Influence Without Authority

For the first decade of my career, I owned nothing.

No P&L. No headcount budget. No final say on strategy. No authority to compel anyone to do anything.

I was a designer, then a product manager, then a digital leader inside much larger machines. The machine did not answer to me.

And yet, things moved.

Projects shipped. Teams aligned. Decisions tilted in directions that made sense.

That period taught me something that later became essential when I finally held authority:

If you cannot lead without authority, you cannot lead with it either.

**The Myth of the org chart**

Early in my career, I believed that power lived in boxes.

The CEO had it. The SVP had some. The director had a little. I had none.

That mental model made sense on paper. On paper, organizations are hierarchies.

In practice, organizations are networks.

Decisions don't flow down org charts. They emerge from conversations, relationships, and accumulated trust.

The people who get things done are not always the people with the biggest titles. They are the people who know how to navigate the network.

I learned this because I had no choice.

If I needed engineering resources, I couldn't demand them. I had to understand what engineers cared about, frame my request in terms that mattered to them, and deliver something in return when they helped.

If I needed marketing alignment, I couldn't mandate it. I had to sit in their meetings, listen to their constraints, and find overlap between what they needed and what I needed.

If I needed finance to approve a budget, I couldn't override them. I had to learn how they evaluated risk, what assumptions they trusted, and how to present a case that survived their scrutiny.

None of this was manipulation. It was translation.

I was learning to speak the languages of the people whose cooperation I needed.

**What Influence Actually Requires**

Over time, I noticed patterns in who succeeded at moving things without authority and who struggled.

The successful ones did four things consistently:

• They understood other people's incentives.
  Not what the org chart said they should care about. What actually drove their decisions. What kept them up at night. What they needed to deliver to be successful in their own roles. If you cannot answer "What does this person need?" you cannot influence them.

• They delivered before they asked.
  They built deposits of goodwill before making withdrawals. They helped with someone else's project before asking for help with theirs. They shared credit generously. The most powerful phrase in organizations without authority is not "I need." It is "I can help."

• They framed in terms of shared outcomes.
  They didn't say "I need this feature." They said "If we ship this, your metrics improve too." They found the overlap between what they wanted and what others already wanted.

• They were reliable.
  When they committed to something, they delivered. When they couldn't deliver, they communicated early. Reliability compounds. Unreliability poisons everything.

**What I Got Wrong**

I also made mistakes.

Early on, I assumed that being right was enough. If the logic was sound, people would agree.

That assumption failed repeatedly.

Being right is not enough because decisions are not purely logical. They are emotional, political, and constrained by factors I couldn't see.

I learned to ask different questions:

Not "Am I right?"

But "What am I missing?"

Not "Why won't they agree?"

But "What do they see that I don't?"

Not "How do I convince them?"

But "How do we find a path together?"

Those questions changed everything.

**The Limits of Influence**

Influence has limits.

You cannot influence your way through a fundamental misalignment of incentives. You cannot persuade someone to act against their survival. You cannot build trust where there is no willingness to engage.

I learned this too.

Some battles cannot be won with better framing. Some doors do not open, no matter how well you knock.

The skill is knowing which ones.

**Why This Matters Later**

When I finally became CEO, I carried these lessons with me.

I knew that authority alone would not make things happen. People would comply because they had to. But compliance is not commitment.

The difference between a company that executes and one that struggles is not the org chart. It is whether people at every level understand how to move things without waiting for permission.

I started designing organizations that encouraged that behavior:

Clear decision rights, but flexible paths to influence.

Rewards for collaboration, not just individual achievement.

Leaders who modeled asking before demanding.

The companies that move fastest are not the ones with the most decisive CEOs. They are the ones where influence flows freely across every boundary.

**For the Current Moment**

In 2026, organizations are flatter, more distributed, more complex.

The old model—wait for authority, then act—is obsolete.

The people who get things done now are the ones who learned, long ago, how to move without permission.

I learned that in the first decade of my career.

I've been applying it ever since.