5 Ways to Lead Through Influence
Leading people and teams when you’re not “the boss”
A few years ago, I had a unique opportunity to attend the Agile 2017 conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The company I worked for was going through an “Agile transformation” during this time. I was fortunate to be one of only four people (at my entire company of over 10,000 people) selected to attend this conference. It was quite an honor and I will always be thankful for having had this opportunity. Back then, I didn’t realize what a huge impact this conference would have on my career and how I would approach my work as a UX Program Manager. Yet, years later, I still find myself applying the skills and ideas I learned.
Of everything I learned, understanding leadership was perhaps the most important concept I took away from the entire conference. As someone who is relatively ambitious, one career goal I’ve had for a long time is to build and lead a team of UX Program Managers, with aspirations to one day become a Director of UX Operations. Along the way, I had discussions with my managers about how I wanted to lead a team in order to grow my leadership skills. However, I was often told by my Directors and VPs things like, “being a manager doesn’t necessarily make you a leader” or “being a leader is more about influence, not direct reports.” I must admit, I didn’t truly understand what they meant at the time. I thought they were just trying to make me feel better about being an individual contributor (instead of a manager) and quickly end the conversation.
Finally, after attending the Agile conference, I learned what leading through influence really means. In fact, my entire mental model of what leadership meant shifted as I learned what true leadership is in today’s world. Most importantly, I learned valuable techniques on how to lead through influence. If you feel like you can’t lead without an official list of direct reports on your org. chart, read on! Try these 5 methods to help you lead and influence others without having the word “supervisor” in your job title.
1. Embrace modern leadership
The world of work has changed a lot in the last five to ten years. Technology and work projects have become a lot more complex. To accommodate these complexities, companies have structured their organizations in more of a matrix model and in less of a hierarchical model. That means, several people and teams often need to be involved in an initiative in order to get anything done. People have changed too. In the workforce today, several generations are working together. Each new generation has different expectations regarding how people should interact with one another. Some prefer text, others prefer face-to-face, some people want as little interaction as possible and others want to share all of their “social-ness” with everyone else, all the time! On top of all of this, our fast-changing world expects companies to iterate rapidly in order to meet changing customer needs, along with making sure to retain employees by meeting their very diverse needs and wants as well.
In order to get anything done in today’s workforce, diverse people and perspectives need to come together and work towards a common goal.
As a result, leadership styles have also changed. If you haven’t read his book yet, I highly recommend reading David Marquet’s book, Turn the Ship Around — A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. In his book, Marquet discusses how the traditional “command and control” style of leadership simply does not work anymore in today’s complex environments. Leadership can no longer be a single person in charge, who possesses all of the knowledge, and solves all of the problems for the team. Furthermore, the team cannot simply be invisible, unaccountable followers who report to a leader, simply taking commands and carrying out orders. Today’s problems are far too complex for this type of leadership and team dynamic to be successful. Modern leadership is about everyone on the team being a leader and working together at solving problems with their collective brainpower. Therefore, in order for you to be successful at leading through influence, it is important to embrace the idea that leadership is no longer simply the act of bossing people around.
Leadership is about cultivating other people around you to think and lead, not to simply follow your lead.
2. Own your relationships
Now that you’ve let go of any previous notions that being a leader is the same thing as telling everyone what to do, the next part is making sure you are building and maintaining your relationships with the people on your team and on other teams you interact with to get work done. Managing relationships with those you work with and lean on to get things done is directly related to the “influence” part of leadership. This is especially important for those who do not have direct authority or direct reports to manage in order to get things done.
So exactly what is influence? The popular dictionary, Merriam-Webster defines it as:
Influence is the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command. — Merriam-Webster
In order to have influence or the “power of producing an effect” on people, it’s important to get to know the people you want to have an effect on. The great news about building relationships for non-managers who want to develop more leadership skills is that no one has a monopoly on relationships. You are free to form and develop work relationships with just about anyone who is willing to engage with you. Understanding how people think, what they need and what obstacles they are struggling with is crucial to building relationships. Also, listening to understand someone else’s point of view first, before you speak, is an important skill that helps build strong relationships. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can skip maintaining relationships. It is up to you to reach out and actively manage key relationships so you can establish and maintain your influence with different people at various levels within your organization.
