At senior level, competence keeps working, yet its protective power thins out. People still notice whether you deliver, whether you understand the business, whether you can solve hard problems. What changes is that these traits stop being distinctive. In board facing roles, competence becomes a baseline expectation, and reputation becomes the variable.

Power gradually diminishes rather than dramatically declining in the spotlight. It quietly erodes over time, until a leader realises their once weighty decisions now face doubt and qualification. This gradual weakening is usually explained as a shift in sentiment or a tougher media cycle. A quieter cause sits underneath it: narrative drift, the slow separation between what a leader is understood to stand for and what their actions, choices and presence now suggest.

Executive positioning loses its effectiveness when it is treated as a higher-status version of personal branding. The two practices share some surface features: both involve words, images and public interpretation. That resemblance has allowed tactical LinkedIn “makeovers” to borrow the authority of serious reputation work.

What people see as a sudden fall is usually the moment a longer internal drift becomes impossible to ignore. Boards and executives often experience that moment as a surprise because the signals were dispersed, partial or inconvenient. The external rupture feels abrupt only because the organisation had become practiced at quietly managing disagreement, uncertainty and weak accountability.