Influence is a Leader’s Special Source of Power

Oct 7

This week, I have been spending a lot of time on my preparation for a leadership event I am participating in soon. In my leader thinking time, my thoughts keep circling back to the concept of influence; particularly about how influence is a leader’s special source of power. Of course, there are varying levels of influence you may have with different members of your team, and different things influence people in different ways. But the point I mean to underscore here is that it is imperative to spend an adequate amount of time thinking about influence as a power source within your leadership.

The good news about influence is that it can be won with your team in multiple ways. The bad news about influence is that it must be won over and over again; it is not something that you simply retain forever once you’ve won it. It makes me think about my combat time in the military. The wars I participated in were both counterinsurgency-type wars. You don’t use brute force traditional military tactics to win counterinsurgency battles; you ultimately win a counterinsurgency by winning the hearts and minds of the populace and turning the native people against those who are creating the conflict. That is the power of influence at work – winning hearts and minds. And that is precisely what you have to do with your own people on your team, too. You must win their hearts and minds over and over again, every day.

Today, I am going to assume you have already won the hearts and minds of your people. This means you should next turn your attention to mitigating the risk of losing your influence. Here are three risks you can look for that can rob you of your influence with your people:

Dissatisfaction: In general, people will become dissatisfied over time. Pay attention to the potential causes of the dissatisfaction. Often, they have lost sight of the vision, so they are no longer excited about the future and are letting themselves get caught up in the dissatisfaction of their current struggles; or, perhaps they feel there is just no growth or improvement being experienced. All of this creates dissatisfaction within your team and you will lose your influence if they are dissatisfied.
Disunity: I think the quickest way to diminish a strong sense of unity within your team is just a loss of culture. Shared culture and feelings of unity are very closely correlated. Remember that we like to think of culture as the accumulation of the particular values that drive your behavior. The quickest way to lose your culture is to make a bad hire – allowing someone to join your team that is not a good fit and stirs things up in a bad way. Or, a person that becomes dissatisfied in your organization could start to rebel against the values that you have all identified as important for your team’s culture. You either need to get them satisfied quickly or help them transition to somewhere where they will be satisfied.
Temptation: Business, to some extent, is a battle for talent. There are people in the marketplace who recruit talent as their core competency, which means your talented people – satisfied or not – are likely constantly bombarded with solicitations from external forces. Someone may do a great job painting a picture of the grass being greener elsewhere, or promise more money (or freedom, or whatever else may motivate your talent personally…). Recruiters are adept at playing at whatever may be a source of dissatisfaction for your talent – however big or small that might be – and influence your people with that temptation to move away from you. This is when you effectively lose the hearts and minds of your talent because they believe they could be offered better somewhere else.

Pay attention to these three risks and continue to spend time thinking about the influence you have with each member of your team. Without influence, you are not truly leading your team.