedback. And being willing to hear things that do not confirm the picture you already have.

It also means being honest about the difference between what the role requires and what you have been willing to do. Those are not always the same thing. The gap between them is where the people who depend on your leadership pay the price.

The man at the government agency was eventually replaced. A new head of development came in. The agency continued.

The businesses that lost a year or two waiting for help that did not arrive in the form they needed — they did not get that time back.

That is what untested power actually costs. Not the leader who carries it. The people who depend on them.

The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism by Bruce Eickelman is forthcoming. For information about 12X Decision Architecture, visit 12xclarity.com.