How portable is your power?

My father had a small selection of favorite movies that were on repeat. One of them was Trading Places, that great comedy with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. It’s got every classic trope – the fall of the high and mighty, identity switching, the revenge and ultimate triumph of the lowly.

Aykroyd plays Louis Winthorpe III, a blue-blooded successful commodities broker in Philadelphia. He has money, status, a beautiful townhouse, a butler, a prestigious job, and the confidence of someone accustomed to being treated accordingly. Then, through an elaborate scheme, all of it is stripped away. He loses his job, his home, his bank account, his fiancée, and his reputation.

Suddenly, the man who was accustomed to commanding respect is being treated like a criminal and a bum. Before long, he is reduced to stealing food from his former firm’s Christmas party and stuffing a smoked salmon under his coat.

The joke, of course, is that Winthorpe is still Winthorpe; he still acts like he’s due all the respect in the world, even though no one responds accordingly.

His power didn’t travel with him.

It’s funny. And it’s also a lesson about power, true for us all: much of the power we accumulate over the course of our careers is more fragile than it feels.

When we talk about different kinds of power, we often think of the bases of power French and Raven described: legitimate power, expertise, reward, coercion, and so on. Or we distinguish between formal and informal power, or between “power over” and “power with.”

When it comes to power in everyday life, there is another distinction I find particularly important:

I divide power into two broad categories: externally sourced social power and internally sourced personal power.

Social power is an asset – conferred by a role, organization, group, or society. Your title gives you authority. Your position gives you access to resources. Your relationships give you clout. Your membership in a particular group gives you insider knowledge and influence. Your social status may give you credibility before you open your mouth.

These powers are extraordinarily useful. But they share one important characteristic: they depend on a context that gives them meaning.

You may be the Director of Marketing at work, but not at the supermarket. You may have enormous informal influence on a team where you’ve worked for fifteen years, but move to another part of the company and that influence can disappear overnight.

Externally sourced power has to be granted, recognized, and continually ratified by other people and by the systems around us. Which means it can also be revoked. It also means you’re dependent on something outside your control for your power. Which makes it—and you—very fragile.

Personal power is different. It’s not an asset but a capacity. No one grants it to us; rather, it’s something we grow and develop. It comes from our knowledge, experience, character, clarity, and presence. It includes our ability to communicate and persuade, to build relationships and earn trust, to navigate conflict, to make sense of complexity, to recover from setbacks, and to help other people move toward something.

Because these capacities reside in us, they are much more portable. Change your title, company, industry, or country, and you still know how to listen. You still know how to build trust. You still know how to frame an argument, read a room, ask a good question, resolve a disagreement, or steady yourself when things get difficult.

Personal power travels with you.

This matters because power is always contextual. My client experienced this vividly when he was promoted into a new organization. On paper, his power had increased. He had a bigger title, broader responsibilities, and more formal authority. But he struggled.

The people around him had worked together for years. They had relationships, history, and established networks of trust: informal power he didn’t yet possess. They had deep institutional knowledge: expertise he couldn’t match. They understood the personalities, politics, and unwritten rules of the organization in ways he didn’t: experience he hadn’t yet accumulated.

His title gave him authority, but it couldn’t compensate for all the other forms of power in the room, powers he lacked. He moved up in rank and simultaneously became less powerful.

This is one reason transitions can be so disorienting for successful leaders. We tend to experience our power as though it belongs to us. After years in a role or organization, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the power we have developed and the power the context has given us. People return our calls. Our ideas get attention. We know whom to ask and how to get things done. People seek our opinion.

It’s easy to conclude that it’s you. Partly, of course it is. But change the context and you discover how much of that influence was buoyed by your network, context, role.

This is the fragility of externally sourced power.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. Of course we should. Roles, authority, networks, reputation, and status are legitimate and necessary sources of power. Leadership would be impossible without them.

The mistake is becoming dependent on them. Because careers change. Companies reorganize. Industries disappear overnight. Leadership teams turn over. We retire. We move. The expertise that once made us indispensable becomes outdated. The network that boosted us is replaced by a room full of strangers who haven’t yet worked with us. .

Developing personal power is a way of making your power more resilient.

Build expertise, but also build curiosity so you can learn when your expertise is no longer enough. Build a network, but also develop the capacity to create new ones. Learn to persuade people who don’t have to agree with you. Develop judgment, presence, emotional regulation, conflict competence, and the ability to earn trust.

Because sooner or later, all of us walk into a room where nobody knows who we are.

And when that happens, you don’t want to have to say, like Louis Winthrop III, “Don’t you know who I am?” You want the kind of power that doesn’t depend on how others behave towards you.