You do not need formal authority to influence what happens at work.
Every day, people influence colleagues, peers, project partners and senior stakeholders through conversations, ideas, questions, evidence and behaviour.
Sometimes that influence is straightforward. You see the issue in much the same way and reaching agreement is relatively easy.
The real test comes when you do not agree.
Perhaps you have different priorities. You interpret the evidence differently. One of you wants to move quickly while the other wants more information. You may even agree on the outcome but disagree completely about how to get there.
Being able to influence others at work is not about becoming more persuasive at any cost. It is about increasing the likelihood that people will understand your perspective, consider it seriously and make a well informed choice.
That takes more than a strong argument. It takes behavioural flexibility.
What does it mean to influence others at work?
Influence is the ability to affect another person’s thinking, choices or behaviour without relying solely on authority or instruction.
This matters particularly when influencing peers.
You may be accountable for an outcome without managing the people whose support you need. You may need another department to change a process, a colleague to reconsider an approach or a senior stakeholder to support an idea.
You cannot simply tell them what to do.
Research into workplace influence has found that approaches such as rational persuasion, consultation and collaboration are generally associated with more constructive outcomes than relying heavily on pressure or positional authority (Lee et al., 2017; Yukl & Tracey, 1992).
The question becomes:
How do I create enough understanding, trust and relevance for another person to genuinely consider my position?
These four approaches are a good place to start.
1. Listen before you try to persuade
One of the easiest ways to weaken your influence is to start solving the wrong problem.
We often enter a conversation already preparing our response. We hear the words, but we are listening for an opportunity to make our case.
Effective influence begins with understanding.
Ask what matters to the other person. What are they trying to protect, achieve or avoid? What information are they using? What concerns sit behind their position?
Good listening does not mean agreeing.
It means understanding the other person’s perspective well enough to respond to what they actually think, rather than what you assume they think.
Research on listening at work suggests that high quality listening can support trust, relationship quality, clarity and more productive thinking between people (Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022).
This makes Social Awareness and Regard for Others particularly useful behavioural capabilities.
Social Awareness helps us notice what may be happening beyond the words being spoken.
Regard for Others helps us make sufficient space for another person’s perspective, even when we disagree with it.
The practical challenge is balance.
Very strong Regard for Others may make someone reluctant to challenge an idea. Strong Assertiveness may help another person communicate clearly but leave too little space for alternative views.
Neither behaviour is automatically good or bad.
What matters is whether the behaviour being used fits the situation.
2. Find the common ground before debating the
differences
When people disagree, attention naturally moves towards the gap between them.
Yet influence often becomes easier when we first identify what is already shared.
You might disagree about the method but agree about the outcome.
You might have different priorities but share responsibility for the same customer.
You might hold different views about the risk but both want the organisation to make a good decision.
Common ground gives the conversation somewhere to stand.
Instead of beginning with:
“Here is why your approach is wrong.”
try:
“We both want this project to succeed. I think we are seeing the risk differently. Can we look at that together?”
The disagreement has not disappeared.
The context has changed.
Purpose and Collaboration can play an important role here. A clear shared purpose gives people something larger than their individual position to work towards, while Collaboration supports the exchange of information, ideas and responsibility.
Again, proportion matters.
Collaboration can increase ownership and improve decision quality. Overused, it can create unnecessary consensus seeking or slow decisions that genuinely require someone to make a call.
Effective influence is not endless agreement.
It is knowing when participation will improve the outcome and when clarity is needed.
3. Frame your message in their context, not yours
One of the most common mistakes when influencing others at work is explaining an idea in the way that would persuade us.
We assume the same argument will motivate everyone else.
It rarely does.
A finance leader may want evidence of commercial impact.
An operational leader may want to know whether the proposal can actually be implemented.
A team member may be concerned about workload.
A senior executive may want to understand the strategic consequence.
Someone motivated strongly by Autonomy may respond well to having choices.
Someone who values Collaboration may want to be involved earlier.
Someone strongly motivated by Purpose may first need to understand why the work matters.
Adapting your communication to another person’s context is not manipulation.
Manipulation hides intent or restricts genuine choice.
Effective influence makes the relevance of an idea easier to understand while allowing the other person to think, question and decide.
That distinction matters.
If you would be uncomfortable explaining openly how you are attempting to influence someone, it is worth examining your approach.
For a deeper exploration of influence, power and behavioural drift, see:
Leadership Influence: Ethics, Behaviour, and Drift
4. Bring evidence, then invite thinking
A confident opinion is still an opinion.
When people hold different views, evidence gives the conversation something more objective to examine.
That evidence might be data, customer feedback, operational results, previous experience, research, financial information or a small scale test.
Rational persuasion has been one of the more consistently effective influence approaches identified in organisational research (Lee et al., 2017; Yukl & Tracey, 1992).
But presenting evidence does not mean delivering a forty slide argument until the other person surrenders.
