[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.]
I once worked with an executive team that included a director who was quieter than the other members of the team. He was not the most senior or experienced person on the team, yet by the end of each meeting it was most often his ideas that prevailed. Clearly, he was the most influential person on that team, yet 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 even works when nobody is watching.
The trap of authority
Authority is what you have when the organizational chart says you're in charge. Influence is what you have when the people around you — including the ones the org chart says you're not in charge of — decide to follow you.
Authority is binary: you have it, or you don't. Influence is on 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 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
Share a vision. Ask for ideas. Build the case. Make the exchange visible. Bring the people who'll have to live with the decision into that 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, while not obvious, showed up in their performance - and performance reviews over the years.
If you only have an hour this month, spend it learning to tell the difference.