Influencing Up

Allan R. Cohen, David L. Bradford

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118236093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

The authors of the classic Influence Without Authority explain the unique challenges of influencing powerful people

Learn to overcome your difficulties with a boss who is uninterested in your concerns, or resistant to giving needed support. Or discover how to win the cooperation of senior managers who are hard to reach, and hard to sell on your ideas, products, or services. In their classic book, Influence Without Authority, Allan Cohen and David Bradford provided a universal model of how to influence someone you don't control. Influencing Up applies those ideas to problematic bosses and other powerful people, with sophisticated tactics for building partnerships with them.

If you're afraid of retaliation or just unclear as to how to change a senior person's behavior, don't stay paralyzed. Influencing Up gives you the tools to bridge the power gap.

• Offers practical advice about how to turn your relationship with your boss into a partnership in which both parties benefit
• Explains what powerful people care about
• Shows how to overcome power gaps by developing more partner-like relationships

Learn what a great partnership with your boss can do for your career—and your mental health!

PART I

Fundamentals

CHAPTER 1

The World Has Changed

To Be Successful You Need to Influence Up

Influence has always mattered at work. Whether it was necessary to obtain something—like a preferred assignment or a sale to an important customer—or minor favors like time off for personal events, it has always helped to have influence. Nowadays, having influence is even more important—because in order to move up in a company or impact other powerful organizations, you have to deal with a more challenging world.

The rapidity of change and uncertain economies has given way to more complex organizations that have a greater number of stakeholders whose cooperation is necessary—despite the simultaneous need for things to happen more quickly. Many people work in matrix organizations with multiple bosses, or they have jobs that cross departmental boundaries. This requires that they influence others who might not have the same goals or agree on what—or who—is necessary to succeed.

These days, you need powerful people to cooperate in terms of getting information, formal or informal approval to act, resources, introductions, and support (or room to maneuver) for implementation just to get your job done. Therefore, you can’t achieve your objectives without getting help from others whom you do not control.

But merely doing your job won’t guarantee that you’ll advance. In an era of cost cutting and increased competition, organizations have to think about how to grow the top line and create new customers, products, markets, or processes that enable investment in growth. The employees who get ahead go beyond their job; they take initiative, create these opportunities, and solve problems that block progress.

This book is for you if you are trying to make significant contributions, yet are finding it increasingly difficult to do so because you need to influence people you can’t control. It’s usually not enough to point out impending problems/opportunities or even to propose solutions. You may have to garner support for your proposed solution or conduct small pilot tests. All of this involves the need to influence powerful people. Fortunately, you are likely in a position to have ideas that are of value to these powerful people. In fact, you are probably closer to the customer, and certainly to the operational problems, than more senior managers. You might have some special expertise or relevant past experiences.

As consultants, we frequently ask managers what they could do to make their organization a more creative, productive place, and the ideas tumble out. However, these are often quickly followed with a drop in enthusiasm as the manager sighs, “But there is nothing that I can do.”

But there is plenty you can do, and we show you with scores of real examples throughout the book how others have found a way to overcome what at first appears to be a discouraging situation. We tell the story of Doug, a national sales manager of a multinational organization, who feels that he isn’t able to use all his skills and knowledge because he has a micromanaging boss. There’s Lucia Emerson at “Grandetech,” who is expected in her role as task force leader to figure out a new system that requires agreement from three very different divisions, each of which has its own objectives. There’s also Peter Dames in the IT department at Toyota USA, who has to get on the radar of senior management so he can get them to accept new ways to use e-commerce. You might be like Indira Rai, who is doing well in a company she loves but is blocked from moving into a dream job by her possessive boss. Or you might be able to relate to a team of managers that has put together what they feel confident is an exciting new business idea and they need to gain senior management backing to go forward—even though their cobbled-together first product lost $6 million!

This book is not just for the employee who is expected to take initiative to produce change and bring in new ideas within a company. It’s also for those who must influence customers, or for consultants who have to sell an ambitious game-changing project to a client who focuses only on cost—as Mike May from Accenture often did. Or perhaps your challenge is closer to that of Kristen Callahan, who is simply fighting to get an elusive, famous surgeon—the only one with a possible curative approach—to see her sick friend for a consultation. That’s an influence success you will learn about in Chapter 12.

Most of the examples in the book describe actual situations, though we’ve altered specifics in some instances for privacy reasons. Only when we note that we are offering potential dialogue is anything not a report from our research and organizational observations.

The issues we discuss are increasingly being faced by managers at all levels, and they can present risks. Going directly to the chief executive officer (CEO), as Peter Dames did at Toyota, to demand that he come and see his department’s demonstration is cheeky and could have the potential to be a career-limiting move. We don’t deny that. However, “just doing your job,” burying your head in the sand, avoiding anything that could possibly get you in trouble, and cursing your fate for having to deal with all those impossible people—these could be the riskiest behaviors of all! Although it is difficult, you need to find ways to successfully fulfill your current role while functioning like an entrepreneurial leader by constantly finding new and better ways to do things—and gaining the support you need to implement them.

