Influencing without authority
When asked ‘which skill or area you like to develop?’ in their performance reviews, product managers often respond with ‘having more influence’. The PM role is one that influences without authority, as they are accountable for developing their products but often do not directly manage anybody involved in the process. Instead, they must persuade and align others to a common goal in order to get anything done.
In particular, product managers would love to have more influence upwards - towards their manager and senior stakeholders, including VP’s and CxO’s. They may see this as challenging because the power dynamics within an organisation mean that roles more senior to a product manager have authority that they don’t.
This article explores what influence is, how it can be cultivated, and an antidote to low influence.
What is influence?
Influence refers to the capacity or power to have an effect on the thoughts, behaviour, or actions of others. It is common to think that the people with the most influence are those who have authority, charisma or social status, but there is more to it: anybody and everybody can have influence over others.
Daniel Goleman in Working with Emotional Intelligence, says that we are all influencing each other’s moods, all the time. Transmission of mood is particularly powerful: smiles are highly contagious, as good feelings spread more quickly than bad ones. Research supports that in early human tribes this ability to influence each other’s emotions acted as an alarm signal to quickly notify everybody when there was an imminent danger, such as a stalking tiger.
How you can have more influence
We can use the knowledge that we are continually priming each other’s emotional states to have more influence in a situation. For example, people that are positive at work have more influence because their good mood spreads wider: they make others feel good, and people want to be around them more.
Let’s take an example. Imagine you are a manager of two product managers with an equal skillset but very different attitudes: one is always looking on the bright side and laughs about it when things don’t go to plan, the other sees disasters everywhere and complains whenever there are changes. An opportunity comes up to lead on developing a new product - which one is the manager more likely to pick?
When it comes to working with senior colleagues, your interactions with them may be quite limited - perhaps a couple of hours in a Product Review every month. If you want to build your influence with this group, be the person who spreads a positive feeling whenever you are together.
Product managers can leverage their positive attitude whilst building rapport, listening openly, negotiating and resolving disagreements, inspiring and guiding others, and managing change.
An antidote to having no influence
Demonstrating that positive attitude is helpful in increasing your influence with those you work with directly, but what if you don’t get to spend much time with a group you want to influence? In this situation the antidote to low influence is trust. It is widely agreed amongst researchers that trust is a crucial component of influence.
Charles Feltman in The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work says that trust is ‘choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions’. There may be implicit trust between distant groups, such as a CEO trusting that their product teams are delivering products that satisfy customer needs, and will bring commercial success for the business. So the question to build influence between distant groups becomes, how do we increase our trust?
It may help to understand the different components of trust first. Brene Brown in Atlas of the Heart, uses BRAVING to identify the seven elements of trust that consistently came up in her research:
Boundaries - clarifying what’s okay and not, and saying no
Reliability - you do what you say you’re going to do
Accountability - owning your mistakes and apologising
Vault - keeping confidences to yourself
Integrity - choosing courage to do what is right over comfort
Non-judgement - asking for what you need without judgement
Generosity - give others the benefit of the doubt
From this we can see there are several areas where product managers can build trust, and therefore have more influence. One of the most powerful ways is for PM’s to get really good at product execution. Consistently delivering great products that meet the definition of success (and taking accountability when things don’t go to plan and adapting quickly) will earn them the reputation that they can be trusted with bigger and more complex challenges. Other tactics to building influence include learning a way to push back gently but firmly on requests or ideas that do not align with their product goals, and asking questions rooted in curiosity and not judgement.
To return to the original problem of wanting to build your influence as a product manager, two key ways are to establish trust by being reliable and accountable, and to maintain a positive attitude at work.
Books about influence and trust:
Working with Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Atlas of the Heart - Brene Brown
