The Environment for Influence

Mastering Influence in Diverse Environments

Maximizing your influence is a necessary step for being a top director. While you can optimize your actions like when to use influence versus command, the environment you operate in greatly affect the level and style of influence possible, and will affect your entire leadership strategy. Thus, understanding the dynamics of the environment you play in is crucial to great leadership since it informs you what levers you have to work with.

One major component of your environment is the prevailing framing and dogma, and it is the component that is easier to influence over the medium term. Other components of influence are just as important, but are either outside of your control or will take a very long time to influence materially. They are:

• Cultishness of the company - is the company driven by a cult of personality from the founder, or is it more corporate

• Interpersonal culture - how does the company recognize and reward teams and individuals

• Company trajectory - is the company in hypergrowth, steady state or declining

Together, these dynamics shape the norms and incentives of everyone within the environment, which create behaviors that make it either easier or more difficult to influence, and dictates what styles of influence are effective.

In general, the more collaborative and risk-taking a group is, the more effective influence is. This is because in a risk-taking, collaborative environment, people are more inclined to:

1. (risk-seeking) take a personal position

2. (collaboration) be open to the viewpoints of others

As a counterfactual example, imagine an environment where people are both risk-averse and non-collaborative. This often happens when the culture is extremely punitive (i.e. name and shame environments). In this environment influence is weak because no one is incentivized to break from consensus nor are they incentivized to create unique, new opinions since there is no upside, and massive downside.

While these environmental components work together to form the overarching norms and incentives of the group, they affect the environment is strikingly different ways, and it is worthwhile being intentional about how they work.

Cults

Merriam-Webster defines a cult as:

Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.

Based on this definition, all teams are some form of a cult. However, the objects and strength of the cult dramatically affect the structure and dynamics within a group, and will greatly impact both the effectiveness and the style of influence available to you.

In business, the object of the cult usually form around either the mission of the company or around a personality, usually that of the founder. A power source of influence is created from this object, and conceptual and social presence in close proximity to this object will derive greater influence. However, whether the object is a personality or a mission changes how this proximity works.