Power With Purpose: Why Leadership Source Matters More Than Style

Power With Purpose: Why Leadership Source Matters More Than Style
Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

Have you ever walked out of a high-stakes meeting and wondered whether the silence after what you said was agreement - or just compliance?

Whether the confident, authoritative voice that drove the decision got the best outcome - or just the fastest one?

Whether the things that would have made it succeed were left unsaid - not because people didn’t see them, but because it didn’t feel safe, or worth it, to say them?

If you have - you already understand the difference between authority that commands compliance and leadership that earns commitment.

The difference between leading from a place of proving and leading from a place of purpose isn’t visible. But it’s felt. The style doesn’t define the leader. Knowing when to be direct and when to listen, when to push and when to hold back - that’s skill. But the style is just the delivery. What matters is what’s driving it. And when that source is genuine purpose rather than the need to prove - people feel it, even when they can’t name it.

That difference shows up in whether people comply or commit. Whether difficult truths surface early - while something can still be done - or stay hidden until the cost is already paid. Whether teams bring their best thinking to difficult problems, or simply what they think leaders want to hear. In complex organisations, compliance is not enough. In transformation and delivery environments, I’ve seen this difference repeatedly: authority can drive fast decisions, but commitment is what sustains execution when things get hard.

So the question underneath all of it - the one most leaders never stop to ask - is this: where is your leadership actually coming from?

That question is really a question about personal power. Not the formal kind - the title, the authority, the org chart. But the internal kind. The source that determines whether your leadership lands or just occupies space.

Janet Hagberg spent decades researching exactly this. Her model - the Six Stages of Personal Power - gave me language for something I’d been observing in organisations and leadership for years, but had never been able to fully articulate. She defines personal power in a way that immediately reframes the conversation:

“Personal power is the extent to which one is able to link the outer capacity for action with the inner capacity for reflection.”

I came across her work in Leon VanderPol’s A Shift in Being. And what the model maps - six stages through which our relationship with personal power develops - isn’t a hierarchy of better or worse. It’s a mirror. One that shows you where you are, what’s driving you, and whether you’re leading on purpose or on autopilot.

Research is catching up to what many experienced leaders already know. Chris Lipp, writing in Leader to Leader in 2025, argues that the dichotomy between servant leadership and dominance is fabricated - that personal power is an internal state that radiates outward, underlying courage, authority, and trust regardless of leadership style. The source, not the style, is what people respond to.

The Six Stages: A Map of Inner Power

Hagberg’s model identifies six stages through which our relationship with personal power develops over a lifetime. Each stage isn’t just a mindset - it’s a whole way of being. How you see yourself, how you relate to others, and critically - the source of your power.

You don’t move through these on a fixed timeline. What moves you is awareness and the willingness to look honestly at what’s driving you. Read through and see where you recognise yourself - not to judge, but to see clearly.

Stage 1 - Powerlessness

Dependence, low self-esteem, a sense of being trapped. Helpless - but not hopeless. The first stirring of power is the recognition that something must change.

Stage 2 - Power by Association

Identity is borrowed from others - a mentor, a group, an institution. Power comes from who believes in you and who you stand next to.

Stage 3 - Power by Achievement: The Outer Warrior

The dominant stage in most professional cultures. Ambitious, competitive, relentless. Power is earned through results. This is where the warrior fights hardest - and where many stay indefinitely, mistaking the treadmill for the destination.

Stage 4 - Power by Reflection

A turning inward. The achiever begins to question their own story. More collaborative, more honest, more capable of mentoring. The ego softens enough to actually listen.

The Wall - Moving beyond intellect · Letting go of control · Facing the shadow · A crisis of integrity

Stage 5 - Power by Purpose: The Inner Warrior

Self-accepting, courageous, grounded. Living from a sense of calling rather than a hunger for recognition. The warrior energy remains - but now it serves something larger than the self.

Stage 6 - Power by Wisdom

Quiet service. Compassion without agenda. Power without need for recognition. The ego has been thoroughly surrendered; what remains is presence.

The Warrior Who Proves. The Warrior Who Leads.

Stage 3 - Power by Achievement - is where most ambitious people live. It built something real. The expertise, the results, the drive to deliver. There is genuine power here, and it shouldn’t be dismissed.

But it has a ceiling. And at some point, for almost everyone who has pushed hard enough and long enough, something shifts. VanderPol calls it the inner earthquake - the signal that something needs to change, not in the strategy, but in the source.

Crossing The Wall

Between Stage 4 and Stage 5 sits what Hagberg calls “The Wall.” It cannot be strategised around. It demands something the achievement-oriented leader finds almost unbearable: letting go of the identity that achievement built. VanderPol frames this as a “crisis of integrity” - the moment the gap between the leader you’re performing to be and the leader you actually are becomes impossible to ignore.

The Stage 5 Warrior: Purposeful, Humble, Fierce

What emerges on the other side of The Wall is not weakness. It is a more refined, more durable, and ultimately more powerful version of the warrior. Stage 5 - Power by Purpose - keeps all the courage, commitment, and inner fire of Stage 3. But the energy is no longer pointed at proving. It’s pointed at something worth building.

This is the archetype that speaks to anyone who has felt the pull between ambition and meaning - between doing more and being more.

Authority without purpose is influence people endure. Purpose behind power is something people feel.

The Warrior Was Never the Problem

This framework doesn’t ask you to stop being a warrior. It doesn’t say ambition is the problem, that achievement is shallow, or that you should want less. It says: there’s more.

The drive, the discipline, the willingness to do hard things - all of that is still present in Stage 5. It’s just pointed at something different. Not at proving. At building something that genuinely matters. And paradoxically, that’s when leadership becomes most powerful. Not power over. Power with.

The warrior who proves and the warrior who leads are not as far apart as they look. The journey between them doesn’t require you to become someone else. It requires you to lead from a deeper place - past the performing, past the need to be the most capable person in the room, toward something your team can actually follow. Whether you’re in Stage 3, at The Wall, or somewhere in between - the question is the same one we started with: where is your leadership actually coming from? And is it getting you the outcomes that matter?

The framework is a mirror. See where you are. See what’s driving your leadership. And then lead - consciously, not by default.

Where is your sense of power coming from today? And is it actually working for you?

Which stage are you at?

References


Written on May 30, 2026