Building Influence Without Authority

Introduction: Influence Without Authority in the Workplace

Consider this scenario: You’re put in charge of leading a project within your organization, but without any control or responsibility for the people that are going to work on the project.

While you are in a formal position of leadership, for the specific project or initiative, you have managerial-like responsibilities, such as generating a budget, creating a project plan, and managing and coordinating a team. So long as everyone else plays along, you should be fine. But that can be a big ask.

While your co-workers might not be intentionally trying to hinder your success, their priorities are naturally going to align with those who hold authority over them and their jobs—their teams and leaders. Without a position of authority, your priorities are likely to take a back seat to everything else on their team’s plate, which threatens progress on your own project or initiative.

Organizations are a mixture of people, processes and projects going on all at once, and while most have strategies for focusing or prioritizing you still have to context with the reality that people contend with so much noise each day (slack, email, context switching between meetings and project work) that even with the best of intentions your project team members may deprioritize what you need them to do, which leaves you as the project owner without formal authority in a tough position.

Finally, odds are, the people on your project are probably working on other cross functional projects. Research suggests that work continues to become more collaborative by nature (versus less collaborative) and you may not only be leading a cross functional project, but you might be another one of those team members. All of this leads back to the key message: being able to influence without authority, to garner people’s attention and to get them to do their work is a critical skill, not just for a leader, but for any employee within an organization.

Whether you are a team lead, the manager of a cross-functional team, or overseeing projects and resources, the ability to influence without authority can help you get buy-in from key stakeholders, improve collaboration within your organization, and help you achieve your desired business outcomes.

What Is Influence without Authority?

Influence without authority is the ability to influence others without having any power over them. Most of us in the workplace don’t have formal authority over our peers, so we must rely on influencing others in order to complete tasks and achieve outcomes in our jobs. But while all of us may have heard the term influence without authority, it can feel amphorous or not very well defined.

One way to make this more clear is to break down the term into a series of skills. According to the Center For Creative Leadership, Influence without Authority is comprised of four key skills

Organizational Intelligence: The ability to understand how to move forward initiatives and get things done within the reality of organizational politics
Team Promotion: The ability to authentically promote your work (or your teams work) in a way that empowers and inspires the rest of the organization
Trust-Building: The ability to cultivate trust to get others take risks or drive change with Leveraging Networks: The ability to utilize the relationships they have to work on joint outcomes

Why Is Influence without Authority Important?

Besides the fact that the majority of us don’t have formal authority over our peers and colleagues, there are a number of reasons for why today’s fast-paced collaborative and distributed workplace relies heavily on people who have a strong ability to influence without authority.

Cross Functional Teams – More and more work is cross functional and collaborative by its very nature. It’s hard to work on something entirely on your own without the help of someone else. This is especially true in large companies
Flatter Structures – less people in formal positions of power and control. The span of control has decreased significantly but that means that
Hybrid Work – You aren’t always in the room to build relationships and trust with people. Furthermore, the meetings where decisions are made do not always have favorable dynamics. You may be at home while everyone else is in the room, or everyone may be virtual and it can be hard to read body language, or know how to interject.
Silos Within Organizations – Organizations have silos and walls between departments, teams and business units. If you need to get something done that requires you to work across different teams, making sure you can circumvent the natural silos that exist relies on your ability to get the attention of others to take action, make a decision, or align to something you are working.
Lots of Things Going On – If you work in a big company there is a lot going on. You need to get others to pay attention to what you are doing. Sure, your entire company sells the same products and serves the same customers, but everyone has a role, set of responsibilities and set of metrics that their team cares about. While its not a zero sum game, getting the resources and attention of others in fast moving environments can be difficult. Being able to influence your peers, or people who you don’t have formal authority over is critical to achieving your goals.

What are sources of Authority?

While a managerial title might be one of the most obvious sources of authority for working professionals, it isn’t the only place influence comes from. There are many sources of authority you can leverage to inspire others to follow your lead. Some of the most important of these include:

Your Expertise – If you want or need to influence others in your organization and motivate them to listen to you, one way is through having expertise in your role, function, industry, scope or all of the above. By having expertise, you can position yourself as the “go to” person or “SME (Subject Matter expert) in that field. Your knowledge and expertise can influence others in what they are working on.
Your Relationships – When you have real meaningful relationships with your teammates and coworkers, you have trust and credibility with your peers, so when you need something, or are looking to advance a cause, those individuals may be more likely to follow you. Furthermore, when you actually know your colleagues and understand their motivations and aspirations, you can better position their involvement in a way that encourages them to take action.
Your Organizational Understanding – Subject matter expertise is incredibly valuable, but so is your expertise of the organization, how it operates and how work gets done, decisions get made, and what gets valued. We all probably work with someone who always just seems to know the inner workings of the organization who is so invaluable to getting something done. These individuals understand the processes to accomplish projects or tasks, which can be very valuable especially in large organizations, where there can be lots of processes. But in addition to that, these individuals also understand those “unwritten” rules, things that are not written down, but are known to be true. If you are that person, your influence/authority can be helpful to a lot of people in your organization.

