PowerU 50: Building Compound Power Through Meaningful Relationships

#PowerU 50! This is lesson 3.5 in a mini-series on power that came out of a power game Lyndsay Poaps and I ran earlier this year. Quick re-cap: lesson three (PowerU #49) was that knowing people beats knowing things every time, because you’ll never have enough time to know everything you need to know. Today I want to go deeper on that. It’s not just about relationships. It’s about the quality of those relationships. If you’re building long-term relationships purely through transactions, you’re caught in one of two traps: Trap 1 - Either you came in with massive resources to trade—in which case, why are you giving up your power to be in this relationship? Trap 2 - You’re running a transactional pyramid scheme: borrowing power from one relationship to transact with another, always planning to pay it back. That’s a power debt cycle. It’s not sustainable. Meaningful relationships create compound power. They generate resources and influence that exceed any single transaction. Over time, you’re building relational capital, informational capital, other forms of power you don’t have immediate personal access to. You’re creating mutual investment in each other’s success, which changes the entire incentive structure of power. When you need to mobilize power, these are the people who actually show up. 💪 This is what power literacy looks like in practice: understanding that distributing your power across a network makes you less vulnerable, not weaker. So ask yourself: Am I building relationships that create compound power, or am I just stacking transactions that build power debt over time? 🤔 #PowerLiteracy #PowerU #Leadership #RelationalCapital #SystemsChange #PolicyChange #SocialChange