Does Power Corrupt or Reveal?

In the past couple of weeks, we have seen poor judgment and behavior from some high-ranking leaders in our country and here in Atlanta. Leaders who were previously held in high esteem in their communities and beyond.  Leaders who wield considerable power in their areas.
These recent occurrences cause me to ask the following question: does power corrupt or does power reveal? I have discussed this with many of my colleagues and have found that we don’t all share the same opinion.
Those who believe power corrupts believe that increased power changes who we are and how we behave. We become addicted to power, crave more of it, and then abuse it. The person we are once we gain power is not the same person we were before.
However, if power merely reveals, it doesn’t necessarily change who we are but rather causes our true stripes to show. If we use our power to act inappropriately, we would have acted that way previously if we could have. Power gives us the opportunity to be our true selves.
Besides the corrupt or reveal question is another that usually surfaces at times such as these: if women ruled the world, would we behave differently or would we make the same mistakes as men? It’s easy to assert that we would, of course, be different—that we wouldn’t let power corrupt us. I’d like to think this is true but I’m not so sure.
Leadership is getting more difficult. There are more pressures, more opportunities to fail, and more visibility if/when you fail. How we fail may be a “gender thing” but whether you fail at something is not. So our goal should not be to avoid failure—this will not happen. But we can avoid failures that involve the abuse of power.
We can also be aware of the pitfalls of power—corruption, addiction to power, fear of failure. We can behave differently as we gain power by self-reflecting and acting consciously within our personal value system. We can do better, whether power corrupts or reveals.