At a Fortune 100 company known for its leadership development, the executives had been through years of development, individualized coaching, and experience leading large, complex businesses. Many were recognized as experts in their fields and regularly asked to speak, teach, advise, and serve on boards.
Over the course of months working with their executive coaches, something began to surface among a group of senior women. It wasn’t something any one executive identified at the beginning, and it wasn’t something the coaches were specifically looking for. But as the conversations accumulated, similar comments and experiences began appearing across the group.
Several women described leaving certain meetings with less confidence in their ideas than they had when they entered. They were not describing obvious conflict or criticism. They could not always identify what had happened or point to a particular interaction that explained how they felt afterward.
Eventually, a pattern became difficult to ignore.
For a company that had invested so heavily in developing its leaders, the question was what these executives were experiencing that traditional leadership development had not addressed.
We began by watching their meetings. At first, we did not pay much attention to what people were saying. We watched the behavior around the conversation instead. Who received immediate eye contact when they began speaking? Whose comments were quickly acknowledged? Whose ideas were picked up and developed by other people? Who had to work a little harder to get the same level of attention?
The differences were often very small. There was no obvious attempt to exclude anyone or diminish their contribution. The behaviors were ordinary enough that most people would never think to describe them as part of the power structure in the room.
When we later asked the executives about what they had noticed, their responses were remarkably similar. They could recognize the behaviors once we pointed them out, but they did not consider them particularly meaningful. They had seen them. They simply had not registered them as something that was affecting them.
That distinction matters.
We are capable of noticing something intellectually without fully registering its significance. A person can know that they were interrupted more often in a meeting, that their idea received less engagement, or that someone consistently looked to another executive before responding to them. They can describe the behavior accurately and still have very little awareness of what repeated exposure to those behaviors is doing to their own confidence and participation.
This is part of what makes power difficult to observe. Much of it operates through patterns that are too small to attract conscious attention.
Our brains are constantly making predictions about the social environment and filtering information according to what they have learned is relevant. We do not process every glance, pause, shift in posture, or change in tone with equal attention. We become more sensitive to some signals because our experience has taught us that they matter.
For someone who has spent years in positions of authority, many aspects of power may simply feel normal. They are accustomed to being listened to, deferred to, or looked to for a decision. They may therefore have less reason to pay close attention to the small variations in those behaviors.
The same process can work in the other direction. Someone who repeatedly experiences subtle signals that their contribution carries less weight may become increasingly attentive to them. Over time, that can affect how they participate. They may hesitate before offering an idea, qualify their language, wait for someone else to speak first, or decide that pushing a point is not worth the effort.
None of those moments has to be particularly consequential on its own. The significance comes from repetition.
This is where the individual experience begins to connect to organizational culture. When a particular pattern occurs repeatedly, people adapt to it. They learn who tends to receive attention, whose ideas get developed, who gets interrupted, who gets deferred to, and whose disagreement creates friction. Eventually those patterns become part of how the organization operates, even when nobody has explicitly decided that they should.
The women in this group were already highly accomplished. They had reached positions where they were expected to be confident, decisive, and authoritative. That made the pattern especially interesting. The question was not whether they were capable of confidence. It was whether subtle social signals were influencing when and how that confidence was expressed.
There is another complication for people in senior positions. Their authority can make some of these patterns harder to see. People behave differently around someone with substantial power. They may be more careful about what they say, less likely to challenge them directly, and less likely to explain the small moments that are affecting their participation.
A leader can therefore receive considerable information about the organization’s performance while receiving surprisingly little information about how their own presence is shaping the behavior of the people around them.
This is what we mean by the nanodynamics of power: the small behavioral exchanges through which power is communicated and experienced. A glance, a pause, an interruption, a response, or a decision about whose idea to develop can seem inconsequential when viewed individually. Repeated across hundreds of interactions, they can influence who feels confident enough to speak, who expects to be heard, and whose ideas become part of the conversation.
And these dynamics do not stop at the C-suite. They operate anywhere people have different levels of authority, influence, status, or perceived credibility. The difference at the top is that the consequences can be harder to see because the people experiencing them are often assumed to have already developed the confidence and authority to withstand them.
That assumption deserves more scrutiny.
For leaders, the useful question is fairly practical: What patterns are people experiencing around me that I am not experiencing myself?
Answering that question requires paying attention to behavior at a finer level than most leadership programs typically ask leaders to consider. It also requires resisting the temptation to assign meaning to every individual interaction. A glance does not necessarily mean anything. An interruption does not necessarily reveal a person’s view of your authority. What matters is the pattern, particularly when the same pattern appears repeatedly across situations and relationships.
Power does not only operate through major decisions, formal authority, or explicit direction. It also operates through ordinary interactions that are easy to overlook. At the highest levels of an organization, where those patterns can influence how people participate and what they learn about their own standing, those interactions are worth paying attention to.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Books.
Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068–1074.
Huttenlocher, P. R. (2002). Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex.Harvard University Press.
AI Disclaimer: The ideas are mine, and I’ve been using them in my work for the past decade. AI did a line edit, which means it may have improved my writing, ruined my voice, or added a little AI wisdom where none was requested. If something sounds suspiciously like a robot, blame the robot.
Myra LalDin is a leadership consultant specializing in the behavioral and cognitive dynamics of power, leadership, and organizational behavior. She advises leaders on how subtle social interactions shape individual and organizational outcomes.