3. Resolve conflicts swiftly
As soon as two or more people are together in any situation, there is bound to be a conflict at some point. Everyone agreeing all of the time is simply not a realistic way to view the world of relationships. When there is conflict, it’s important to not ignore the conflict or let it fester to the point where tension builds. While tension is a negative side effect of any type of unresolved conflict, the bigger problem is the long-term damage of losing trust and the divisiveness that can happen during conflicts. In order to maintain and continue having influence, it is imperative that conflicts are resolved head-on. Being able to resolve conflicts between teams is an even more powerful way to maintain influence and gain more trust. I have found the best way to resolve conflicts between individuals or between teams is to simply make a list of all of the issues people are having and then collaboratively come up with a solution for each issue. It is best to do this face-to-face and use a whiteboard or some other medium where everyone can contribute. Resolving conflicts in this way helps create credibility for you as a neutral party and as someone who can help enable the team to resolve their conflicts.
4. Facilitate (don’t dictate) communication
In embracing a modern leadership style, it is important to make sure communication is not only a 2-way, but a multi-way street. It is important to listen to others as mentioned earlier, but it is also important to make sure you are creating opportunities for everyone on the team to feel comfortable communicating and speaking up. Being a modern leader who wants to cultivate other leaders, it is important that you foster an environment where everyone feels comfortable voicing their ideas, good or bad.
You can’t utilize people’s brains if you don’t know what’s inside!
Make sure that your communication style is one that invites everyone to speak. For example, when you run a meeting, think of yourself as the facilitator of team ideas vs. the person who has to do all of the talking and presenting of ideas. If you change your mental model a little bit from, “running a meeting” to simply “facilitating a meeting”, you will start getting out of the way of your team’s communication and begin making more room for others to talk and share their ideas. The more people’s ideas are put forth, the more brainpower you are utilizing from your team.
5. Empower team members to solve problems
If you are following the steps outlined above, you’re already on your way to empowering your team to act more as leaders instead of followers. A powerful way to really get your team to start thinking more like leaders is to entrust the team with solving problems on their own. One way to accomplish this is to make sure you are posing problems to the team as challenges and creating ample space and time for the team to come up with solutions. A lot of leaders may know the answer to a problem (or think they know it), but it is super important to not let your own ego take over. Don’t jump in to solve the problem for everyone before allowing other proposed solutions to come out. Let the team come up with solutions and give the team a forum to share out their solutions to the broader team, leaders and stakeholders. Then, allow the stakeholders and other leaders to evaluate the solutions objectively. This process will demonstrate to your teams that you entrust them to own and solve problems. The more confidence you instill in your teams, the more they will take on challenges and come up with solutions to problems on their own. The best part, many of these solutions are likely to be ideas you may have never thought of on your own.
As you may have noticed in the list above, none of these techniques require you to have a team reporting to you or have you directly managing others in order to demonstrate and practice team leadership. These are all things you can do as an individual contributor.
Today, at this stage of my career, I’ve applied the steps above to influence large teams and create effective change within complex organizations, all without a team of direct reports. I’ve successfully convinced leaders and teams, comprised of over 200+ people, to change tools, follow new processes and improve how they work with one another. A key part of the success I’ve experienced has also been the result of building support with key leaders and managers. These efforts have contributed to increased efficiency between teams and have significantly impacted how teams function together as a whole. As an individual contributor, I’ve proven to myself that it is possible to lead teams and influence people without being someone’s “boss” on paper. I’ve proven to myself that it is possible to have a huge, positive impact on an organization by leading through influence.
No matter what stage you are at in your career or what level you are at within your organization, try applying these methods to improve your leadership skills. Have fun and good luck!