Real Life Examples of How to Use Influence Without Authority

The following are real challenges that I have faced where I had to use influence without authority to be successful in achieving an outcome

Prioritizing The Offering Roadmap – as a Product Marketing team at a large software company, part of our job was ensuring our product roadmap met the needs of our customers demands. However, there were lots of stakeholders in the organization (sales, customer success, support) who also had a say in the roadmap, and it could easily get complex trying to manage all stakeholder expectations. As Product Marketers, our job was to try to synthesize all the inputs from all of those teams as well as the customer, and to make our recommendations to the product team about what they should release and prioritize versus what should get shelved for later, or not done at all. While every company says they prioritize and value customer feedback, we really believe it. Every time I went into a conversation with our product managers to share our thoughts and recommendations, I would share my notes or slides with the recommendations, and then back them up with the actual logos of where the customer feedback or example came from. In some cases, this was me actually talking to the customer, or in other cases, it was gathering other data from others from the customer, which PMs found to be very powerful.

Inevitably, we would disagree with sales and customer success about what would needed to be on the roadmap. However, one thing I did, that I think ultimately built trust with them, is that I would sit in their conversations with their customers and in their feedback sessions, and I would ask questions, give thoughts, not from my lens, but from their lens. I often found that even when these teams disagreed with my ideas or thoughts, they respected them, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that they saw that I could see what they were going through and from their perspective. It got to the point where many of them would ask me to come to meetings to talk to their customers, because they understood I could be of value to the customer, but also to them.

Launching an International Team – Our team of product marketers saw a gap, and that was we were not doing any work for our international regions (ex: Europe, Asia) – We wanted to do more projects in these regions and support the sales teams because we thought it could have material business impact. Unfortunately, we were strapped and we had no headcount. A new leader came in for international business and we started having conversations with him mostly just as a formality on his “getting to know the business” tour. We knew he had previously worked with marketing teams, so we decided that we would run an experiment: We would scope off one project that we would offer to do for him as he was getting up to speed. If he liked it, we would use that as a way to ask for a dedicated resource to support their marketing efforts.

The first project was gold and he was in love with the work. At the end of the project, we asked if he wanted to do more of this, and when he asked us to tell us what that would look like – we presented him with our POV of a potential work and hiring plan with 3 options (small, medium and large) Within an hour of reading the proposal he approved headcount and we were able to build an international marketing team.

What Are Some Tips For Building Influence Without Authority?

Here are some examples of how you can start to think about how to use influence without authority in your current role.

Framework 1: Influence Plays

This one we can credit to the software company Atlassian, At Atlassian, influence without authority is a critical competency especially for product managers. Product Managers are generally tasked with managing the product development process to release new features and products, but are asked to do so without having formal authority over the people who actually produce the work (ex: designers, engineers, etc) As such, they often have to rely on influence without authority to plant seeds for ideas, execute projects, or drive change.

According to Product Manager, Matt Sloan, the two things that Atlassians must find out before wanting to jump into any situation are the following

1) Culture and Context – Before recommending any type of change, they must seek first to understand. What is going on? Why are things they way they are? What’s in the ways of working that have gotten us to this current state? Finding out the answers to these questions are critical.

2) Degrees of separation – Once they understand the culture, they need to assess the degrees of separation, or the measure of the social distance between the people. For example, if the change impacts someone you know, that’s 1 degree, if it’s someone that someone else knows, that’s two degrees. As a general rule of thumb, it’s easier to influence people you work the closest with, and it’s easier for those decisions to go through.

Influence without Authority Plays

Once you understand the culture and context and the degrees of separation, you then need to figure out which play to run. At a high-level, these are the key focuses of each play:

Psychologist: Understand the motivations and context of who you’re trying to influence & then work backwards to reach an outcome. This is useful when you have a clear understanding of who and what you want to influence
Pitcher: Constantly exploring and trying different ways of framing ideas that you want to influence. This is great for when you want to offer up a number of potential new ideas or initiatives to see what might stick.
Activist: Creating large movements by regularly sharing stories, perspectives and facts. This is when you are trying to build a coalition to drive larger and more transformational change within a company, or doing something that has a large ambition.

