Influence Vs Authority

I have been thinking about the notion of having influence versus having authority at a workplace. It’s one of the few principles in my workplace handbook. It’s something that I have deliberately tried to understand on a daily basis for the past couple months. Based on my observations and experiences at betaworks over the summer, I think one should strive to become influential regardless of title, role, nature of work or size and scale of the organization.

When you have authority with a fancy title, people need to work with you, respect your position, and, for the most part, agree with you. When you have influence, people want to work with you, voluntarily respect you, and have honest conversations with you. When it comes to authority, people do what they need to do regardless of whether they like doing it or not. When it comes to influence, people do only what they want to do because they don’t need to do it.

Can influence and authority overlap? Yes. Thats a killer combination.

I think influential people are very likely to end up with authority. But, just because you have authority, it doesn’t mean you will be influential.

Being influential does not mean being able to get others to do whatever it is you want them to do without having an official title. Being influential, in my mind, means being impactful. You are influential when people want to be around you, talk with you about their work, want your help on projects, respect your opinions, and encourage others to work with you. Being impactful means thoughtfully adding value to conversations, projects, products, teams, departments and the overall organization. Each instance of value-add might be tiny. But, if done persistently, the impact accumulates.

One needs to be resourceful, pro-active, nice and a good recruiter for building influence.

Resourceful

Everyone faces constraints. It is important to be able to make the best out of what you have. But, it is even more important to be resourceful in the context of people you work with. By this I mean we should strive to put ourselves in a position to enable others to get their work done.

Being resourceful has nothing to do with feeling the need to know everything, have all the skills needed and to be in the know of every single decision or task others are working on. It’s not about being competent in every aspect of the work. It’s about being competent enough to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and knowing what you can and cannot do. Knowing what you don’t know is more important that knowing what you do. Being resourceful, in my mind, is knowing when to chime in, when to sit down and work with someone on something, and when to take a step back, say no to an incoming idea or project and route the request to the right person.

It’s about getting things done. It’s not about forcing yourself to get the things done all the time. It’s about facilitating getting things done by people who are in the best position to do so.

I think in order to become resourceful, one needs to become a central node for knowledge-sharing and ideas. This calls for being curious all the time.

Pro-active

Sucking at what you are paid to do is bad. Being unwilling to learn to get better at what you are paid to do is downright awful.

Being great at what you are paid to do is awesome. Being great at your job and being great at going beyond your job is exceptional.

Pro-activeness is the second pillar for building a tower of influence. Recklessly overstepping boundaries causes trouble. It is unproductive. But, knowing your boundaries, your weaknesses, and behaviors of people you work with, and using that knowledge to take little extra steps to do value-added things at the peripheries of your boundaries is almost always appreciated.

I think being pro-active feels scary. There’s lot of uncertainty around it. Even if your intent is right, your efforts might be misunderstood. I think its important to identify right people who are open-minded and flexible. They need to believe that good ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. Once the right people are identified, one can slowly start taking initiatives that are beyond the job description. But, it is important to be careful not to go way beyond your scope the first time. Its an iterative process. You do something new. You approach the right people. You observe reactions. You get their feedback. You act on the feedback. If its encouraging and positive, repeat the process and go for a bigger initiative. If the reaction is negative, you probably chose the wrong people. Go find the right people and repeat.

The key is not to give up. It is about learning and being persistent. There is a difference between well-intentioned persistence and plain annoyance. Right level of pro-activeness with right set of people on right projects goes a long way in building influence. In my mind, the notion of being proactive is about not letting your job title limit your thinking and drive your decision-making. I respect titles. I do not embrace them. I don’t think the established ways of doing things are the only right ways of doing things. Just because I am not a top executive, it doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that I cant come up with a better idea or strategy. The key is to find the right channels to bubble up your voice and initiatives. Identifying the right channels requires a proper understanding of the office dynamics and the unspoken rules. It goes without saying that such mindset can only be nurtured in an organization where people believe that good ideas and titles are not correlated and where the organizational structure and culture are flexible enough. Betaworks is one such environment.

