You don’t need a title to influence your colleagues

“I used to think…”

We were all quiet…

What was she going to say?

There were five of us on the call. All female managers - members of the Keys to Impact Community. We were having a virtual coffee chat with a Senior executive who had led big culture changes at large corporates in energy and manufacturing.

This was not the usual surface-level networking. We wanted to understand her journey and get first-hand advice.

She was telling us about something she got wrong earlier in her career.

“I used to think I had to wait for the official promotion and title before I could have influence.”

“But I have realised, that’s not true. You don’t have to wait to climb the hierarchy to influence and lead your colleagues.”

 

Influence comes first, then title

Think about the last few people you watched getting promoted. They didn’t get the title and then became influential. They were already the person others went to for advice. The promotion arrived afterwards, and by the time it did, it just made sense.

That’s the order these things happen in. Not: title, then influence. Instead: influence, then a title that matches this.

Julie Battilana at Harvard has spent years researching power, and she calls out this exact belief as one of the biggest myths: that power belongs only to the people at the top. It doesn’t. Power is your ability to influence what other people do, and it comes from having something others need.

Honeybees have been running on this principle for millions of years.
 

How honeybees decide where to build the next hive

A honeybee colony has to make one really big decision. When the hive gets too crowded, half the bees leave to find a new home, and they have to agree on where.

You’d think the Queen decides. She has the title, but in fact she doesn’t pick the destination.

The scouts do. They fly out beyond the hive, further than anyone else goes, and they come back knowing something nobody else knows. Then they dance “the waggle dance”, which tells the other bees exactly what they found and where.

No delegation, no official authority from the Queen. They go and find something the colony needs, they make sure everyone can see what they found, and the swarm follows them. (I have linked the research into honeybee behaviour below.)

Where power comes from

So what do those scouts have, if they don’t have the official position or authority?

I wrote about this in September last year: Power comes from three sources.

• Your position.

• What you know.

• Who you know.

(Full blog here if you missed it.)

The honeybee scouts have knowledge that the other bees don’t have, and that allows them to influence and eventually lead the swarm to the new location.

In our careers, it works the same: Your manager can decide over your title, and when you get promoted.

But they can’t decide what you know and who you know. That’s what you can decide, and work on - and that’s what will give you influence and make the promotion conversation much easier.

So here is how to work on that:

Build unique knowledge and skills

Not every skill or knowledge is a power source. If five people on your team can do it, doing it well makes you reliable, not influential.

What gives you power is knowing something that people need and can’t easily get elsewhere - something that’s unique.

Reflect on where a skills or knowledge bottleneck is right now, or might be in future. Three places to look:

What breaks when one person is on leave. Every team has someone whose holiday causes a small crisis - find out what is that critical skillset.

What keeps getting escalated. If the same type of question is being asked to leadership every few weeks, it means no one at your level has the knowledge. You could build it.

What‘s required in order to meet the company’s strategic goals. You might need new technologies, a new way of working - if you are the first to learn this, this is your power source.

Out of these, is there one skill or area of knowledge that interests you and that aligns with where you see your career going? If you focus on learning that, that’s your next power source.

Make sure people know you know it

This is the step most of us skip - but it matters the most.

Battilana suggests a simple question for working out who really holds power in a room: who do people go to for advice?

Knowledge that nobody asks you about is just knowledge. You can be the most capable person in your department but have no power, because power comes from people asking.

The scout bee that finds the perfect new home and then doesn’t dance has changed nothing either.

Here’s how this played out for me.

My first full-time role was as a project manager in the head office of a FTSE 100 manufacturer, in a brand new Innovation and Digital team. The company sent me on training, including certified ScrumMaster.

I then set up an internal knowledge base and decided to run webinars. That meant that when someone in the business had a question about agile ways of working, they asked me.

Within months I was guiding teams in our subsidiaries through the change, including managing directors and directors, while I was still fairly junior. Nobody gave me authority over them. They came to me because I was the person who knew about these processes - and I had the courage to make it visible, by running these webinars.

Build connections that cross a boundary

The valuable connections sit where you’d otherwise have to go via someone else to get to the answer, for example another department, a subsidiary, a supplier, an industry institute.

You don’t need a big network - a couple key connections are very powerful.

In that same role, I stayed in touch with the graduates who joined the company when I did. Over the years they’d scattered across the world into different parts of the business. When I needed to pull those parts of the business together onto a call, I could do quickly, because I knew someone in many of them.

My title couldn’t reach those people but my connections could.

Your next step

Find out what skills or knowledge are important to your team and company. Then pick one that aligns with your interests, and take one step to find out how you could learn this?

The executive on that call didn’t tell us how to get promoted - instead, she told us to stop treating the title as the starting point. I am convinced she’s right.

PS. The research article on how honeybees find new nests is linked here.