Influence Without Authority

I took an exec ed course on Influence and Persuasion this week, and I've learned from experience to be quick about processing the takeaways. I'll try to capture a few of them here like lightning in a bottle, then channel the energy into a more concentrated force as this becomes a one-day workshop in 2025.

I'll start with a memorable story from Associate Professor Zeke Hernandez . He described a moment early in his career when he anticipated a jackpot win for his personal brand. He had identified numerous inefficiencies in his company's sales process, and over many months he spent evenings and weekends building an in-house solution for lead and record management (this was pre-Salesforce). His coding was exquisite and his aesthetics were sublime. He had even confirmed the PMS colors for his company logo, so that he could precisely evoke the design in his home-grown interface.

Hernandez saw the opportunity to unveil his masterpiece at an upcoming Board meeting, and he planned to use a portion of his allotted time for The Big Reveal. 

Finally the meeting arrived, and Hernandez was given the floor. With passion and pride he demoed his labor of love, and the audience was hugely complimentary. They agreed his solution addressed a known and significant problem. They said it was demonstrably effective and impressively simple to navigate.

Then weeks went by without any action being taken. His dazzling demo was soon forgotten. All those weekend hours turned out to have been for nought.

Looking back on the experience, Hernandez remembers he used to think courses on influence were for people who couldn't do their job. Like many high cognitive individuals, he had overvalued analytics and undervalued the 'softer' elements of decision-making. It wasn't until later in his career that he came to see the importance of this shadow domain.

By 'influence' I mean the act of increasing the likelihood that someone will do something they otherwise wouldn't have done. It's a probabilistic, not a deterministic, craft. It's a multi-dimensional skillset with shades and nuances that are easy to overlook, as the recent US election shows.

The non-obvious elements of influence pertain to the reality of power. Many believe power is purely formal, that it derives solely from position and authority. But in fact this is rarely the case. Far more often, power is informal. It is conferred. Franz de Waal, among others, has documented how even among chimpanzees the alpha is likely to be overthrown in the absence of reciprocity. Raw dominance alone is a highly unstable leadership mode.

The positionally weak can become relationally strong. This is the essential mandate of a sales team. Embracing their lack of formal authority, they must systematically recruit a critical mass of supporters. Coalition-building is their primary mechanism for shifting the balance of power. It is the single most important vector for influencing without authority.

So much of influence can sound ridiculously self-evident. Did I really need to tell you that relationships are important? But it's surprisingly difficult to bridge the divide between knowledge and action.

Engineers have lately been designing autonomous systems to man helicopter flights. When they ask pilots for detailed explanations of how they perform their most challenging maneuvers, the pilots seem to be at a loss for words. So the engineers have attached sensors to the arms, legs, and craniums of these expert aviators to track precisely what they do.

Teaching high-level influence is a little bit like that: fiendishly difficult to convert implicit awareness into deliberate practice. But I'm sure as hell going to try. Stay tuned for more in 2025.