We’ve all watched a good idea go nowhere. The thinking is sound, the benefits seem clear, you’ve made the case well, and the people you need to bring with you – a peer group, a client, a cross-functional team with no line into you – are perfectly pleasant about the whole thing. Nobody argues and nobody blocks, they just never quite get round to moving, and you come away from yet another meeting wondering what more you could have done when, on paper, you’ve done everything right.
The skill that grows with every promotion
Looking back over my own consulting career, influence was there at every stage, though the shape of it kept changing – from persuading busy client teams to make time for testing they saw as someone else’s priority, to working the matrix and aligning stakeholders who were measured on different things and answered to different people, until my final corporate role, a global one, where the job was virtually all influence – making things happen across every region with accountability that far outstripped any formal authority.
Nobody ever talked to me about leading through influence as a skill to develop along the way, and I don’t think my experience is unusual. Organisations increasingly design work to run across functions, geographies and partner boundaries, which means senior people are being asked to influence without authority almost daily, yet influence rarely gets developed as deliberately as leadership or communication, despite holding careers back just as surely when it’s underdeveloped.
When relationships are strong, it barely feels like a skill at all – you ask, and people help. The test comes with the harder cases – the resistant stakeholder, the lukewarm peer group, the situation where your usual approach keeps getting you nowhere and you can’t work out why.
Missing by a mile
For those harder cases, I’ve found the work of Allan Cohen and David Bradford, and their idea of currencies of exchange, a helpful lens. Their starting point is that all influence involves some form of exchange – when someone says yes, it’s because they see benefit of some kind, even if that benefit is simply feeling good about helping. When influence stalls, then, the question worth asking isn’t “how do I make my case more compelling” but “what does this actually offer them”. The most common failure, in their words, is being so convinced of the value of what we’re proposing, so sure it speaks for itself, that we ignore what the other person cares about entirely. They call it missing by a mile.
What people care about, they suggest, sorts into five broad currencies – inspiration, task, position, relationship and personal. Some are obvious once named. A colleague drowning in delivery pressures values task currencies – help, resource, speed, anything that makes their week lighter. Someone with an eye on their own progression values position currencies – visibility to senior people, association with something that’s working, a good word in the right room. Others are easier to overlook, like the person for whom the most valuable thing you can offer is to take their concerns seriously and involve them early, rather than arriving with a finished answer.
When it changes
One client I worked with was trying to extend a successful offer to new internal clients, and her peers weren’t opening the door. They weren’t hostile, just uninterested, reluctant to give it attention among everything else competing for it. The temptation was to push harder or escalate, and to her credit she did neither. What she changed was the offer itself – she started speaking their language, framed the benefits in terms that connected to what each of them was measured on, and made the entry point simple and low-risk. The idea was the same one they’d been politely ignoring, but what it offered them was different, and the doors started opening.
Another client, in a global leadership role, found traction in much the same way – by going deep on what success looked like for each region, not just for the wider organisation.
More to trade than you think
The most liberating part of this thinking, for me, is the one that gets the least attention. Most people badly underestimate what they have to offer, assuming that without budget or positional power they have nothing to trade. A careful look says otherwise. Recognition, appreciation, visibility, a good word to someone senior, backing a colleague when they’re under fire, sharing what you’re hearing from other parts of the organisation – these are among the strongest currencies there are, they cost nothing, and no one needs to grant you permission to spend them. For anyone influencing sideways or upwards, that reframe alone changes the conversations you’re able to have.
If all this talk of exchange and currencies sounds a little cold and hard-nosed, that was my hesitation too. In practice, the opposite tends to hold. Calculating, self-serving operators lose influence over time, and it accrues instead to people who take a sincere interest in what matters to others and act on it. Paying attention to someone’s world, understanding what they value and offering it where you can sits far closer to generosity than to horse-trading. There’s still an exchange in there, but when it comes from a sincere place, there’s real care in it too.
A final thought
Influence isn’t a personality type you either have or lack. It’s a senior skill, learnable like any other, and one that will ask more of you with every step your career takes. The next time a good idea isn’t landing, before making the case again, it may be worth asking a different question – not “have I explained this well enough” but “what does saying yes give them”.
You might also find these useful:
If influencing a particular person or stakeholder is proving difficult, Navigating Difficult Work Relationships – Breaking the Cycle looks at how to understand what may be happening in the relationship and what you can do differently.
If part of the challenge is making sure your contribution is recognised by the people who matter, Being More Visible – Making Sure the Right People See the Value You Create explores visibility as being seen for the right things, rather than simply being seen more.
And as your role becomes more senior, influence often goes hand in hand with letting go of direct control. The Art of Letting Go – Making Delegation Work for You and Your Team explores why delegation can become harder as your responsibilities grow, and what can help.