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Influence is one of the hottest topics with all of my clients – how can I have more, how can I develop more in my team, how can I be more effective with influence efforts? So much work today is cross team, cross function, project oriented where the leader and the person accountable rarely has formal authority. If you do, and you use your formal authority, it doesn't tend to go well.

– Wanda Wallace, President and CEO, Leadership Forum; VoiceAmerica Talk Radio, Host of “Out of the Comfort Zone”

This book is about influence – the power to get your work done. You need to influence those in other departments and divisions: people you can't order and control. You need to influence your manager and others above you, and you certainly can't order and control them!

But you are not alone: nobody has the formal authority to achieve what is necessary, not even with those who report to them. It is an illusion that once upon a time managers could make their direct reports do whatever was needed. Nobody has ever had enough authority – they never have and never will. Organizational life is too complicated for that.

Yet, you can have enough influence to make things happen – and this book will tell you how.

You will learn how to move others to accomplish important objectives, in a way that benefits them as well as you and the organization. We build on a way of working that you already know, though it is easy to lose sight of how to create win-win trades in difficult situations or when dealing with difficult individuals, groups, or organizations. The book teaches you how to stop doing the things that get in the way of influencing those problematic situations and can dramatically increase your ability to get things done.

When we first wrote about influence in the 1980s, we had to justify its importance to people at all levels of the organization. At that time, the leadership and managerial focus was on how to command better, how to give clear directions and how to ensure compliance. But the world was changing, with a greater need for managing laterally and upward – along with less ability to just give orders downward. Today, almost everyone knows that influence is how the world works. We have lost count of the people who hear the title of this book, Influence without Authority, and instantly say, “That's my life” (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Forces Increasing the Need for Influence Skills

Few people can do anything significant alone. This requires influence in three directions.

Along with death and taxes, bosses are faced with this inevitable certainty of organizational life. In a flat organization, the boss may be a distant, benevolent resource, while in a more hierarchical one the boss may be breathing down your neck, but no one escapes having someone officially responsible for him or her. Even CEOs have a board and sources of financing they must influence, not to mention the financial markets, the press, and other organizations needed to create or sell company products.

Similarly, virtually everyone in organizations must deal with peers. Very few jobs let a person work completely solo. Most are dependent upon, and important to, a variety of colleagues.

Finally, some people also have responsibility as supervisors of others – the bosses to all those subordinates just mentioned. These managers are expected to utilize fully their subordinates' talents to see that the assigned work gets done.

Therefore, those keeping their heads down and working only within their immediate areas will slowly become extinct. Whatever your job, you are expected to join your colleagues in important work, which will lead you to influence and be influenced. You will need to know how to sell important projects, persuade colleagues to provide needed resources, create satisfactory working relationships with them and their managers, insist that your boss respond to issues that may not appear important to him or her, and (in turn) give thoughtful responses to requests associates make of you. The person asking something of you today may be the very one you'll need next week.

Here is an actual example (only some names disguised) of life in today's organizations.

Manucom, Inc., a successful manufacturing firm, recognized important market shifts in their industry. In 2014, the company expanded to a slightly different market space and invested heavily in building a software product. The company wanted to rapidly transition into a technology company structured into separate technology and product teams. Most of the product team, which was responsible for sales and marketing, had backgrounds with little technological understanding. (They cared about and were rewarded for creating a successful new product and generating demand so that it could be sold at profitable prices and volumes. The technology team was most interested in creating a new and interesting technology with the latest bells and whistles, regardless of whether customers wanted them or would pay for them. Their rewards came from technical complexity and novelty, solving difficult problems independent of demand.) The technical and product teams were supposed to be linked by the platform management team, whose members had technology backgrounds and MBAs. This team owned the entire software platform (and were rewarded for seeing that individual products worked as part of an integrated platform, which would reduce overall costs and reduce complexity).

The new product was supposed to go live in December 2015. The marketing campaign had started, the sales team was ready to sell (and cared about the new products to help meet sales targets and achieve their bonus goals), but the tech team was way behind schedule. Despite this, the product team decided to showcase the incomplete solution to the entire sales force, thinking the demo would buy some time. However, the product crashed during the national sales demo!

Millions of dollars had been spent, and emotions were running high. The product team blamed marketing, sales, and technology. The technology team blamed product and marketing. Even though everyone was from the same company, people treated each other as contractors, often blaming each other for breach of contract and trust.