Influence Without Authority
It's easy to bark orders at people who report to you. What about those who don't?
In very hierarchical organizations there is a clear chain of command, and orders tend to flow from the top to the bottom. There are clear delineations of who listens to whom and the authority for said instructions simply lies in the title of the person giving it. An SVP telling an associate director to get something done is simple and clean and the esoteric query of “Why should I?” doesn’t come into play, except maybe with the most anti-authority (in)subordinate.
But outside of the armed forces, most places aren’t like this. Like everything in life, there is nuance to boss-employee relationships. But orders still need to be carried out, and as you move up in your career you will find yourself having to ask for something from someone who owes you nothing professionally. This is where you need to influence outcomes without any authority to actually do so - it seems counterintuitive, but in large, corporate organizations it is crucial to success.
Want to Do the Dishes
While a sitcom trope at this point, there is the classic chore-based complaint in a relationship where one partner nags the other to get something done like the dishes. But it’s not enough to simply get the dishes done - there should be the desire to get the dishes done, often communicated as “You should want to do the dishes.”
Now, no one - not even this newsletter’s author who is incredibly efficient at them and whose stacking game for air drying is A1 - actually wants to do dishes. The ask isn’t to wish to undertake the task, it’s the hope that the other partner can see that doing the dishes helps with the overall goal of getting things done as a team. Whether the dishes are getting done so your partner doesn’t have to and can focus on another task or simply relax at the end of a a hard day, being able to see the dishes not as a chore in a silo but as part of a larger mission is where this age-old comedy bit comes about.
Obviously, there’s no authority in a relationship (unless you’re in a sub-dom kind of thing, in which case, this newsletter does not judge) so the understanding needs to rest with both parties about what the dishes are and what they aren’t.
Source Your Authority
While relationships may lack it, authority comes from many places at work. The most obvious is positional authority - you outrank someone and they’re in your line of reporting so whether they want to or not, they need to listen to you. We can get into being a good leader vs. a passable manager here, but that’s for another post.
In practice, positional authority is rarely as clear cut as it sounds. In large organizations, you may outrank someone but they’re within another discipline and don’t report to you. Or you may work globally and while someone may be in your department, they have a different reporting structure there and you’re not in their regional hierarchy. In other words, this is probably one of the rarer places from which you can draw authority.
So what other sources can you lean on?
Existing relationships: People are more willing to do tasks for someone they know and like. It’s a lot easier to ask for something when you have an ongoing rapport with that person than as a stranger or someone on the periphery of their work circle. You don’t have to be besties with everyone, but the more folks you know the more work you can get done.
You get shit done: Having unrivaled organizational understanding of how things move and progress within your organization is crucial. Being seen as someone who can push agendas successfully (and without alienating others) will naturally get people to help you with them.
Become a subject matter expert: Similar to understanding your firm’s policies and politics, being an SME (especially in a slightly niche subject) can help convince people to get on board with your initiatives when you ask.
Reason and Logic Only Go So Far
As much as most of us would love to live in a world where rational arguments win the day, we simply don’t (just take a look at Congress and the upcoming presidential race.) So while you may intuitively understand your project and be able to effectively communicate the facts around it, that’s only part of the game. And when you look at it from a distance, it’s really just table stakes.
You need to engage people emotionally to get them to do something they are not required to do. There’s a strategy to this, and it requires a delicate balance between a bunch of different emotional triggers:
Be Curious - Don’t just bark orders at someone expecting something to get done; by understanding someone’s motivations for work and what their larger goals are, you can better position an ask. This is something that should intertwine nicely with the existing relationship point in the previous section.
Align Interests - When you’ve been genuinely curious, you should know how to couch your ask in a way that aligns with the requestee’s ways of working. Yes, you’ll need to align a common mission and outcome (that comes later), but first you need to approach the emotional alignment aspect of it.
Soft Power - At the end of the day, carrots only go so far. There’s no need to flex and threaten with your title or authority, but there is a requirement to show you’re a credible leader. If people don’t find you credible, they’ll feel the same way about your ask and treat it with the requisite respect they feel it deserves (i.e. none.)
Highlight the Why - This is where the common goal comes into play. Show the person why they should be helping you from a purely mission-based perspective and they’ll be a lot more willing to help. The best part is, the reason doesn’t even have to be that strong, it just needs to be something.
Transparency Will Rule, Even If You Don’t Want It To
Transparency is always a good idea, but something to keep in mind is that it can also pop up in ways you’re not expecting.
If you approach these types of collaborations as ways to manipulate others into doing what you want, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Approaching these conversations genuinely is the only way to sustainably work with and influence others without authority. Trying to be Geppetto with these things is going to be so transparent and lose you any goodwill you had while making this exercise extremely difficult, if not impossible.
No one likes feeling like they’re being controlled or manipulated, and if you make someone feel that way they will remember. Don’t be that person.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF Target: Target had a sale last week and I bought a bunch of stuff from them. The first box that showed up (because of course it had to come in multiple packages) was completely wrong - not a single item was correct and it was clear someone put the correct address on the wrong box.
Whatever, shit happens, right? I let them know to send me the actual items I bought and their response was absolutely ludicrous from a customer service perspective. They said of course they would send me the items I had bought and paid for, after I sent back the incorrect items they sent, and after they received them, and after they confirmed those were the incorrect items. Then they would release my products.
So the quick shipping promised during the sale was actually going to turn into a two week turnaround time because not only was it on the consumer to run QC of their logistics operation, it was also on the consumer to actually correct the mistake while the consumer’s paid-for merchandise was held hostage until the free labor provided by the consumer was complete.
I’ll be sticking with the greater of the two evils (Amazon) for now, as the only free labor I provide them is swapping boxes with my neighbors once a week when the drivers in the electric vans riding through my neighborhood with the doors wide open inevitably just guess as to which house is which when delivering packages.
Album of the Week: Back in 2002 this author was an awkward, gangly teenager with absolutely zero game. That didn’t stop him from thinking he was actually cool when he listened to Mario’s self-titled debut album.
Then-15-year old Mario hit the scene with a cover of Biz Markie’s classic “Just a Friend” and set himself apart from a burgeoning hip hop class at the time (Bow Wow was headlining a tour that included Mario, Nick Cannon, Jhene Aiko, and Marques Houston.) Following up with singles “Braid My Hair” and “C’mon” cemented Mario’s spot in early 2000s pop culture.
The album itself is actually pretty good, especially if you can get past the fact that someone who just got to high school is singing about being in the club. “2 Train” is a standout, in no small part thanks to the fact that Alicia Keys is a writer on it, produced it, and provided backing vocals - her style is all over the track. We can thank Clive Davis for that, whose J Records had been the home of Keys’s debut Songs in A Minor the year before Mario dropped on the same label. Don’t sleep on “Never” (love a ballad) and “Chick Wit Da Braids” (nothing said “status” more than an Escalade back in the early aughts.) At 45 minutes, you could do worse than this R&B throwback.
Quote of the Week: “No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
See you next week!