At one startup I worked with we had an issue with our network of suppliers - there wasn't enough capacity for the demand that we were seeing, and we couldn't scale fast enough. Senior leadership were concerned about how this was impacting our customers (and the business!). I was asked to lead a project to review how we could increase supply. I started with identifying the problem, and the levers we had short term to turn it around. The leaders I worked closest with - the COO and CTO - trusted me to solve this: they asked me what support I needed from them and asked for regular updates on progress, otherwise they stayed out of my way. When I did have an ask to make they were quick to respond. They also backed me when I had to make hard calls. To me, this demonstrated three key points about influence:
Today we're going to dive into this a bit more, starting with a quick look at different types of power and how they interplay with influence.
What comes to mind when you think of someone who has 'power'? Politicians in charge of the country? Senior leaders in your company? Yourself?
It's important to recognise that you have power, and you can use that to influence other people.
French and Raven in 1959 identified ​several different types of power​:
These types of power can be split into positional (legitimate, reward, coercive) and personal power (informational, expert, referent). What this means is that you don't need to have authority in order to have power - in fact, that's just one type (legitimate). You can have power through having key information that people need, or being an expert in a particular topic. For product managers, that could look like being the person who is closest to your customers and what problems they are experiencing.
Too often I see product managers failing to recognise the power they do have, and just giving it away. This looks like not speaking up in meetings because they're scared to add their voice, or not challenging or questioning what somebody more senior says, even if they have evidence that it's wrong. Their perception of legitimate power (i.e. the hierarchy) gets in the way of them being effective influencers.
The good news is that you can change this. Taking it one step at a time, you can practice influencing your peers, your manager, and then working your way up to senior leaders. You can have a go with this today with the self coaching exercise.
The third point made in the introduction is that you can only influence people if they are open to it. This may be a hard pill to swallow but if someone isn't open to you influencing them, you're unlikely to succeed. There's lots of reasons why there is resistance, but it usually comes down to a person's power, an individual characteristic or that they see you as belonging to a different group identity to them. Let's explore this using a hypothetical situation.