Most people can guess where their power comes from. Few have ever tested it.
This is one of the exercises drawn from Ethical Strategic Influence, designed to help professionals identify where their power is actually found, and what genuinely moves the needle when they need to influence others.
It starts with the seven sources of power: Credibility, Character, Presence, Position, Connections, Skills and Agenda. Most professionals can list these once shown them. Almost none have ever ranked them, for themselves or for the people around them.
Take the seven sources and place them in the order they influence you personally. Not the order you would like them to matter, the order they actually do. Then take someone you consider genuinely influential and rank the same seven for them. Notice where the two lists agree, and where they diverge sharply.
That divergence is the point of the exercise. It is rarely where people expect.
Why the divergence matters
Most professionals assume the people who influence them do so through Credibility or Position, since those are the sources organisations recognise and reward. In practice, Character and Presence are just as often the real driver, quietly doing the work that a job title gets credited for.
The same mismatch appears in reverse. A person’s own view of their power source rarely matches how others actually experience it. Someone convinced their Skills carry them may be leaning, unnoticed, on Connections built over years. Someone who believes Position protects them may be one reorganisation away from discovering it never did.
Running this exercise properly, across several people and with honest reflection, exposes patterns a single self-assessment cannot. Which source is doing more work than assumed. Which is doing less. Where the gap between self-perception and reality is largest.
The most effective and enduring senior leaders have learned to develop their power ethically and strategically. They still build power. They still diagnose where others hold theirs. They do this with integrity and trust, and that is what makes it endure.
Colin Gautrey, 2015. Updated July 2026
This exercise only works if you’re honest about where the divergence actually sits, and honest with yourself about what to do with what it reveals.
See how professionals in organisations like GSK, Zurich, and the NHS are using this to turn that kind of diagnosis into something they can actually act on..