Nice

The third principle sounds so simple in theory. Just be nice and polite. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t let ego get in your way. Being respectful of others’ time and work is probably the best skill one could have. People need to feel good after having worked with you. Treat yourself like a product. If people like what you do and how you do what you do, they will tell about you to their superiors, juniors and teammates. Kindness creates word of mouth for you within the organization. It’s also about genuinely caring about your work and the people at work. I really felt invested in all the products and teams I worked with. Going in to work wasn’t about clocking in hours for me. I would be amongst the first few people to get to the office.

Niceness also manifests in the form of having people’s best interests in mind. I always wanted to be there in case anyone wanted some help, had a question, or wanted to discuss ideas. And, if not, I will think about two or three ways I could help every team on a given day before I get to my daily work schedule and existing projects. It is important to not have a very high standard for being considered helpful. Yes, you could be be really helpful by helping a founder raise millions or help a product team make their roadmap or help the business development team strike a new partnership. But, one can also be helpful in little ways.

Being helpful is a mindset. Not an outcome driven act. Being helpful could mean sending a very relevant article based on a conversation three days ago to a founder. Being helpful could be identifying the right person who could make an introduction for your colleague. Think about the mindset. Not the size of offering. Tiny things done consistently with the best intentions have a snowballing impact.

Recruiter

The last principle flows from the second principle. Let’s say you were pro-active enough to identify a new project to work on. You got approvals from the concerned people. Now, it is time to recruit the relevant people from within the company with the right skill-sets, level of authority, and knowledge to execute on the project. One need not be an HR person to think about internal recruitment. Most projects need a collection of people to get the work done optimally. I do not think you need a fancy title to get people to buy into your idea. We should not always rely only on people on our teams, in our departments, or those we regularly work with. Getting people from across the organization to rally around a new project, forming a cross-functional team, coordinating between tasks and people, and giving appropriate credit to all the parties are very important skills required for building influence.

John Borthwick pointed out this last principle to me. I’m glad that he thinks I am good at internally recruiting people for projects. One of the projects I started and worked on was building a bot product. The steps I took for building the product were more important in my learning process than the product itself. I had to identify and get buy-ins from people in design, engineering, operations, branding, and the executive team to build out the product. Most of the people I worked with were on different teams. While the project was one of my top priorities, it surely wasn’t for the team I built. The process also involved recruiting beta-testers from across the organization and transferring the ownership to right people right before I left betaworks. The project is far from finished. Building the team around the outcome and not the features helped me streamline processes to make sure the project will be completed after I am gone.

If all of this sounds beyond your job title to you, please recall that my title said intern. It is important to be mindful of everyone’s time, schedules, priorities, and goals throughout the process.

I believe working on these four virtues can help in building influence. I would always pick influence over authority. This does not go to mean that I wouldn’t aspire to have authority or that I would never look for upward career mobility. It just means that I won’t let the organizational structure and titles limit my efforts. Influence increases the odds of getting authority and titles. But, it does not guarantee it. So, in case you don’t end up getting that promotion that you always wanted or don’t get to work on a project that you really wanted to work on, influence keeps you satisfied and happy. It also helps grow a skill set that always stays with you regardless of where you work.

None of this goes to show that I have successfully build a lot of influence at betaworks. Neither does it mean that I know the formula for building influence. What I laid out is just a framework I have built for myself and that is naturally supported by betaworks’ culture.

It was very reassuring to me when I saw some folks getting surprised when I told them I was just an intern and when people said that they would miss working with me. I consider that my greatest achievement this summer.

The first part of this series was about preferring to ask for advice to ask for permissions. Counterintuitive, but it works.

Permission vs Advice

In case you are interested in understanding why I wanted to work at betaworks so badly despite not knowing what I will be doing there before and even right after I started working there, here is the story —

“It’s Complicated”

For the outside world, I was an intern. I surely did not feel like one. Borthwick and his executive team have created a great culture. The employees and studio companies amplify that culture. There is no guarantee that your experience will be similar to mine if you were to work at betaworks. After all, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. It’s an outcome-driven, not a process-driven environment. People who thrive the best in such environment are those that are very pro-active, responsible, and resourceful. We often talk about product-market fit and founder-market fit. We do not talk enough about employee-environment fit.