Power We Don’t Name Still Shapes the System

Most transitional leaders can recall the moment when they encountered the invisible wall of pillows that softly, but clearly, blocked their way.

A decision had been made. It was within their formal authority. It was reasonable, well-considered, communicated clearly. And then nothing happened. Or something happened, but not what was decided. Or the decision technically held, but the energy around it shifted in ways that were hard to name. The leader, looking at the org chart, had every reason to expect movement. The system had other ideas.

This experience is so common in transitional leadership that it deserves a name. What the leader is encountering is not resistance, exactly. It is not insubordination. It is the consistent, persistent operation of informal power inside a system that prefers not to acknowledge it has any.

Most communities tell themselves a particular story about how they work. They describe themselves as collaborative, as relational, as consensus-driven. They emphasize shared leadership and flat structures. They speak with some pride about the absence of hierarchy. And often, in important ways, these descriptions are true. But they are not the whole truth.

Power does not disappear because a community declines to name it. It simply operates without supervision. And unnamed power tends to be the most consequential kind, because it cannot be questioned, adjusted, or held accountable. It moves through the system on assumptions everyone shares but no one articulates.

In congregations and organizations, informal power lives in predictable places. It lives in longevity. The people who remember how things were done two pastors ago, three executive directors ago, carry an authority that has nothing to do with their current role. It lives in lineage and family. It lives in money, which can be exercised behind the scenes without anyone naming it as influence. It lives in proximity to the previous leader, whose preferences continue to shape what the community treats as normal. It lives in control of information, in committee chairs who decide what reaches the agenda, in the small group that meets before the meeting to agree on what will happen at the meeting. It lives in the ability to grant or withhold approval, which in close-knit communities can be more powerful than any formal vote.

None of this is necessarily corrupt. Most of it developed for reasons that once made sense. But it is real, and it is operating, whether or not anyone names it.

This is where the transitional leader’s particular position becomes important. The interim arrives with significant formal authority. The title is real. The responsibilities are real. The decision-making scope, in most cases, is substantial. By the standards of an org chart, the transitional leader has considerable power. And almost no informal power at all.

The community’s informal power structures predate the leader by years, sometimes decades. They will outlast the leader’s tenure. The relationships, debts, alliances, and unspoken agreements that actually move the system were in place long before the interim arrived and will continue functioning long after the interim leaves. The transitional leader, by definition, has not had time to build the relational capital that informal power runs on. And the community knows this, even when it would not say so out loud.

This is why decisions that should “just work” often don’t.

The leader exercises formal authority. The system absorbs that exercise of authority, runs it through the informal structures the leader cannot see, and produces an outcome that may bear only passing resemblance to what was decided. The leader is left wondering what went wrong, whether the decision was unclear, whether they failed to communicate well, whether they misjudged the situation. Often, none of those things is the problem.

The problem is that formal authority and informal power are not the same thing, and the transitional leader has one without the other. Most transitional leaders blame themselves for friction that the system was always going to produce. They assume the difficulty is about their leadership when it is, in fact, about the structure of their position. Recognizing this changes things.

It does not make the difficulty disappear. But it shifts the question. The leader stops asking, “Why isn’t this working?” and starts asking, “What informal power is operating here that I cannot yet see?” That is a more useful question, and it leads to better leadership.

Naming informal power does not dismantle it. It is not a confrontation. It is not an accusation. What naming does is make the system legible. The leader who can see the informal power in the room can work with it, work around it, or enter into honest conversation with it. The leader who cannot see it ends up exhausted, confused, or in conflicts they did not choose and do not understand. Legibility is its own form of leadership.

It allows the transitional leader to ask better questions. Who actually needs to be consulted before this decision, regardless of what the bylaws say? Whose approval, withheld or granted, will determine whether this moves? Whose memory of the community gives them a kind of authority the org chart does not capture? These are not cynical questions. They are practical ones. A leader who knows the answers can lead more effectively than one who does not.

There is an ego cost here, too. Naming informal power often means admitting that formal authority is less decisive than the leader hoped. It means accepting that the title does not move the system as much as the title suggests it should. For leaders who entered the role expecting their authority to be sufficient, this can be a genuinely difficult adjustment. The honest reckoning is that formal authority is necessary but not sufficient, and that pretending otherwise leads to predictable forms of failure.

The good news is that once a transitional leader can see informal power clearly, formal authority begins to work better. Not because the leader has gained informal power, but because the leader has stopped trying to use formal authority to do something formal authority cannot do on its own. Decisions get made in conversation with the system as it actually is, rather than the system as the org chart describes it.

Naming all of this makes leadership possible. This does not mean control or dominance. It does not mean the elimination of informal power, which is neither possible nor desirable. What naming makes possible is honesty. And honesty is what allows formal authority to do the work it was meant to do.

Power we don’t name still shapes the system. It shapes it more, in fact, because nothing accountable is happening to it. The transitional leader’s task is not to seize informal power or to pretend it doesn’t exist. The task is to see it clearly enough to lead with both hands open, knowing what is actually in the room.

More will emerge.

For now, this is enough.