How to Influence Without Authority at Work [Persuasion - Part 1 of 3]
imagine how much easier it would be if your boss and your coworkers would just listen to your suggestions and agree with your ideas…
…unfortunately common sense and logic doesn't always prevail, especially in the workplace. But when you know how to influence people to your way of thinking, there's virtually no limit to where your career can go.
Stay tuned.
Before I begin, you are probably wondering who is this guy and why should I listen to him?
I'm Doug Howard. I'm a licensed structural engineer and engineering manager, and my biggest passion is helping engineers like you elevate your life personally and professionally.
It's why I started this YouTube channel, which is 100% dedicated to helping engineers like you build the right skills to create your own opportunities and take control of building the career that you want and deserve.
Subscribe to my channel if you don't want to miss out on any tools, insights, or techniques that can put your engineering career on an accelerated path.
Today I'm gonna explain what influence is and how it's different than manipulation. I'm also going to explain the only way you can convince someone to do something that they don't want to do.
Why Influence is Important
Let's start with why influence is more valuable than any technical skill, even for engineers.
The biggest transition in your engineering career is when you shift from depending on senior team members, into actively contributing to the team's decision making process. Before this transition, the majority of your job is, following rules, following procedures, guidelines, and instructions. You're basically following things that were created and given to you by senior engineers and managers.
At this stage of your career, you hate to admit it, you're basically a glorified rule follower who carries out mindless plug and chug calcs. It can feel pretty painful, and at that point, you know you really want nothing more than to progress to the next level, even if you don't know what it is yet. You want to be in a role where your unique set of skills are being utilized. You wanna feel like you're still growing, but you're also gaining more freedom, autonomy, and independent judgment in your role. You wanna feel like you're contributing to the team at far greater levels than just crunching calcs and slinging out code. And the only way to get there is by learning how to influence people. Because in today's world, technical skills just aren't enough.
In fact, any senior engineer or engineering manager like myself will tell you that the longer your career goes, the more you understand that tech skills is rarely the hard part. In fact, the things that trip you up the most in your career are people, communication, working with teams, navigating office politics, gamesmanship, and just things that have nothing to do with engineering or your actual job.
Now, as engineers, we like to believe that our reputation should be based on performance, and we like to believe that our performance is measured by tangible metrics like our quality of work, meeting deadlines, minimizing errors, and you're right, it should be, but it's not. The harsh reality is that your perceived performance, and that is you know how your boss and your coworkers view your performance, your perceived performance has very little to do with your technical skills or even the quality of your work.
Think of it this way. Your work is assigned and managed and reviewed by a product manager or a team leader or a director. Whoever it is or whatever their title is, it's a person who has more responsibilities than you, but less knowledge about specific areas than you, which means it's not even possible or even practical for your boss to accurately measure the quality of your work.
And if they can't even do that, how will they know if you're qualified to take on more responsibilities or advance to the next level? The answer is they don't unless you influence them. By the way, if you want me to create more episodes on topics related to persuasion, negotiating, and influence, let me know by tapping that LIKE button.
Influence vs Manipulation
A lot of people think influence is synonymous with manipulation, but don't confuse these two terms because there is a clear difference between them. Manipulation is tricking someone into taking action, and it usually involves being unethical and it probably involves lying. Now, on the other hand, influence is where you're actually able to inspire someone to want to take action.
To better explain this, I'm gonna share a story from the early days in my career when I was still a project engineer. Now back then, my biggest frustrations always came from our sales team. Every time I'd sink my teeth into a new project, there never was enough information for me to actually begin working on the project. Literally every time.
Critical information like the story height, service loads, design parameters, site locations and conditions, all this information was always missing, and the sales team at our company was responsible for gathering that information.
I'd waste so much time hunting down the salesman and waiting for them to get back to me with basic information that I needed to do my job. I spent so much time doing this I started to feel more like a babysitter than an engineer.
I would try to efficiently manage these situations by working around it and working on something else. While I was waiting for answers, I'd have to contact sales and request the info, then work on something else while I waited. And it would usually take a few days for them to get back to me with answers. Meanwhile, my boss wasn't extending my deadline for this, so I'd be under the gun to make up for the lost time.
Can you relate to this? I wanna know what situations create a lot of unnecessary stress for you at work. Please share in the comments.
As you can imagine, I quickly developed a general resentment towards the sales team for all the stress they put me through.
