Relational Power: Power-with instead of power-over

There is a moment in early spring that I find myself watching for every year.

It happens at the edge of the woods, or along a fence line, or in the unmowed corner of a yard where human management hasn't quite reached. It's the moment when you can see, if you look closely, that nothing is growing alone. The emerging plants are in conversation with each other — with the fungi threading through the soil beneath them, with the insects moving between them, with the light and shadow created by what's already standing. The whole system is negotiating. Trading resources. Making room.

There is no single plant running the show. There is no hierarchy organizing the emergence. There is just a dense, intricate web of relationship — and out of that web comes the extraordinary complexity and abundance of spring.

That is Relational Power. And it is the second pillar of the Framework for Regenerative Leadership because, without it, Rootedness becomes isolation. Knowing who you are only matters if you can bring that self into genuine contact with others.

What Power-With Actually Means

Most of us have been formed by institutions and industries built on power-over. It's the default architecture of business as we've inherited it — hierarchical, competitive, extractive. Someone wins, someone loses. Someone leads, someone follows. Someone sets the terms, someone accepts them. The assumption underneath all of it is that power is a fixed quantity, and that having more of it requires that someone else have less.

Power-with is a fundamentally different premise. It says that power, like soil fertility, is something that can be generated between people rather than taken from them. That genuine collaboration — not the corporate kind, where everyone performs collaboration while one person still controls the outcome, but the real kind — actually creates more capacity than any individual could access alone. That the goal of leadership is not to accumulate influence but to cultivate conditions in which everyone in the relationship can do their best work.

This isn't soft. I want to be clear about that, because power-with is often mistaken for powerlessness, or for the kind of people-pleasing that masquerades as collaboration. Power-with requires tremendous clarity about who you are and what you stand for — which is why Rootedness comes first. You cannot share power authentically if you don't know what you're bringing to the table. You cannot hold relational space for someone else's growth if you haven't done the work of knowing your own ground.

Real relational power has edges. It has discernment. It can say no. It can hold a boundary not as an act of dominance but as an act of integrity — because integrity in relationship is what makes the relationship safe enough to actually work.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When I made the decision to restructure my offer suite down to a single container for deep client work, I wasn't just simplifying. I was making a relational statement about what I believe the best work actually requires.

I'd been operating in a model where the implicit structure was: I create, you consume. I produce content, courses, masterclasses. You receive them. That's a relationship, technically, but it's a thin one. It moves in one direction. And it doesn't allow for the thing I actually care about most, which is the back-and-forth — the genuine encounter between my thinking and yours, where neither of us quite knows what's going to emerge.

The Rooted Business Container is built on a different premise entirely. It's not me delivering expertise to you. It's us thinking together, over time, about the specific reality of your specific business and life. My role isn't to have the answers. It's to hold the space steady enough that you can find yours — and to bring everything I know and have learned to the service of that process.

That's power-with. I bring my over 25 years. You bring your full knowing of your own life. Neither of us is primary. The work that emerges between us is the point.

I also see this in how I've restructured my content relationships. The Rebel's Almanac, this newsletter, is not me broadcasting to an audience. It's me writing to people I'm in relationship with — people who have been generous enough to invite my thinking into their lives on a regular basis. That changes how I write. It changes what I'm willing to say. When I write this, I'm not performing expertise. I'm thinking out loud with you, trusting that the conversation is real even when it only moves in one direction on the page.

The Spring Parallel

Ecologists have a term — mycorrhizal network — for the fungal web that connects trees in a forest, allowing them to share nutrients, water, and even chemical signals about stress or threat. The largest trees in a forest, it turns out, are not competing with the smaller ones around them. They're feeding them. The mother trees — the oldest, most established members of the ecosystem — pass resources through the network to seedlings struggling in the shade.

This is not altruism in the human sense. It is simply how the system sustains itself. The forest that shares resources is more resilient than the forest that doesn't. The trees that are in relationship with other trees outlast the ones that aren't. Isolation, for a tree, is a vulnerability. Connection is a survival strategy.

I think about this every spring when the canopy starts to fill in and the forest floor comes alive underneath it. The abundance visible above ground is a direct expression of the invisible network below. What you see is the relationship made manifest.

Power-with works the same way. The most generative, sustainable businesses I've encountered — and the most generative, sustainable leaders — are not the ones who have accumulated the most individual authority. They're the ones who have built the most genuine network of mutual trust. Who have treated their clients, collaborators, and communities as partners rather than resources. Whose power comes from relationship rather than from position.

That kind of power doesn't diminish when you share it. It compounds.

What Power-Over Costs You

I want to say something directly about the cost of power-over, because I think it often goes unnamed.

When you operate from power-over — even subtly, even with good intentions — you are constantly managing. You're managing perception, managing outcomes, managing the narrative. You're expending enormous energy maintaining a position that has to be defended because it isn't rooted in genuine relationship. And at some level, you're always a little bit alone, because real connection requires a kind of mutuality that power-over forecloses.

I've been in that dynamic in my own business. The pressure to be the expert, to have the answer, to project certainty I didn't always feel — it's exhausting in a specific way. Not just energetically but relationally. It keeps you at a slight distance from the people you're supposedly serving. It makes real encounter harder.

Letting that go — choosing power-with deliberately and consistently — feels like the spring thaw. Not dramatic. Not instantaneous. But gradually, steadily, things that were frozen begin to move again. Relationships deepen. The work gets more honest. And you stop feeling so alone in it.

An Invitation

Here are the questions I want to leave you with this month — again, to hold rather than answer quickly:

Where in your business are you operating from power-over, even gently — and what is it costing you relationally?

Who are the people in your professional life with whom you have genuine power-with relationships, and what makes those different from your other working relationships?

What would it look like to restructure one relationship, offer, or dynamic in your business around the premise that the other person's full knowing is as important as yours?

The forest doesn't produce spring alone. It does it together, through a network so intricate and so old that we're still learning how it works.

You don't have to produce yours alone either.