Strong influence combines evidence with curiosity.
You might ask:
- “What part of the evidence do you see differently?”
- “What information would help us make this decision?”
- “What would need to be true for this approach to work?”
- “Is there another risk I have not considered?”
That changes evidence from a weapon into a thinking tool.
It also creates an important possibility.
You may discover that you are the person who needs to change position.
That is not failed influence.
That is good judgement.
Influencing peers when you have no formal authority
Influencing peers can be harder than influencing direct reports because the authority relationship is different.
You cannot rely on hierarchy to create movement.
Your influence comes from other sources, including credibility, expertise, relationships, information, reliability and the quality of your reasoning.
This is why influence is such an important leadership capability beyond formal management roles.
People who consistently influence well tend to make it easier for others to work with them.
They listen.
They understand competing priorities.
They communicate clearly.
They bring useful evidence.
They adapt their approach.
They follow through.
Over time, those behaviours build credibility.
And credibility creates influence long before someone receives a leadership title.
Your strongest behaviour may not always be your most useful behaviour
One of the assumptions we challenge through flowprofiler® is that more of a positive behaviour must always be better.
Workplace behaviour is more contextual than that.
Someone with very strong Self Confidence may communicate with conviction. In some situations that is exactly what is required. In another situation the same strength may leave too little room for doubt, challenge or alternative evidence.
Strong Assertiveness can create clarity. It can also crowd out quieter voices.
Strong Collaboration can involve others and improve ownership. Used too strongly, it may create dependency on consensus.
Strong Regard for Others can build trust and consideration. It may also make necessary challenge harder.
A person may be perfectly comfortable operating with a strongly expressed behaviour. The cost is not necessarily experienced by them.
Sometimes the people around them are the ones who must continually create space for it.
This is why behavioural awareness matters.
flowprofiler® helps people understand how they are currently using workplace behaviours, both in their day-to-day state and when they are under pressure.
The goal is not to create one ideal profile.
It is to increase behavioural range and choice.
Explore the flowprofiler® behavioural assessment
Influence can change under pressure
Most of us can influence thoughtfully when the stakes are low.
Pressure makes the test more interesting.
When time is short, conflict increases or an important outcome feels threatened, behaviour can change.
Listening may reduce.
Assertiveness may intensify.
Emotional Regulation may become harder.
Collaboration may disappear as someone takes control, or increase as someone becomes reluctant to make a decision alone.
A person’s day-to-day behaviour does not always predict how they will behave when the pressure rises.
This is one reason flowprofiler® compares behaviour across two states.
Awareness of that shift gives people an opportunity to notice when a useful strength is becoming less helpful and deliberately choose another response.
When Influence Alone Isn’t Enough
We’ve probably all experienced it. Two capable people, both committed to achieving a good outcome, who simply cannot reach agreement.
It’s tempting to assume that better communication or stronger influencing skills will resolve the issue.
Sometimes they will. But not every disagreement is a communication problem.
The way an organisation operates can make collaboration easier or considerably harder. Competing priorities, inconsistent expectations and organisational pressures can all influence how people respond to each other.
And when these issues go unrecognised, even experienced leaders can find themselves having the same conversations, managing the same tensions and achieving very little progress.
This is why developing influence requires more than teaching people to communicate persuasively. It involves understanding the behaviours people bring to work, how those behaviours change under pressure and the wider circumstances affecting their interactions.
At flowprofiler®, we recognise that effective leadership development must consider both the individual and their working environment.
Because improving someone’s ability to influence others won’t necessarily resolve the underlying issues preventing people from working effectively together.
Influence is not about winning every conversation
The strongest influencers are not necessarily the people who get their way most often.
They are people who can create movement while preserving the quality of the relationship, the quality of the decision and the ability of others to contribute.
Sometimes that means persuading someone.
Sometimes it means reaching alignment.
Sometimes it means understanding why another person’s idea is better.
And sometimes it means disagreeing clearly and respectfully while still moving forward together.
Influence is not one behaviour.
It is the ability to recognise what the situation requires and adjust.
That is behavioural intelligence in practice.
Develop your ability to influence at work
Our Leading Through Influence workshop helps leaders and teams understand how influence works, recognise the behavioural choices available to them and practise approaches that build commitment rather than dependence or compliance.
The one day programme explores practical influence, behavioural flexibility, power, communication and how people respond differently under pressure.
Ready to explore a programme for your people? Contact us.
References
flowprofiler® Global. (2024). flowprofiler® technical manual.
Kluger, A. N., & Itzchakov, G. (2022). The power of listening at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 121–146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-091013
Lee, S., Han, S., Cheong, M., Kim, S. L., & Yun, S. (2017). How do I get my way? A meta-analytic review of research on influence tactics. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 210–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.11.001
Yukl, G., & Tracey, J. B. (1992). Consequences of influence tactics used with subordinates, peers, and the boss. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), 525–535. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.77.4.525
