It looks like a paradox. The people who climb to the top of organisations presumably got there partly by reading rooms and people well, and yet a striking number of successful leaders turn out to be remarkably unaware of how they come across, what their weaknesses are, or the effect they have on the people around them. The puzzle dissolves once you stop assuming that self-awareness is what got them there and start looking at what success does to a person on the way up. The uncomfortable finding from the research is not that oblivious people rise, but that rising itself tends to erode self-awareness, and that the conditions of leadership quietly strip away the very things self-awareness depends on.
Power dulls the ability to see past yourself
The first mechanism is that power changes how the mind attends to other people, and not for the better. In a set of experiments by Adam Galinsky and colleagues, people made to feel powerful were less likely to spontaneously take another person’s visual perspective, more likely to assume others shared their own private knowledge, and less accurate at reading others’ emotional expressions, suggesting that power leads people to anchor heavily on their own vantage point and adjust too little to anyone else’s.
Self-awareness is not a purely internal act; a large part of it is seeing yourself as others see you, which requires the ability to step outside your own head and take an outside perspective. That is precisely the capacity power blunts. A leader who has spent years accumulating authority has, without noticing, been training themselves to weight their own viewpoint ever more heavily and everyone else’s ever less, which is close to the opposite of what accurate self-perception needs. The rise to power quietly turns down the faculty that would let a person register how they are actually landing, so the more successful someone becomes, the less naturally they check the gap between how they see themselves and how others do.
Power also inflates confidence in your own judgement
The second mechanism compounds the first: power does not just narrow perspective, it inflates certainty. In research by Nathanael Fast, Niro Sivanathan and colleagues, experiencing power reliably produced overconfident decision-making across several studies, with the heightened sense of power driving people to trust their own judgement more than the evidence warranted, sometimes to the point of costly errors.
This matters for self-awareness because honest self-appraisal depends on a certain willingness to doubt yourself, to entertain the possibility that you are wrong about your own abilities or blind to your own faults. Power erodes exactly that willingness. Feeling powerful makes your own conclusions feel more obviously correct, which leaves less room for the uncertainty that would prompt a leader to examine themselves. Combined with the perspective-narrowing effect, the picture is of a mind that both sees others’ views less clearly and trusts its own more completely, a combination almost perfectly designed to produce confident blind spots. And there is an organisational accelerant on top of the psychological one: as people rise, honest feedback dries up, because subordinates learn that telling a powerful person an unwelcome truth is risky. The leader loses the external mirror at the very moment their internal one is clouding over.
Why this is a liability, not a secret weapon
It would be a mistake to read any of this as evidence that lacking self-awareness helps people succeed, and the distinction matters. The research does not say that blind spots are an asset; it says that the process of gaining power and the position of holding it tend to create them as a side effect. If anything, the evidence on leadership points the other way, with more self-aware leaders generally making better decisions and running healthier teams, which makes the erosion described here a genuine cost of success rather than a hidden ingredient of it. Plenty of leaders are self-aware, too; the point is that they are so despite the current, not because success handed it to them.
That reframing is also where the practical lesson lives. If self-awareness naturally decays as power grows, then keeping it is not something that happens on its own but something that has to be actively maintained against the pull of the role. The leaders who stay grounded tend to do deliberately what power makes unnatural: they go out of their way to solicit candid feedback and to reward rather than punish it, they cultivate a few truth-tellers who are safe enough to disagree with them, and they consciously practise taking the perspectives of the people they lead rather than assuming those perspectives match their own. None of it is instinctive at the top, which is the whole point. The real surprise is not that so many successful leaders lack self-awareness, given everything about success conspires to take it away. It is that any of them manage to hold on to it at all.
