http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-psychology/four-ways-you-8217re-sabotaging-your-own-power-at-work/262?promo=713&tag=nl.e713

• The effort required. I don’t know of any powerful people who don’t work a lot. Esserman sleeps little and so does Rudy Crew, the former school superintendent in New York and Miami-Dade County who was named the best school superintendent in the U.S. in the spring of 2008. CEOs travel constantly and are always “onstage,” working and thinking. Great results require enormous energy and effort. Some people think they want power, but aren’t willing to devote the time. As marketing guru Keith Ferrazzi told my class, “you have to work really, really hard. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but don’t count on it.” Studies of genius in every field ranging from art to science to athletics show that while individual talent matters, it is practice and coaching - effort — that is the key to success. Why would attaining power be any different?

• The time spent on strategic relationships. Most people, naturally enough, want to spend their time with friends, family, and close work associates. The problem is that people who are closest to you are also more likely to be close to each other and to have the same information and contacts as you do. In other words, they can provide you mostly redundant information and contacts. That’s why network research consistently shows the importance of weak ties — people whom you don’t know particularly well but who enable you to access different information and social networks.

I saw someone with no scientific background or preexisting ties build an influential network and then get a job in biotechnology by assiduously reaching out to people he did not know for information and advice, and then thanking them and connecting them to each other. But doing this requires getting out of our comfort zone and our habit of associating mostly with those we already know. And it requires being strategic — in this person’s case, about whom he needed to meet and how he was going to meet them. Many people don’t want to interact with so many strangers and want their social relationships to be more “natural” rather than strategic, so they forego the opportunity to build power.

• Loss of privacy. People in power are under intense and constant public scrutiny. As former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd learned, in positions of great power, there is no such thing as a private dinner. Not only will people be watching your every move, and feeling free to comment on job-irrelevant things like the car you drive and whom you hang out with, when you have power, any mistake you do make won’t be as readily forgiven. Higher power means your actions have higher stakes, and higher consequences means less latitude. This constant scrutiny is stressful, and some people would rather have more privacy and autonomy.

• Fragile egos. People like to feel good about themselves, and one thing that people do to maintain their self-esteem is to engage in self-handicapping. Specifically, if you don’t try — or try too hard — any setback or failure won’t have the same implication for your actual abilities. In the power domain, people sometimes “opt out” of the competition, choosing to believe they are above “playing the game.” That way they don’t have to confront the inevitable setbacks.