I took it personally and I assumed they knew how much stress they were creating for me, and I assumed they realized how much stress they were creating for other people that I worked with, and I became so frustrated over time that I really didn't do much to hide it. I'd complain to my boss about the sales team when that didn't get results, I'd complain directly to the sales team. I'd say things like, this is gonna put a lot of stress on me. It's gonna be hard for me to hit this deadline now, I'm probably gonna have to work over the weekend.
Needless to say, the sales team was really testing my patience by the way, patience is a skill that can be improved even if you feel like you're naturally impatient. If you wanna learn more about this, then check out my episode called Three Ways to Improve Your Patience. Just click on the link in the description.
Anyways, I figured if the sales team realized that they were holding up the project and causing me this much pain and frustration, it would get them to move faster get me answers and motivate them to do a better job in the future.
Of course, this approach did not get the results I wanted, it was because I was making a common mistake that most people make when it comes to influencing people.
I was approaching the problem like an engineer, which means I was being too logical.
The Right Approach
So I started trying a different approach on the next project that I had with missing info. I called the salesman right before my lunch break to request the info that was missing, and at the end of the call I said,
Hey, Mike, you know I don't want this project to be late any more than you do. But the last time I fell behind while waiting for answers from the sales team, John, who was my boss, John, ended up taking over the project for me at the last minute and we ended up missing the deadline. Wouldn't you know I had crystal clear answers on all my questions waiting in my email inbox by the time I came back from my 30 minute lunch break.
If you're wondering how I was able to get the salesman to give me crystal clear answers this time, I'll explain in a moment.
But first, have you ever been in a situation where you needed to influence someone that you didn't have authority over? Were you able to get what you needed from them? Please tell me about it in the comments.
Here's some perspective on why I was able to get answers from the salesman. My boss at the time was a VP and a partner in our firm, so he had indirect authority over the sales team. He also had a chip on his shoulder towards the sales team like most engineers do. So he'd actually seek out opportunities to make an example out of them when they weren't doing their job right. The sales team knew this about my boss, and they knew that whenever he got involved on a project, it wasn't a good thing, at least not for them, because it often resulted in pushing out the deadline at the last minute, and, in my, in my previous attempts at influencing the sales team, I was only speaking to them in terms of the impact their actions were having on me.
Where Most People Go Wrong
I was coming at it from my own personal interests. Saying things like, this is gonna put a lot of stress on me. I'm going to fall behind. I can't get started.
Here's what I didn't do. I didn't explain what the impact would be on them. I never even considered the situation from their perspective.
But this time I challenged myself to do that. I started by giving the salesman the benefit of the doubt. I brainstormed valid reasons why the salesman would continue to leave out critical information when he knew we were asking for it, and he knew we needed it.
At first, I came up with reasons like, maybe he was distracted, maybe he simply forgot to include it, maybe it was sloppy note taking on the job site, maybe a note got misplaced while he was traveling. None of these provided me with any insight on how to influence the situation. then I started considering what the salesman wanted. I already knew what the salesman didn't want. They literally feared telling customers that a project would be late, especially at the last minute. I went deeper and considered why that was so important to them., could it be as simple as just good customer service, keeping the customer happy to hopefully earn repeat business? It sounds noble, but it doesn't sound like it would be enough to invoke fear. So then I considered their pay structure.
I knew it was a commission system where they didn't get paid until their project was completed. Our projects had a pretty long turnaround time, so they'd literally go a few months without receiving a paycheck. Now I can only imagine how stressful it would be to hear that your next paycheck is gonna be delayed at the last minute, especially when you have a family to support.
When you think of it this way and from this perspective, it's no wonder why my original pleas for answers got no results.
From the salesman's perspective, the stress they created for me doesn't even compare to the stress of pushing out their paycheck. They probably figured, that sucks and I'll work really hard to get Doug answers, but Doug's boss will make sure he gets the project done on time, so I'll get him answers after I close my next sale.
Despite having no authority over the situation, I was able to get what I wanted in record time without lifting a finger or getting anyone else involved and all it required was just a few minutes of brainstorming and reconsidering how I delivered my message. That's not exactly true. Influencing people requires developing a skill that I didn't cover in this video yet.
This skill is really easy to learn and practice. However, it doesn't come naturally to most engineers. But since this video is getting pretty long, I'm gonna cut it here and save that tip for part two of this series on persuasion. Click HERE to check it out.
Thanks for watching.
