Being an effective leader is more than your place on the organization chart.

It’s hard to quantify influence. Life isn’t a game where you can allot experience points into your influence stat, nor is influence something tangible that you can collect over days, weeks, and years. But influence is an important thing to gain if you want to not only stand out at work, but help become pivotal in moving your peers, your bosses, and your company towards success.

Why You Should Care About Your Influence

When you think about it, influence can be an extremely powerful thing to wield. To be able to influence someone is to be able to shape the very conversation around you. With enough influence in the workplace, your fellow employees follow your lead on a project. Enough influence and you can more easily establish a better working relationship with your boss. And while it’s great that influence can be an interpersonal tool, it’s also useful when seeking promotions and raises, or closing new business. Your influence can lead to becoming a more trusted and recognized individual within the organization.

How your influence can drive your team

Have you ever been involved in a group project, either in school or at work? Did you ever notice that the person everyone thought was smarter or more capable than everyone else usually fell into the leader role? That’s exactly how influence works. Their reputation and influence preceded them and as a result, they were trusted to keep the team engaged and guide them through the task at hand.

As an influential leader in the workplace, your team’s engagement on whatever project you’re working on is important. When it comes to engagement, you’re already fighting a losing battle, as the most recent figures from Gallup show that 33% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, compared to the 70% level of engagement at the world’s best organizations. Your influence, however, can energize your team to give their all. They just have to trust and understand you.

With each workplace success, your influence will grow within your team. The more your team trusts and respects your influence, the more your leadership will be valued. But remember, it’s important that your influence is used positively. To that end, always give people a lane to share their ideas, accept feedback and criticism, and admit that you’re not the be-all, end-all arbiter of excellence at work. Your influence can give your team purpose and be the thing that buoys everyone closer to their goals.

How you can ‘manage up’ and influence your manager

The concept of “managing up” may sound like you’re overstepping your boss or superseding their authority at work, but it’s actually the contrary. When trying to “manage up,” you’re trying to establish a positive working relationship by working towards a scenario where you both have a good working rapport that builds over time.

“Managing up is all about building a robust, working relationship with your boss, supervisor, or anyone above you in the food chain,” Mary Abbajay, author of the award-winning, best-selling book “Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss,” told HigherEd Jobs. “It’s a deliberate effort to increase cooperation and collaboration with those who have influence over your career, even when you don’t particularly like how they operate.”

Eventually, you can use your influence to not only become your boss’s go-to partner, but to also learn their management style and what they need to accomplish. Once you understand that, you can help them understand what your job entails and how you can best work within their parameters to achieve mutual success.

Ultimately, using your influence to “manage up” is all about opening up a shared dialogue with your manager or boss. Too often people clam up around their superiors for fear of saying something wrong or being seen as inept. Your boss is a human being. They can’t read your mind. Some honest conversation about each other’s expectations can go a long way.

Your influence as a peer can help you ‘manage across’

While it’s easy to understand what “managing down” or “managing up” means, the idea that one can use their influence to “manage across” is a little harder to comprehend. In the other instances, it’s easy to see the inherent power structure between a manager and an employee. But when you’re talking about influencing your co-workers or peers in other departments, things can get tricky.

According to an article written by John B Wilson Jr. MBA/PMP for Emory University’s Projects and Processes, managing across is harder than the other methods because it “requires a different set of skills, including emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and effective social skills.” That’s due to the fact that you don’t really have any organizational power over the other person in question. You’re relying solely on your influence to get someone to go along with your ideas.

To that end, seek to establish your trustworthiness with whomever you’re trying to influence. Work can be a competitive place, so show them that you want to work with them, not trying to use them to further yourself while leaving them in the dust. Be as authentic and supportive as possible when discussing plans. As long as you’re honest and follow through on your end, you will gain your co-worker’s trust and they’ll be more willing to follow your lead. And when needed, give back to them when they need your help with something.

“In order to get what you want, you have to give when something is needed from you,” Wilson Jr. writes. “It works both ways and it’s a matter of simple give-and-take.”

How to Use Your Influence and Motivate the People Around You

Simply knowing what having influence means doesn’t immediately translate into being able to leverage it to motivate the people around you. When it comes to cashing in your influence and making a change around you, keep the following things in mind.

Don’t just talk, do it!

Most people can sense a phony. If you’re not being honest to yourself and following through, eventually the people around you will catch on. Why should they do anything you suggest when you won’t even do it for yourself? Remember, influence must be a two-way street for it to really work.

Listen to and understand people’s motivations

Since this is always going to be a two-way street, you should pay attention to people’s needs and motivations. Maybe there’s something that you can help them with? Whether it’s a team’s desire to finish a particular task or an individual’s request for help hashing out an idea, treat each person uniquely and address their needs. Be sure to ask open-ended questions to figure out what you can do for them.

Make your ideas as understandable as possible

Have you ever been told an idea or concept by someone and you just didn’t get it? You probably felt like you couldn’t help them even if you tried. When you’re conveying your ideas and trying to sway an audience your way, make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Position your new ideas in accordance with company initiatives

Most people in the workplace want to contribute to the company’s goals. As you’re sharing your ideas with those around you, make sure you quantify how your plans could align with the company’s initiatives. Whether that’s revenue growth, profitability, hiring, process improvement, or whatever it may be, linking your ideas to key initiatives will be for the betterment of everyone.

Make sure to set goals

By setting goals for the people you’re working with, sure you’re delegating tasks but you’re also showing them that you trust their ability to get the job done. That kind of trust will often make a person want to keep working with you, since they’ll feel valued as a teammate. These goals should be tough but attainable, that way your team will always strive to better themselves and their output.

The Bottom Line

Starting out, the concept of influence as a leadership tool in the workplace may seem nebulous at best. Just remember that it’s a real thing that highly effective individuals in the workplace use to get things done. While gaining trust and being recognized as a leader is beneficial to your career, it’s also a great thing to have in order to help push your organization forward. When it comes to influence, it’s really a matter of collaboration and respect, and it goes all ways.

‍