Framework 2: The 9 Types of Influence

Professor Gary Yukl and his colleagues have been studying managers’ influence attempts for more than two decades. According to their research, there are 9 proactive influence tactics that employees can use:

Ingratiation: using compliments, showing empathy, being sensitive to moods
Rational Persuasion: reasoning, explaining, showing evidence, and facts/benefits
Personal Appeals: asking for favors, explaining the benefits, and leveraging friendships
Pressure: persistent requests, reminders, asking for dates of completion
Legitimizing: leveraging authority, policies, and rules
Inspirational Appeals: expressive style of speaking, appealing to ideas and values
Consultation: asking for suggestions, asking for help, involving people
Exchange: offering to share benefits and offering incentives
Coalition: bringing someone along to help you in an influence attempt, and getting other people to provide evidence and support

How to Build Influence Without Authority

Here are some practical tactics you can try to build greater influence that you can use to be more impactful in your job.

Help Others – According to research from Adam Grant, Sharon Parker, and Catherine Collins, managers tend to pay attention to whether their employees tend to help themselves or help others. Each week, find small ways that you can help your direct teammates or peers, and over time, you can build your own credibility, as well as trust and good will.
Ben Franklin Effect: The Ben Franklin Effect is a documented psychological phenomena where when you ask someone for a favor they actually become more engaged and willing to help you down the road. The theory is that when you ask someone for their help with something they become more biased toward wanting to help you because of the investment that they’ve already made. By proactively going out of your way to ask for favors (not large ones) when it does come time when you need to influence someone to help you with something they might be more willing to comply or assist. For example, asking someone if they will take time to review your project before an upcoming meeting, and getting their feedback is a good small step.
Preheat – Just like you would preheat an oven before you make a dish, you’ll want to pre-heat your stakeholders that you want to influence or that you need help with something. Leading up to when you need to ask for help, reach out to them to ask for feedback or thoughts on what you are working on and set expectations that this is only an idea. This will give them a chance to also participate in what you are doing, and make them more invested.
Avoid Mixed Messages – Drawing on research from Ethan Burris, one challenge people face is that when they are selling an idea to influence others, they often struggle to get support when they add two messages: combining the benefits of doing something new, with the risk of not taking action. Burris’ research suggest that when leaders were forced to read proposals that included both, it took them more time and energy to understand the problem and potential solution. But when managers were given proposals that focused on one of those (ex doing something no or risk of not taking action) proposals that used one of those were more likely to get endorsed.
Influence Colleagues Before Decision Makers – Instead of trying to win over the person directly, another approach is to win over the people and colleagues who are close to the decision maker. According to research from Ethan Burris, in a study, he saw that 60% of people talked directly to their managers before running ideas by colleagues to see if they had merit. In another study, he and his coauthors found that people who spoke up on behalf of others were 57% more influential than people who spoke up for themselves. An example of this in action is when you go to a Tech companies website and look at their customer case studies section. Sure, Salesforce can tell you how great their product is, but it’s so much more powerful when you hear the same message from another fellow customer.
Co-Create Early – If you’re working on a project that involves other people, treat them as co-creators versus project members. Instead of waiting to present to them your summary, solution or findings, start early by inviting them into the process and give them a seat at the table to contribute in coming up with the potential solution.
Find Your Allies Up The Chain – Finding other influencers at your level or within the organization is helpful, but in many companies, the people who make decisions often (but not always) sit at the top of the org chart. Getting their input and feedback into what you are working on is one way to get their support, which may help you significantly in moving the project forward. In cases where you may not have the relationship with the specific leader, you can also rely on others who are closer in proximity to help you, such as your direct manager, who can work with you to brief the leader and get their buy in

Conclusion

In our hyper-connected, distributed and cross-functional workplace, employees who build their influence without authority have the ability to influence changes, receive resources, advance projects, and hit key objectives and outcomes.

While not everyone in an organization is in a formal position of power, each individual has the ability to build their influence without authority skills to improve their effectiveness in achieving outcomes, and building stronger relationships with peers and colleagues in the workplace.

Want to help your employees improve their communication and influence skills so they can work more effectively in the hybrid workplace Contact Us today about our Influence and Communication Training Program

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