For thirty years, I walked into conference rooms and watched people straighten in their chairs. They’d quiet down when I spoke.
My suggestions became decisions. My questions got immediate, detailed answers. I thought I’d built something valuable: genuine professional respect earned through decades of good judgment and fair dealing.
Then I retired. Within six months, the phone stopped ringing. Former colleagues who used to seek my input suddenly had full calendars. The deference I’d grown accustomed to vanished like morning mist.
That’s when the uncomfortable truth hit me: they hadn’t been deferring to my wisdom or experience. They’d been deferring to my signature on their paychecks.
The realization stung more than I care to admit. But it also taught me something crucial about power, respect, and the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world.
The architecture of deference
In those thirty years of high-stakes negotiations, I became an expert at reading rooms. Who had real leverage, who was bluffing, who needed the deal more than they’d admit.
But somehow, I never applied that same analysis to my own position. I confused structural power with personal influence.
Here’s what actually happens in those rooms where someone signs the checks: people calculate risk with every word. When the boss suggests something, disagreement becomes expensive. Not just financially, but socially. You become the difficult one, the person who “doesn’t get it,” the one who might not be a team player. So people nod. They agree. They defer.
The fascinating part is how good we become at convincing ourselves it’s genuine. The person with power starts believing they really do have the best ideas. The people deferring start finding reasons why the boss might actually be right. It’s not conscious manipulation. It’s human psychology protecting everyone from an uncomfortable reality.
I remember countless meetings where my suggestions sailed through unchallenged. At the time, I thought I was particularly insightful that day.
Looking back, I can see the subtle calculations happening around the table. The junior analyst who started to object but caught herself. The department head who reframed his opposing view as a supporting point. The careful dance everyone does around institutional power.
When the music stops
Retirement strips away the institutional scaffolding that props up our professional identity. No title, no budget, no formal authority. Just you and whatever genuine relationships you’ve actually built. For many of us, it’s the first honest feedback we’ve received in decades.
The first few months were brutal for my ego. People who used to respond to my emails within hours now took days, if they responded at all. Lunch invitations I extended were met with vague promises to “circle back.” The industry conferences that used to court my participation suddenly forgot I existed.
But here’s what made it worse: I could see the same pattern playing out with my successor. The same people who’d stopped calling me were now laughing a bit too hard at his jokes, nodding a bit too enthusiastically at his observations. The deference had simply transferred to the new signature on the checks.
The respect you actually earned
Once I stopped sulking about my wounded pride, something interesting emerged. A handful of relationships survived the transition. Not many, but some.
These were the people who still called, who still asked for advice, who still valued my perspective even though I couldn’t do anything for their careers anymore.
These relationships taught me what real professional respect looks like. It’s quieter than institutional deference. It doesn’t announce itself in meetings or show up in the speed of email responses.
It appears in the colleague who calls to run something by you because they genuinely value your judgment. It’s the former employee who updates you on their career because you played a meaningful role in their development.
Real respect also looks different in practice. People actually push back on your ideas now. They’ll tell you when they think you’re wrong. The conversation becomes genuine dialogue instead of performance. It’s less comfortable but infinitely more valuable.
Power dynamics never really go away
Even in retirement, I catch myself reading the power dynamics in every room. Old habits from decades of negotiation don’t just disappear.
At the community board meeting, I can spot who actually influences decisions versus who just talks a lot. At the golf club, I see the subtle deference patterns around wealth and social standing.
The difference now is that I’m usually outside these power structures. This distance provides clarity.
You see how much energy people spend managing up and sideways, protecting their position, avoiding any risk to their standing. You realize how much of professional life is actually about navigating power rather than doing the work itself.
Understanding this doesn’t make you cynical, just realistic. People respond to incentives. They protect their interests. They defer to power because that’s how hierarchies function. The problem isn’t the system itself but our failure to acknowledge it honestly.
Building something beyond the signature
If you’re still in that position of institutional power, still the person signing checks, here’s what I wish I’d understood earlier: the deference you’re experiencing is temporary and conditional. It’s not personal. It comes with the role and leaves with it too.
This doesn’t mean you can’t build genuine respect, but you have to work against the current of institutional dynamics to do it. You have to actively invite dissent. You have to demonstrate that disagreement won’t be punished. You have to separate your ideas from your authority and let them compete on merit.
More importantly, you have to invest in relationships that transcend the transactional. The mentoring that goes beyond what benefits your department. The support that continues even when someone leaves your organization. The connections built on mutual interest rather than mutual benefit.
Closing thoughts
Six months into retirement taught me more about power and respect than thirty years of wielding it. The deference I mistook for respect was just good organizational behavior. People were managing risk, maintaining stability, playing the game we all agreed to play.
There’s no shame in this recognition. We all operate within systems of power, adjusting our behavior to navigate them successfully. The shame would be in not seeing it clearly, in confusing the temporary privileges of position with permanent personal qualities.
The real question isn’t whether people defer to your power or your person. It’s what you do with that clarity once you have it. Do you use your position to extract compliance, or do you work to build something that survives beyond your signature?
My rule of thumb now: assume any deference you receive is about the chair you’re sitting in, not the person sitting in it. Then work to be worthy of respect that would exist even if the chair disappeared. Because eventually, inevitably, it will.
