Power Shift — The Newly Powerful Manager

A four-round executive-education simulation set inside Meridian Iberia Consulting, S.L., a Barcelona management-and-technology consultancy. On 2 June 2026 you are Álvaro Mendes, just promoted to Head of the Digital Transformation practice (38 consultants, €21,000,000 in annual fees) over Núria Camps — a nine-year senior manager widely expected to get the role, now reassigned as your direct report. The whole firm watches power transitions on a public engagement-marketplace dashboard, so every overconfident, unilateral move is visible. You start with a trust index of 62/100 and six working days to (1) diagnose the power transition and name the overconfidence traps that gaining power invites, (2) allocate the €4,200,000 Grupo Camino flagship mandate and choose the public framing and the private sequencing toward Núria, (3) calibrate a public Q3 forecast against an 80% band of €4,400,000–€5,900,000, separating appearing confident from being calibrated, and (4) recover trust and retain Núria — who holds three of the top-five accounts and €9,500,000 in at-risk fees — after a leaked Slack thread and a competitor approach. Built on Sebastien Brion's (IESE) research on power and the loss of trust, the math models influence as a finite credibility budget: unilateral, self-aggrandizing, and badly-sequenced moves spend trust, while consultation, accurate credit attribution, calibrated commitment and kept promises replenish it. The overconfidence gap (committed forecast minus calibrated expected value) is scored against a realized Q3 outcome, and ignoring Núria's exit risk can collapse the forecast entirely. Final KPIs track Trust Index, Account Risk, the Overconfidence Gap, and Influence Retained.