Recently I had pause to consider the nature of the ‘power trip’. The usual characteristics are:

• The person in question is associated with a person in a role with perceived influence
• The person aspires to carry more gravitas than they currently do / believe they do
• The person feels inferior to those around them or has ‘imposter syndrome’
• The person is a junior / lower level in the chain and is looking for a pathway forwards

In any of these situations, the situation tends to manifest itself in several ways:

• Aggressive, borderline threatening behaviour – demanding, threatening escalation etc.
• A distancing from peers where the person in question considers themselves senior to their peer group based on association with perceived higher levels
• An adoption of workload (or lack of it!) or work style commensurate with those higher levels
• An inability to question or reject questionable decisions or behaviours or to operate on own initiative

Simply depicting the point (and its true that the blue line descends more steeply in reality):

The reality is that in most cases you operate ‘for’ the higher person and not ‘with’ them. They will have different priorities and goals, most of which will be self focussed by necessity and all of which designed without your personal protection in mind.

My experience over the last few decades is that the way to gain co-operation is to find good people and work with them, learn from them and support them where necessary. The law of reciprocity is very real and works (most of the time). Never more than in human relationships do you find that a large amount of what you get out is directly related to what you put in.

If you ‘put all of your eggs in one basket’ make sure its the right one otherwise they might end up scrambled!