What Is Power Fluency™?
Conversations about power have become much more common in leadership circles over the last few years, and most of them land in the same place. “Power over” is the problem. “Power with” is the goal. Choose the better one.
There is something in that. It is also a static view, and static views do not survive contact with what is actually happening inside companies right now. The constraints are real. The dynamics shift overnight. The room you are in today is not the room you will be in next quarter.
The leaders I have watched thrive, the ones who get results under all that pressure and seem to enjoy the process, did not arrive at the right ideology about power. They learned to read it accurately in real time, and then built a flexible approach based on what they actually saw.
That capability is what my work is built on. I call it Power Fluency.
Power Fluency is the ability to read what is actually happening inside a complex organization, the visible dynamics and the invisible ones, and to have options for how to act within them.
That second half matters as much as the first.
There is a version of this that stops at observation. Call it power literacy: you can see the dynamics, you can name them, you can describe what happened in the meeting afterward with real accuracy. That is genuinely useful, and it is also incomplete, because seeing clearly and being able to move are different capacities.
Fluency is the word I chose deliberately. Reading a language and speaking it are not the same skill. Fluency means you can respond in the moment, in a situation you did not plan for, without translating first.
Most executive coaching operates on behavior. Say this differently. Hold the room this way. Prepare for that conversation with this structure. All of it can help, and all of it leaves something untouched.
Underneath the behavior is an architecture. You absorbed a set of rules about power and authority long before you had this title. They came from your family, your community, the systems that shaped you and the ones that did not make room for you. Nobody sat you down and taught them. You learned them the way anyone learns the rules of a place, by watching what got rewarded and what got someone frozen out.
Those rules are running in the background of every high-stakes decision you make. Which risk feels acceptable. Whose approval you are quietly tracking. What you will say in a room and what you will only say afterward in the hallway.
When they stay invisible, they operate as instinct, and you experience them as who you are. When they become visible, they become revisable. That is the point where leaders stop reacting and start choosing.
People sometimes expect a methodology to arrive as a set of prescribed responses. Here is what to do when a board member undercuts you. Here is the phrase for a peer who takes credit for your work.
I do not work that way, for a straightforward reason. A prescribed response is built for a situation that has already been described, and the situations that actually cost executives their footing are the ones nobody described in advance. A script gets you through the meeting it was written for.
What we build instead is options. You look at what is really happening, including the parts nobody is naming out loud, and you generate several ways you could move. Then you choose, and the choice is yours rather than a default firing before you noticed it.
The constraint I hold throughout is that this cannot come at the cost of your values or your judgment. Plenty of advice on power is really advice on becoming someone else in order to survive a room. That works for some people, and it costs them something they usually cannot name for several years.
I hear a version of this often, usually from someone who is doing well and does not think of themselves as struggling.
Much of my work is with what I call firsts and onlys, the first-time and first-generation executives walking into rooms where the existing rules of power were never designed with them in mind. The need is sharpest there, because the gap between the written rules and the actual ones is widest when nobody in the room shares your reference points.
But nobody gets handed the rules. Executives who look like they belong absorbed them earlier and more casually, often from someone who had been in the room before them. That is a real advantage, and what they hold is the same knowledge everyone else needs, acquired informally and never written down.
The leaders who come to me have usually just discovered the limits of what they absorbed. They got somewhere new, the old rules stopped producing the old results, and nothing announced the change. That happens to people who look like they belong too. It just tends to happen later, and it tends to surprise them more.
If you are at a point where the instincts that got you here have stopped working the way they used to, that is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a temporary dip.
It usually means the rules changed. Something is being rewarded now that was not before, or something you did well counts for less at this altitude. The discomfort is information, and it is telling you the ground moved.
The leaders I work with do not change because they learned a better framework for power. They change because they developed the capacity to see clearly, act flexibly, and lead entirely as themselves. That is what Power Fluency makes possible, and it is what this work is for.
You can read more about how I work at meghnamajmudar.com.
9/21/2026
COMMENT LOVE