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Why Influence?

Influence is the power and the ability to personally affect others’ actions, decisions, opinions, or thinking. As such, influence is an essential component of leadership. Most leaders want to have more of it, but may be unaware that a tactical approach can increase their personal influence. Leaders need it to sell ideas and to motivate people to support and implement decisions—sometimes your ideas and decisions, and sometimes those of others that you represent.

Your position in an organization and the power (the capacity or potential to exert influence) it gives you may not be enough to persuade and engage people. Many contemporary organizations have adopted flexible, matrix structures that rely less on hierarchy and more on a leader’s ability to influence and win commitment.

Positional power does not equal personal power.

Influence is important because it achieves desirable outcomes. You can use your influence to communicate your personal or your team’s or your organization’s vision. Skillful influencing can align the efforts of others in the organization, build commitment to the work, and expand the organization’s capacity to meet its challenges.

Leaders who effectively use their influence skills can achieve their goals and objectives more successfully than leaders who simply order people to do things. But what does it mean to effectively use your influence skills? To answer that question, you need to know that the use of influence tactics can produce three distinctly different outcomes: resistance, compliance, and commitment. In Leadership in Organizations, Gary Yukl describes the differences between them.

Resistance

The least desirable outcome is resistance to the request you are making. People may directly oppose what you’re asking for or use a stealthy resistance, perhaps sabotaging your efforts to influence in subtle ways. For example, they may initially agree with your request, but then put roadblocks in the way of its completion or make excuses about why it cannot be accomplished.

Figure 1. Potential Influence Outcomes

Compliance

Compliance is better than resistance, and it is often the level of response you need to ensure that another person takes action in a required way; for example, that he or she follows rules, accepts procedures, and so on. Compliance is sufficient when your request is simple and routine and doesn’t require the other person to exert much additional energy or effort to accomplish it. You can settle for compliance in such situations because your request isn’t optional but required by the organization, by the unit, or by the team you lead.

Commitment

When your influence efforts result in commitment, you have succeeded in presenting sufficient reasons to secure voluntary endorsement and support for carrying out a task. This is an important distinction, and it’s vital if what you are asking requires other people to take on jobs that may not be simple, quick, or without cost to their personal time or work schedules. When you are able to influence someone to the level of commitment, you receive several advantages:

• There is less need to monitor progress toward your goals or fight resistance to them.

• There is greater sustained effort, which is particularly important when the tasks involved are complex or difficult and require a concentrated effort over a long period of time.

• Because committed people endorse your objectives, they tend to be more efficient, creative, resilient, and focused toward your shared goal.

• Working relationships improve.

An Inspirational Appeal

On May 25, 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy addressed the Congress on what he called an “extraordinary challenge.” Four years earlier, the U.S.S.R. had launched Sputnik I, a 184-pound aluminum ball that emitted radio beeps as it orbited the earth. Kennedy wanted support from lawmakers, the scientific community, and U.S. citizens to help the United States to catch up. “We possess all the resources and talents necessary. But we have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment,” Kennedy said. The president framed his call to action as exploration and discovery—values held in common by many Americans at the time. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” Kennedy said. In 1969, the United States achieved that goal.