This book is about how to both do your present job more successfully and take the initiative that will make you a more valued organization member. We can’t totally eradicate risk, nor can we guarantee success; we can only put the odds in your favor by compelling you to see your relationships with powerful people in a different way. We provide knowledge about power differentials and how to overcome the obstacles, and encouragement to change some aspects of the way you have been operating.

Although there’s no doubt that external realities such as very difficult bosses or remote senior managers can present significant challenges (problems we address in later chapters), we’ve found that you, the person seeking influence, often erect your own barriers to achieving that influence. The reasons for this are various and include the following:

• The assumptions you hold about how hard to push
• An unwillingness to raise a tough issue or have a difficult conversation with your boss
• A combative tone that provokes the exact reactions you dislike
• Fear of being turned down
• Inability to let go of your own concerns long enough to remember to give something valuable to get cooperation
• Any problems you might have dealing with authority

These self-limiting attitudes and behaviors are why you will have to take a tough look at yourself at various points in the book, while also carefully analyzing the person or group you need to influence. You have more ability to make a difference than you may think. It will help you to accomplish your goal if you keep in mind the following two conceptual themes that we present in this book:

1. Understanding the dynamics of power and overcoming the negative consequences of large power gaps.

2. Becoming a partner with high-powered people, whether as near as your boss, or as distant as a senior executive far up in your organization or in another organization.

Influence is exerted by reciprocity and exchange; in other words, people can be influenced when they receive something that they value in return for their response. Therefore, anyone can influence anyone else if they have something valuable to trade and can be trusted to deliver it. It’s not always easy to figure out what people value, how to approach them, how to maintain trust, and how to make it clear that you aren’t just looking out for your own interests. We built a generic model for working through all aspects of how to influence through exchange in our previous book, Influence without Authority. This book significantly expands on that model by providing examples of how to effectively apply influence when dealing upward.

The Impact of Large Power Differentials

In today’s complex organizational world, you will increasingly be dealing with people who may be neither peers nor friends. These individuals have much more formal power than you have—and that’s especially true when there are many organizational levels between you and those you need to influence. Middle managers have to deal with senior executives more often than ever, and they may need to influence across organizational boundaries as well. Regardless of whether it’s within your organization or between your organization and another, the greater the power differential, the more difficult influence becomes.

Unfortunately, this kind of large power gap tends to produce dysfunctional behavior for people on both sides of the equation. Relatively high-power people tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue others’, whereas those with less authority tend to overestimate higher-level individuals’ power and underestimate their own. This makes it hard for both to get what they need. Higher-ups don’t get the information and support they need to complete complex work, whereas those with less power fail to gain the credibility they need to use all of their capacities. We will discuss how this peculiar dynamic works in Chapters 2 and 3 and give suggestions throughout the book on how to overcome it.

Despite these challenges, most people have potentially much greater power than they think they do—and can therefore contribute more than they think they can without diminishing those in high-power positions. We will show how to effectively reduce these kinds of power differences so you can deal with high-power people—especially senior executives—and not fall into the traps that large power gaps often set. As long as you don’t inadvertently give away your power, are willing to do your homework, and act with reasonable courage, you can increase your influence with a variety of high-power people.

Underlying our analysis is the little-realized phenomenon that power is usually not a fixed amount; it doesn’t work in a way that means the more I take, the less there is for you. Thus, increasing your ability to influence usually does not require that you take away others’ power. Instead, power is a variable, with a total amount that can be low or high. As we will demonstrate, you can decrease the power gap without decreasing the higher party’s power. And since significantly increasing your influence can actually add to the other person’s power, the outcome is usually win-win.

Becoming a Partner

Once you’ve come to understand what’s at work in the dynamics of power differences, your second job is to adopt the mind-set that you must “become a partner” with authority figures. Although this may sound paradoxical in light of the usual characteristics of a power gap, it is a style of interacting that can have major positive consequences.

Relationships do matter for success in organizations. No one can accomplish much working alone, and the nature of how people connect with one another has major repercussions both for the organization’s performance and for each individual’s access to information and resources. This access determines effectiveness, reputation, and potential for advancement.

As everyone who has ever worked knows, work relationships have the potential to be unsatisfying and ineffective. Either or both parties can feel angry, stifled, mystified, vulnerable, misguided, untrusted, or deeply frustrated. Negative relationships frequently become frozen, with neither person knowing how to improve the relationship. This often leads to both people engaging in negative behavior, thereby aggravating each other and creating an atmosphere in which conditions only worsen and each person constantly blames—and tries to change—the other. Consistently battling these kinds of conflicts ultimately leads to separation—by firing, quitting, transferring, or just ignoring each other.

These negative relationships, however, are not the only kind; work relationships also have t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Fundamentals
• Part II: Building a Powerful Partnership with Your Boss
• Part III: Influencing Powerful People
• Additional Resources
• Index