INFLUENCING WITHOUT FORMAL AUTHORITY

Senior Managers who are not the formal authority figure often want to influence their Executive Teams and Senior Management Teams for the better. Sometimes they consider that the formal authority figure is a major part of the problem. How do you exercise leadership in these circumstances? I am often invited into organisations to do consulting and development work by senior managers who are looking for leverage around this very issue.

Of course, being the CEO or the formal authority figure doesn't guarantee automatically that you will be highly influential either. I have written an earlier blog about the challenges for formal authority figures and longer articles on the question of the relationship between formal and informal authority, and leadership (see "Seven Sources of Power for Effective Leaders").

Here are a few things that I have learnt recently about what works and what doesn't.

1. Being right does not make you influential if you cannot find a way to help others to hear you. In one group that I worked with a terrific senior manager could see the possibility for his management team to collaborate and perform better. He was enthusiastic in his efforts to communicate the possibility to his fellow managers and he organized for me to come along and do some development work. To my surprise I discovered that he was strongly disliked by the rest of the team and considered arrogant and authoritarian. I watched him in action and I could understand the source of his reptutation. He was trying to shove his views down the throat of the others and he was making them wrong. Being right and having something valuable to offer is not enough if you want to be influential. And constantly repeating those views out of frustration will not work either. The job of leadership is to work very hard at helping others to hear what it is that you are trying to offer them.
2. Being influential may not look like a total transformation. The CEO of another Executive team recently invited me to do some work with his management group. The GMs had been lobbying for changes to how the Executive worked and how decisions were made. My involvement was a concession by the CEO to all the lobbying. In private meetings with me the GMS complained that the CEO had become very aloof and cynical and they wanted to change this too. During very frank discussions at the workshop the CEO agreed to a raft of the operational changes put forward by the GMs and these were implemented. The CEO's parting words to me at the end of the workshop were: "That should keep the whingers off my back for another eighteen months before I retire".  Progress on the cynicism front appeared to be nil, but the GMs had been very influential on the operational matters.
3. You can't be influential and resigned at the same time. In another group of managers with whom I worked recently, some of the senior managers were disillusioned with their boss and believed that she rarely exercised any leadership. They had worked very hard to get her agreement to engage in some development work with me. During the workshop the boss slowly started to drop her mask and her defences and to make some tentative suggestions about how she and the team could improve. My own big internal sigh of relief was interrupted by a tirade of frustration and accusations aimed at the boss from one of the senior managers.  This manager was either blind to the small step shift occurring with her boss at that very moment, or she had already given up on the possibility of change. If you are resigned about change and the ability of others to change, then influence for good is impossible.