Leadership Unseen: Power & Identity

Leadership is often presented as systems, performance, and efficiency. But beneath the surface lies something far more powerful: forces that shape behavior, culture, and outcomes before you even realize it. Anxiety, power, and identity are the invisible engines of every decision, every interaction, every organization. Understanding them isn’t optional; it’s essential for anyone who wants to lead with insight, clarity, and real influence.

Leadership on the Surface

Leadership is a popular yet still such unexplored topic. The foundations were and are still being covered by many, but there are aspects of it that are rarely mentioned. As a result, people who are curious, reflective, and sensitive to nuance can feel bored with what is out there, going over the same things again and again, dressed in slightly different language.

But if you look outside, there are topics we never seem to get tired of. Empires rising and falling. Civilisations emerging and vanishing. The quiet forces behind collapse and greatness.

Similarly with culture in the context of business - it’s such a dull theme (it often feels this way to me). One you almost want to run away from. But once we zoom out, culture becomes the most fascinating thing about life and people: the beating heart of civilisations. The reason why people can look at the same thing and understand it differently.

Why can’t leadership and business culture be like that?

Or can they?

In our chase for perfect completion and efficiency, we took broad topics one could spend a whole life exploring and tried to compress them into a few key words. We removed emotions. Removed context. Removed depth. What remained was a neat, functional surface: efficient, transferable, and strangely lifeless. How no one noticed this feels like a collective failure. Or maybe we noticed and simply didn’t care.

Well, I did.

Which is why this frustration kept boiling over. I would participate and listen to conversations about leadership and culture, read articles that were technically correct, and feel absolutely nothing. Meetings where everyone nodded, frameworks that made sense, language that sounded right. And yet something essential was missing. Twice, I was close to giving up on the topic altogether. Every time, something pulled me back. Not clarity. Something much stronger. Curiosity.

Still, I kept asking myself: how can I talk about something that feels so soft or boring even to me, despite all my genuine interest and understanding? Can this be made interesting or is the problem deeper than that?

And then something shifted.

Instead of looking at leadership and culture literally, I decided to look beneath the surface. Not at what they are supposed to be, but at what they actually are.

Invisible Forces of Leadership

When we talk about leadership, the first things that usually come to mind are management, systems, performance, alignment, and optimization.

And yes, all of that matters.

But if we pause and strip leadership down from strategies and revenues, this is what remains:

anxiety, trust, silence, power, identity,
fear of looking stupid, fear of conflict,
moral compromise, social puzzles

Now we are talking.

This is where mystery appears. Where depth returns. Where boredom disappears. It suddenly became clear to me that the future of leadership is not - and should not be - more efficient, more clinical, more business-like.

It should move in the opposite direction. Back to where leadership comes from: social psychology, anthropology, human dynamics, moral dilemmas, lived experience. The future of leadership should be more human. At least, that's what I want to walk into. 

From this list, three forces stood out to me immediately: anxiety, power, and identity.

They are endlessly discussable without becoming boring, because there is always another angle, another story, another context. And more importantly, they are not abstract ideas. They are real forces shaping everything.

Power → who can act, who must adapt

Identity → who am I allowed to be here?

Anxiety → what happens if I’m wrong, seen, or excluded?

Every workplace problem you can name reduces to some combination of these three.

People don’t argue about strategy. They argue about status. People don’t stay silent because they lack ideas. They stay silent because of risk. People don’t resist change because of logic. They resist because of identity threat.

Once you see this, it’s hard to unsee it.

I wanted to take this further. I asked myself: in what context could I explore these forces without defaulting to work and business language, and still keep them valid, sharp, and insightful?

The answer appeared almost immediately.

Power

Power has always fascinated us. Who gains it. Who loses it. Who should never have had it in the first place. Cultural norms deciding who is allowed to speak, act, rule, rebel. This is the story of history: kings, empires, rise - and of collapse.

At first glance, comparing modern leaders to kings sounds dramatic. Obviously, the stakes are different. No executions. No exile. Usually.

But the analogy holds because the dynamics are the same.

Same dynamics. Lower stakes. Same mistakes.

People who should not have power get it. People who have power lose touch with reality. Groups defend the indefensible. Catastrophe follows. Not because of “stupidity” or weakness, but because of human dynamics.

This led me to a central question that keeps returning:

Why does power keep breaking people no matter the century?

This is where leadership stopped being a business topic for me and became a human one. 

Anxiety as lack of power

Then there is anxiety. What is anxiety, if not a lack of power?

The lack of power to slow down. To pause. To choose timing. To be unavailable. To make a mistake without consequences. To exist without constant self-monitoring.

Seen this way, anxiety stops looking like a personal flaw, and it becomes a response to structural conditions. The more we understand power, the more we can recognize anxiety as a meaningful feedback mechanism rather than a weakness.

But anxiety alone doesn’t explain why leadership feels so difficult. The next piece of the puzzle is identity: the lens through which power and anxiety operate.

Culture & Identity

Culture is often treated as soft, decorative, or secondary. But zoom out, and it becomes one of the most powerful forces shaping human behavior. Culture determines who belongs, who can speak, what is acceptable, and what is off-limits, long before formal authority is applied. It frames expectations, shapes perception, and silently enforces rules.

Identity is the individual reflection of that culture. In any organization, we ask ourselves: who am I allowed to be here? Which parts of me can I show, and which must remain hidden? Identity defines how we navigate power and respond to risk. It explains why some people speak up while others remain silent, why ambition flourishes in some contexts and withers in others.

Consider how culture shapes global differences. Traveling from Denmark to Spain to Thailand, we notice instantly how behavior, interaction, and hierarchy are influenced by invisible norms. Yet the human questions remain universal: belonging, agency, recognition, and safety. Leadership, stripped down, is the art of navigating those invisible forces.

When leadership and culture are understood through power and identity, we see the structural nature of influence: it is not about individual will or morality alone. It’s about the system that surrounds us and the invisible rules it enforces.

Leaders who recognize this can leverage the forces rather than be constrained by them turning structural side effects into advantages.

Why this Matters

Leadership challenges are rarely personal failures. They are often structural side effects of the interplay between power, identity, and anxiety. Understanding these forces doesn’t eliminate difficulty, but it allows us to do something about it.

That’s the strange power of uncovering blind spots. Once named, they feel obvious. Nothing changes and yet everything becomes clearer.

At Ace, our goal is to explore these invisible forces. Not to provide neat answers, but to reveal the mechanisms shaping behavior, decision-making, and culture. We aim to name what usually remains unseen, to make leadership more human, more nuanced, and more structurally intelligible.

Ironically, the more I focused on the “people” aspects, the more I noticed that leadership challenges or even business challenges are rarely personal failures. They are structural side effects. But that means they can be figured out, corrected, and become your advantage. Only if you know, though.

This journey isn’t about perfection. It isn’t about packaged solutions. It’s about curiosity, discovery, and learning to see the structures that shape what people do and how they feel. Once you recognize these forces, you gain insight, clarity, and a new kind of leverage: the ability to act with awareness in a complex human system.

Closing

Leadership is not just a set of skills or frameworks. It is an exploration of power, identity, and the structures that shape human behavior. Understanding these forces doesn’t make leadership simple, but it makes it real, possible to navigate, and endlessly fascinating.

If you choose to join us, this won’t be about perfection or certainty. It will be about the highest level of strategic advantage via realness, discovery, and learning, to see what usually remains unseen. One thing is certain: it will be an interesting journey.