How to Build Influence

The Hidden Compass of Effective Leadership

Influence is the skill that separates a director from a manager - while it is a nice to have for a manager, it is a fundamental skill for the director, and the best directors not only need to be competent at influence, but excel at it.

This is because the director needs to develop a broad, impactful strategy and get a multi-functional group of people to execute on it. To achieve this, the strategy needs to make sense and be internalized by the people that will work in the same direction as the director’s intentions. This almost always extends beyond the scope of their own team, and require a complex group of people, sometimes even the entire organization. As a result command is no longer an effective tool, and the direct must rely on influence to direct initiatives of this size.

However, building influence takes time, and doing it effectively separates the median director from the truly impactful ones. There are two levels of building influence:

• Personal influence: this is your influence with your peers at an interpersonal level. What multiplier do they put on the statements you make given no supporting information from elsewhere?

• World building: this is your ability to shape the framing and dogma of the company - i.e. how do to people approach a specific problem, what factors they consider in making decisions, and what are the incontrovertible truths of the company.

Personal influence is highly contextual, and doing this correctly varies greatly from person to person. It is extremely difficult to give general guidance, but common themes are:

1. be empathetic,

2. understand the perspective and goals of the other person,

3. share your views and receive feedback, and

4. over time, build mutual respect and shared goals.

However, world building is generalizable, and in the long run is the dominant influence factor. Similar to how command is not scalable when compared to influence, personal influence is not scalable when compared to world building. This is because world building shapes the environment that maximizes the effectiveness of everything you do - it is both a perpetual form of influence and an influence multiplier at the same time.

World building has this dual effect on influence by making everyone else think the same way that you do. This is highly efficient for you, since you will spend very little time needing to convince people of the direction you want to go, and they will be naturally aligned since it’s the same direction they want also. In fact, they will be aligned with you even when you are not there!

Thus, understanding how to world build well is absolutely critical to being a top director. In fact, I don’t know of any top tier directors, VPs or executives that have not successfully executed on world building in a material way.

To do this, think of influence as a mathematical equation. You have full control if you have control of the inputs and the formula. In the real world, framing is the formula, and dogma is how incontrovertible the inputs are.

Getting a group of people to align on your way of framing, and to believe in your dogma however takes different approaches.

Framing

There are usually hundreds of ways of understanding the root cause of difficult problems, and often tens of those ways are equally correct. Often debates arise about how to solve a problem because people have different perspectives on the understanding of the problem itself. Unfortunately, while these debates are usually focused on the solution - i.e. what and how things need to be done, the source of the argument is in the definition of the problem. Unsurprisingly, a good resolution is unlikely because the debate is never directly addressing the root of the disagreement.

A powerful way to have everyone’s views become more correlated, and define problems in similar ways, is by having everyone have the same framing for key problems within the company. Framing is like defining the equation of a specific problem or a specific part of the business. This is powerful because framing constrains what inputs matter for a problem (and which ones don’t) as well as how they combine together to get to an output.