I once worked with a senior executive who had the formal authority to shut down any initiative in his division. He used it, on average, twice a year. The rest of the time, he was the most influential person in the room — and almost no one could have told you why.
That, more than anything I've learned, is what real influence looks like. It is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. It works when nobody is watching.
The trap of authority
Authority is what you get when the org chart says you're in charge. Influence is what you get when the people around you — including the ones the org chart says you're not in charge of — decide to follow your thinking.
Authority is binary: you have it, or you don't. Influence is a gradient. It can grow. It can shrink. It can be lost in a single bad meeting, and rebuilt over a year of better ones.
Why this matters for your career
Most senior leaders I coach are not under-using their authority. They are over-relying on it. They reach for the org chart because it's faster than reaching for the room. And every time they do, they're trading a small amount of long-term influence for a small amount of short-term compliance.
That trade feels good in the moment. It is expensive over a career.
What to do instead
Build the case. Make the trade visible. Bring the people who'll have to live with the decision into the decision early. And accept that the slower path is almost always the more durable one.
This is, incidentally, the entire premise of the Exercising Influence work. The book came out of watching a generation of smart, well-meaning leaders confuse the two — and pay for the confusion in ways that didn't show up on their performance reviews for years.
If you only have an hour this month, spend it learning to tell the difference.