A Senior VP I coached once described her situation in a way that stayed with me: “I have the mandate on paper. What I don’t have is the room.”
She had recently stepped into a role overseeing three business units that had never previously reported to one leader. On the organisation chart, everything looked straightforward. She had the seniority, the mandate and the decision-making authority. Yet the reality she encountered was quite different. During her first few months, she found herself spending far more time than expected trying to gain cooperation, navigate competing priorities and bring people with her.
What surprised her most was that she had assumed the new role would naturally give her greater influence. She quickly discovered that authority and influence do not always travel together.
This is something I have seen in many coaching conversations with senior leaders. As people progress through an organisation, their formal authority usually increases, but so does the complexity of the environment around them. They begin working across functions, business units and geographies. They deal with peers they cannot direct, stakeholders with their own priorities and experienced leaders who may respect the position without necessarily supporting every decision that comes from it.
At that level, knowing how to influence becomes just as important as knowing what decision to make.
There is a useful body of research behind this. In their seminal work on social power, John French and Bertram Raven identified five original bases of power: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert and referent power. Formal roles provide legitimate power and can also give leaders access to rewards and consequences. Expert and referent power develop differently. They depend much more on what other people experience from you: your judgement, credibility, expertise and the quality of the relationships you build.
This distinction becomes particularly relevant as leaders move into more senior roles. Having the authority to make a decision may settle who has the final say, but it does not necessarily create the commitment required to implement that decision well.
Allan Cohen and David Bradford explored this challenge through their work on Influence Without Authority. At the heart of their approach is reciprocity: understanding the world of the person you are trying to influence, recognising what matters to them and considering what you can offer that they value. They describe these sources of value as “currencies” of influence. Different people value different things, which means influence begins with understanding rather than persuasion.
For one stakeholder, that currency may be access to information or expertise. For another, it could be visibility, recognition, support, autonomy or involvement in an important decision. Sometimes what matters most is much simpler: knowing that their concerns have genuinely been heard and understood.
This is where I often see the real difficulty in coaching conversations. The leaders struggling with influence are frequently highly capable people. They know their business, they understand the problem and they often have a perfectly reasonable case for what needs to happen. Where they can get stuck is in approaching the conversation almost entirely from their own perspective.
They know what they need from the other person, but have spent much less time considering what the other person needs from them.
That is a very different question.
Before an important stakeholder conversation, I will sometimes ask a leader: “If you temporarily put aside what you want from this person, what matters to them right now?”
Then we go further. What are they trying to protect? What pressure might they be under? What would make this proposal easier for them to support? What do they value that you can genuinely offer? Where might your interests already overlap?
Those questions can change the quality of the conversation because the leader walks into the room trying to understand the landscape rather than simply trying to win an argument.
For the Senior VP I mentioned earlier, that became the turning point. She began spending less time explaining the mandate and more time understanding the people whose support she needed. She asked more questions. She became more curious about the priorities of each business unit and the concerns sitting behind some of the resistance she was encountering. She also became much more deliberate about what she could contribute to those relationships.
Gradually, something shifted. The conversations became easier, people involved her earlier, and cooperation required less effort. Her organisational authority had remained exactly the same throughout. What had grown was her credibility and the quality of the relationships around that authority.
There are three questions I often encourage leaders to consider when influence feels harder than it should:
- What matters to this person, beyond what I need from them?
- What can I genuinely offer that they value?
- What have they experienced from me so far that would give them a reason to trust my judgement?
Influence at senior levels rarely comes from one perfectly argued conversation. It accumulates through the way you listen, the commitments you keep, the value you create and the experience people repeatedly have when working with you.
The Senior VP eventually got the room. By then, she no longer needed to remind people quite so often that she had the mandate.
Perhaps the more interesting leadership question, then, is this: where are you expecting your position to carry an influence conversation that would benefit from greater curiosity, credibility and trust?