Maintenance
Workplace influence meaning: six terms and what each one means
Workplace influence means being consulted before decisions, not power, authority, status or being liked. Article separates six terms and three ways to observe it.
The phrase is used loosely enough to cover six different things, and the six behave differently. A person can have a great deal of one and almost none of another. Most disappointment on this subject comes from building one while wanting a different one.
The definition that holds is narrow. Influence at work is the extent to which people consult you before deciding something, and act on what you say without being required to.
What to take away
- The measurable form is consultation before a decision. Everything else on this page is a neighboring thing that gets called influence and is not.
- Influence is held by other people, not by you. It lives in their habit of checking, which is why it cannot be announced and cannot be taken away by a reorganization.
- Visibility is the most common substitute and the least useful. The people consulted most are frequently in fewer meetings than their peers.
Six terms
Influence. People come to you before deciding, and what you say changes what they do. There is no formal component. It is entirely a property of other people's habits.
Power. The capacity to affect what happens, from any source: budget, information, position, a scarce skill, a relationship. Power is the broader category, and influence is one of its forms, the one that operates through other people's judgment rather than around it.
Authority. Permission to decide, granted by somebody. It can be given and withdrawn in an afternoon. It gets you heard once; whether you are heard the second time is the same test everybody faces.
Status. Where you sit in an informal ordering, which is largely about who defers to whom. Social status tracks influence loosely and diverges from it often, most visibly in the person everyone is polite to and nobody consults.
Expertise. Being the person to ask about a subject. Necessary for influence within that subject and not sufficient beyond it. Influence is being asked about things outside your specialism, which comes from a different source.
Popularity. Being liked. It lowers the cost of every conversation and is worth having. It does not make anybody consult you about a decision, and a person optimizing for it will avoid exactly the small disagreements that build a record.
How they come apart
And lacks
- Authority
- Influence
- Expertise
- Influence
- Status
- Influence
- Popularity
- Influence
- Influence
- Authority
- Influence
- Status
What that looks like
- Authority
- Decisions routed to them, and worked around afterwards
- Expertise
- Consulted on one subject, never on the decision
- Status
- Treated with deference, told nothing useful
- Popularity
- Liked, and not in the room where things are decided
- Influence
- Consulted constantly, cannot approve anything
- Influence
- Quietly asked, rarely credited
The last two rows are the common position for anyone doing this well without a title, and they are stable. Standing built from other people's habits does not require a rank to hold it up.
Has one, lacks influence
Has
- Authority
- Influence
- Expertise
- Influence
- Status
- Influence
- Popularity
- Influence
- Influence
- Authority
- Influence
- Status
Lacks
- Authority
- Routed decisions, worked around
- Expertise
- Consulted on subject, not decision
- Status
- Deference, told nothing useful
- Popularity
- Liked, not in the room
- Influence
- Consulted constantly, approves nothing
- Influence
- Quietly asked, rarely credited
What it looks like
- Authority
- Expertise
- Status
- Popularity
- Influence
- Influence
What it is measured in
There is no scale, and there are three observations that answer the question.
Three signs of influence
- People come to you before deciding
- The tense is 'I am about to'
- Someone asks what you would have said
- Your absence shows in the work
- People come to you before deciding rather than after. The tense of the sentences you receive is the tell: "I am about to" against "I did".
- When you are absent from a meeting, somebody asks what you would have said.
- Your absence shows in the work rather than in the room. Things you own go slightly wrong when you are away, and everything else runs.
None of those can be arranged. All three are things other people do, which is what makes them evidence.
Where the word gets stretched
Two stretches are worth naming. The first is using influence to mean any effect at all, which makes the word useless: a person who blocks work has an effect and is not being consulted. The second is using it to mean persuasion in a single conversation, which is a skill and a different one.
Influence in the sense here is a standing condition rather than an event. It is what determines whether a persuasive argument gets a hearing at all.
Where the standing comes from, and how it is built and spent, is set out in workplace influence. Using it on a specific request to somebody who does not report to you is influence without authority.
If authority arrives as well, the failure mode inverts and is described in leadership influence. Deciding which people around a decision actually have to be brought along is stakeholder influence, and the test for whether a given use of standing is legitimate is in positive influence.
Common questions
Can I have influence without anyone noticing?
That is the usual case. It lives in other people's habits and it is rarely discussed, which is why people who have it often underestimate how much and people who want it look for the wrong evidence.
Does a promotion give me influence?
It gives you authority and a hearing. Whether people consult you next month depends on what happened after the first hearing, and a title makes that test slightly harder rather than easier, because agreement now arrives whether or not it is real.
Is being liked really not part of it?
It is part of the conditions and not part of the definition. Liking makes each conversation cheaper. It produces no consultation on its own, and the effort spent on it is usually effort not spent on the record of being right, which does.
What happens to influence in a reorganization?
Authority is reassigned and influence mostly is not, because it lives in habits rather than in a chart. What changes is whose habits matter, so the useful work after a reorganization is finding out which decisions have moved and who now makes them.
How is this different from a network?
A network is who you know. Influence is whether those people check with you before deciding. The two correlate and they are not the same, and a large network with no consultation in it is a contact list.
