Ten years ago, this same executive genuinely cried during a team member's difficult personal update, showed up at the hospital, remembered everyone's kids' names without effort. Now the same person walks past a visibly struggling employee without breaking stride, mid-sentence about quarterly targets, and doesn't seem to register the disconnect at all. I've watched this exact transformation happen slowly enough that nobody in the room, including the executive, ever consciously chose it. Here's the hard truth: power doesn't just reveal character, it actively reshapes the brain's capacity for empathy, and almost nobody warns rising leaders that this cost exists until it's already well underway.
Power Genuinely Changes How the Brain Processes Other People
Research on the psychological effects of power consistently shows a measurable decline in perspective-taking and empathic accuracy as people accumulate authority and status, not because powerful people start out less caring, but because power itself reduces the brain's motivation to accurately model other people's internal states. When you depend on others for your outcomes, understanding their perspective is a survival necessity. When others increasingly depend on you instead, that same mental effort becomes optional, and the brain, always looking for efficiency, quietly stops investing in it as automatically as it once did.
Think of it like a muscle that atrophies not from injury but from simple disuse. A junior employee's empathy muscle gets exercised constantly, out of genuine necessity, reading a boss's mood, anticipating a colleague's needs, staying attuned to avoid friction. A senior executive's same muscle, needed less and less as others adapt to accommodate them instead, can weaken measurably over years, not through any dramatic event, just through a slow, cumulative lack of the exact demand that used to keep it strong.
Early Warning Signs of the God Complex Taking Hold
- A growing impatience with perspectives that don't immediately align with your own analysis of a situation.
- Feedback from your team becoming noticeably softer or less honest over time, without you fully registering the shift.
- A creeping sense that your intuition is simply more reliable than input from people with less authority than you.
Pause and Reflect: Take ten seconds and think honestly about the last time someone junior to you disagreed with your view and you genuinely changed your mind because of it. How long ago was that, really?
Why This Doesn't Happen Equally to Everyone in Power
People higher in trait Agreeableness tend to resist this erosion longer, since their baseline orientation toward others' wellbeing provides some natural counterweight to power's isolating effects, though even highly agreeable leaders aren't fully immune once the structural incentives shift strongly enough around them. People higher in Openness sometimes retain more empathic accuracy simply because their curiosity about other perspectives remains active regardless of hierarchy, treating a junior employee's viewpoint as genuinely interesting information rather than something automatically inferior to their own.
People with lower baseline humility, or a stronger pre-existing need for status and validation before ever reaching power, tend to show the sharpest empathy decline once actually granted real authority, since power in that case doesn't create a new tendency so much as it removes the social checks that had previously kept an existing tendency in check.
A Micro-Insight Worth Sitting With
Here's something worth sitting with: the god complex rarely announces itself as arrogance from the inside. It usually feels like clarity, a growing confidence that your read on situations is simply more accurate than everyone else's, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. Nobody wakes up deciding to stop caring about their team. They wake up feeling increasingly, genuinely certain they already understand what their team needs, which quietly makes actually listening feel unnecessary.
What If You Can't Tell From the Inside Whether This Is Happening to You?
Here's a fair, honest complication: what if the entire mechanism described here operates specifically by making itself invisible to the person experiencing it, meaning self-reflection alone might not be a reliable enough tool to catch it happening in real time? This is a legitimate concern, and it's exactly why external, structured feedback becomes more important, not less, the higher you rise. Anonymous 360-degree feedback, a trusted advisor with explicit permission to be brutally honest, or simply and directly asking former peers who now report to you whether they've noticed a shift, these external checks catch what internal reflection alone often can't.
It also helps to build small, deliberate structural habits that force genuine engagement with other perspectives regardless of how confident you currently feel, regularly meeting with the most junior people in your organization without an agenda, or requiring yourself to seek out the specific perspective most likely to disagree with your current plan before finalizing any major decision.
What If Confronting This in Yourself Feels Too Threatening?
Here's a fair, honest complication worth naming: what if reading this triggers real defensiveness, a strong internal resistance to the idea that your own empathy might have quietly eroded, since admitting that feels like admitting you've become someone you wouldn't have respected earlier in your career? That defensiveness is worth noticing rather than immediately dismissing, since it's often a sign the pattern described here is landing closer to home than feels comfortable. Nobody wants to believe their own compassion has genuinely diminished, which is exactly the kind of resistance that keeps the pattern quietly protected from honest examination in the first place.
A useful, less threatening entry point is starting with curiosity rather than judgment, simply gathering evidence before drawing any conclusion about what it means. Tracking, honestly and privately, how often you've genuinely changed your mind based on someone junior's input over the last month, without immediately interpreting the number one way or another, tends to produce more honest self-assessment than jumping straight to either harsh self-criticism or defensive denial.
There's a bigger "what if" worth sitting with too: what if the willingness to even consider this uncomfortable possibility, rather than dismissing it outright, is itself meaningful evidence that your empathy hasn't fully eroded after all, since the god complex, at its most advanced, rarely leaves room for this kind of self-doubt to exist at all?
A Client Story: The CEO Who Asked to Be Interrupted
A client of mine, a genuinely well-intentioned CEO, had grown increasingly frustrated that meetings had become quieter over the years, mistaking the silence for alignment rather than recognizing it as fear. When we dug into it, his own behavior, subtly dismissive reactions to disagreement, had trained his team to simply stop offering it. He instituted a specific, deliberate practice: explicitly asking, at the start of every major meeting, for someone to argue the opposite of whatever he proposed, and genuinely rewarding whoever did it best. Within months, the quality and honesty of feedback in the room noticeably improved. He told me the hardest part wasn't building the practice, it was accepting how much his own unconscious behavior had been quietly silencing the very people he needed to hear from most.
If you've noticed feedback growing quieter around you as your responsibility has grown, it's worth examining honestly whether power has been reshaping your own capacity for empathy without your full awareness. Understanding your own natural tendencies under pressure and authority is exactly the kind of insight the MyTraitsLab Personality Test can help you uncover.
