“Help! I have all this responsibility and no authority to get it done!”

OK, I’ll help: authority is designed to formalize and strengthen your ability to influence others, not to replace it. If there is something you need done and you can’t figure out how to do it by influence, then having authority won’t help. In fact, here’s what’d happen if you had sufficient authority right now to push your agenda through:

You’d call up whoever it is whose help you needed, and you’d ask for help.

They’d say, “No.”

You’d pull rank and tell them they have no choice.

They’d tell you to go stick it.

Or, after you pull rank and tell them they have no choice, they say, “OK, whatever you say.” And fail to deliver, just to spite you.

Now whatcha gonna do? Tell your boss that you got had by an employee? That you didn’t see it coming? That you were perfect and it was your dang employee who dropped the ball? Because now that you have authority, ultimately your failure to deliver is due to one of only two things: your inability to prioritize activities or your inability to manage people.

Yikes.

OK, so suddenly, influence is starting to look better. That means you need a model for influencing others, so you’re in luck: there are lots of them. Here’s one:

Influence can happen through one of three ways:

1. Power: think might, brute strength, political clout. Pros: fast, expedient, and you WIN. Cons: you develop enemies, create animosity and resentment, and because power erodes with use, every time you use your power, you weaken yourself relative to those around you. (Think of military power: once a bomb is dropped, it is gone until it is replaced; once a division is mobilized, it is no longer available to commit elsewhere; similarly, once a political favor is called in, it’s been called in, and needs to be replaced.)
2. Rights: think formal authority, contracts, mediation… basically, anytime a third party or outside, objective standard is used to determine an outcome. Pros: objective (perceived as fair). Cons: slow, not so objective (how impartial do you think you’d feel after losing a court case?), indistinguishable from power under certain circumstances, introduces 3rd parties (with their own interests, interpretations, and perceptions) into the mix.
3. Interests: think influence, trade-offs, win-win negotiations (the real kind, not the coersive, “power dressed up as a fake win-win“ kind). Pros: lasting outcomes, don’t need formal authority, long term relationship is preserved. Cons: can be slow, require both parties to be invested in the relationship, can create future vulnerabilities, not always perceived as fair in the moment

We often hear about influence, power, interests, authority, and win-win or win-lose scenarios, but we don’t often hear about them in context. Hopefully, this context helps bring just a bit of visibility to why formal authority is so alluring and the real costs of using it, vis-a-vis a softer, more influence-based approach.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Gen X & Gen Y