How to Influence Without Authority: Leadership Tips

Occasionally, at work or in your personal life, you might need to influence the actions of others despite not having traditional and direct authority over them. To influence without authority means to lead people without the official title expected of a leader in a given scenario. To do so, you must win over peers with your knowledge and confidence rather than with established credentials.

This is particularly common in startups or more organic working arrangements where there might not be enough people or even much of a desire to establish more traditional hierarchies anyway. Other times, your own supervisor might assign you to oversee project management for a distinct initiative, vesting you with temporary positional authority over your peers.

Leading people, especially as someone not vested with an authoritative title, means becoming a person worthy of trust. To develop the leadership skills necessary to influence without authority, you’ll need to possess these three core characteristics:

1. 1. Confidence: If you need to unofficially assume a position of authority, act like the leader you are. This requires a tightrope walk of sorts: Arrogance will likely turn off those you hope to influence, whereas humble confidence in yourself and in your ability to help your peers will encourage them to buy in on your leadership. Try to only seek to influence others when you truly have the expertise and personability to lead peers anyway.
2. 2. Knowledge: If you have a well-informed and nuanced point of view on a specific subject, feel confident in your ability to influence others without authority. Open yourself up to everyone’s questions and be as helpful as possible. Suppose you helped spearhead a new product management initiative alongside your manager, for instance. This uniquely qualifies you to influence others about how to implement that initiative as well.
3. 3. Personability: Exhibit charisma, kindness, and emotional intelligence if you hope to influence others without authority. People like to help people they admire and respect—and gaining a person’s trust and affinity in this way hinges on your ability to be a people person. Show those you hope to influence how helping you is in their own self-interest. Make compromises. Seek out opportunities to build meaningful relationships.

Without formal authority, it takes a great deal of finesse and expertise to persuade certain people you have what it takes to be a leader. Here are just five ways to influence without authority in a more traditional sense:

• Ask for collaboration. Leading and influencing others as their peer still means enlisting them as collaborators. Rather than try to assert dominance over them, address other key stakeholders as joint contributors in your endeavor. People are more likely to assist in an initiative when they feel it’s a creative partnership rather than merely a chance to follow someone else’s orders. Exhibit your own expertise and win people over to your opinions organically.
• Develop meaningful relationships. Treat others as you would like them to treat you, regardless of whether you hope to influence them to join you in an initiative. For instance, it’s likely someone will be able to tell if you bring them coffee as a friend or as an attempt to ingratiate yourself to them for the sole purpose of getting your way on something.
• Display your expertise. In an organic and humble way, make it clear you possess the expertise to lead people in an initiative. People need to know you’re both experienced and knowledgeable enough to lead an endeavor more traditionally assigned to a manager and humble enough to do so without coming across as arrogant or authoritarian. Strive to use the right choice of words to strike this sort of balance. Ask and answer questions in equal measure.
• Help people when you can. To influence people to help you, help them when you can, too. See if there are projects you can follow their lead on to pave the way for them to do the same for you. When you make a reputation for yourself as a helpful and appreciative person, others become more likely to follow through on what you ask of them as well.
• Prove you can get things done. Meet your own metrics before seeking to influence others to meet theirs, especially if you aren’t their direct supervisor. Establish a track record of getting things done yourself and helping others complete their tasks, too. This encourages people to seek your consultancy anyway, regardless of whether you’re hoping to influence them or not.

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