Earning Influence to Shape Change
One of the things I spend a lot of time helping leaders on my teams develop is influence.
Not because they don't know how to communicate. Not because they lack good ideas. And not because they need to become more persuasive.
The challenge is rarely the quality of their thinking. It's that they haven't yet built the conditions for that thinking to carry enough weight to change what happens.
I've seen this with people early in their careers, and I've seen it with experienced leaders entering a new organization. The circumstances are different, but the pattern is often the same: someone has the capability to contribute at a higher level, but the organization hasn't yet given their judgment the weight they need.
It can be tempting to respond by becoming more vocal. Make the argument stronger. Build a better presentation. Find the right executive sponsor. Increase your visibility.
Sometimes those things help. But I've learned that influence rarely comes from the moment when you try to exercise it. It comes from what you've built before that moment.
Influence matters because it gives you the opportunity to shape how an organization understands a problem, not simply how it responds to a decision. It can help create a shared understanding that allows people with different perspectives to move in the same direction.
I learned this myself the hard way.
Early in my career, I'd had some success getting teams and executives to move in a new direction. I'd learned how to make a case, build a strategy, tell a compelling story, and bring people along. Over time, those experiences became a kind of working theory about influence.
I assumed that if the thinking was strong enough and I communicated it well enough, I could create the conditions for change.
Then I moved to a new organization and discovered that the same approach didn't work nearly as well.
The ideas weren't necessarily weaker. The strategy wasn't less thoughtful. I hadn't suddenly become less capable of communicating.
Something else had changed.
The context had changed.
The relationships were different. The history was different. The people making the decisions didn't know how I worked or what to expect from me. They hadn't seen me navigate difficult problems, make tradeoffs, or deliver on what I'd said I would do.
More importantly, I'd made an assumption I didn't realize I was making: that the things that had created influence for me in one organization would create it in another.
They didn't.
Every organization has its own history, relationships, incentives, and definitions of what earns someone's attention. The experience and reputation I'd accumulated somewhere else still mattered, but they didn't automatically translate into standing here.
I had brought the tactics I'd learned from one environment into another without first understanding what this environment valued.
It took me a few more moves to understand what that experience was really teaching me.
Influence isn't something you simply do. It isn't a behavior you can turn on when you need to change a decision. It isn't automatically granted by expertise, a title, or a strong point of view.
Influence is an outcome.
It is what becomes possible when you've built enough of the foundation beneath it that people are willing to listen, believe, and ultimately act. And that foundation looks different in every organization.
You have to earn it before you can rely on it.
The Foundation of Influence
If influence is an outcome, what creates it?
Over time, I've come to think about it as the result of three things: capital, credibility, and trust.
They aren't steps to complete or boxes to check. They are different dimensions of standing that develop through experience. You can build one without necessarily building the others, and what matters most can change depending on the organization and the situation.
Capital
Capital is perhaps the hardest to define because every organization creates it differently.
I've seen this repeatedly throughout my career. In one organization, capital was largely built through relationships. Knowing the right people, understanding the organizational history, and investing in endless coffee conversations and one-on-ones were essential. Your network was your ability to get things done.
In another, people earned capital by putting ideas into the organization. Sharing a thoughtful point of view, starting a conversation, or giving people a new way to think about a problem created opportunities for others to engage and build on the idea.
In another, we used to joke about "slide deck capital." A presentation with a compelling narrative that inspired excitement or opened up new thinking could travel quickly across teams and leadership groups. The artifact itself wasn't the point. The ability to make an idea tangible enough that other people wanted to share it was.
And in a growth-stage company, capital could come from something much more practical: seeing a gap in how the business operated and doing something about it. People who improved the conditions around the work—making the organization more effective, removing friction, or helping the business produce better results—earned standing quickly.
These are very different behaviors. But they have something in common: they are signals of value that an organization recognizes.
That's why I don't think you can simply carry your approach to influence from one organization to another. The things that earned standing in one place may not matter nearly as much somewhere else.
When I enter a new organization, one of the first things I'm trying to understand is what creates capital here. Who gets listened to? What kinds of contributions create momentum? What do people consistently reward with attention, access, and opportunity?
The answer isn't always obvious.
But the sooner you understand it, the sooner you can start building it.
Credibility
Credibility develops differently.
It's what people conclude after they've had the opportunity to watch you operate. You can tell people about your experience. You can show them your credentials. You can explain what you've accomplished somewhere else.
But you can't declare yourself credible.
People need to see your judgment in action. They need to see how you navigate ambiguity, make tradeoffs, understand the business, respond when things go wrong, and follow through on what you've said you'll do.
Over time, those experiences confirm that your experience and perspective have value.
That's why credibility doesn't arrive with your résumé. It accumulates through what people experience from you.
Trust
Trust is different again.
Some leaders extend trust early. Sometimes that's simply the nature of the relationship: a hiring manager may need to give you a degree of trust because they chose to bring you into the organization.
Others start from skepticism. They need to see how you operate before they're willing to give you meaningful responsibility.
Either way, trust develops through experience.
It's the confidence people have that they can give you responsibility and rely on how you'll use it. Will you tell them what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear? Will you understand their constraints? Will you act in the interests of the organization rather than simply your own team or agenda? Will you follow through when things get difficult?
Trust is also fragile. You can spend years building it and lose it through a single decision or interaction.
But when it is present, it changes the opportunities available to you. People are more willing to bring you into important work, involve you in difficult decisions, and give you room to operate when the answer isn't obvious.
Capital, credibility, and trust aren't sequential. They can develop independently, reinforce one another, and change in importance as your role and context change.
You don't necessarily see them accumulating as they happen. You feel it in the invitations you start receiving, the conversations you're included in, and the decisions where people begin asking for your perspective.
There's a point where you realize you're no longer working primarily on your own agenda. You're participating in the organization's agenda—helping shape how people understand the problem, what they believe is possible, and how they move forward together.
That's when influence starts to become visible.
And I've learned that trying to skip that foundation usually creates the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.
When You Try to Skip the Work
I once hired someone for my team who was, by any reasonable measure, excellent.
She was smart, experienced, well credentialed, and had good instincts. She also joined the organization with a strong point of view about how things should change.
Within her first couple of weeks, she started telling other teams that their processes were fundamentally broken. She created a polished presentation outlining her background and experience, clearly hoping it would establish her as someone worth listening to.
It had the opposite effect.
Instead of seeing her as a credible change agent, people started asking each other a different question: Who is this person, and why does she think she can tell us how to work?
For a long time, I thought of that as a credibility problem.
It wasn't.
Nobody had actually had the opportunity to evaluate her credibility yet. The problem was that she hadn't built the capital that would give people a reason to listen long enough to form that judgment.
She had entered a new organization carrying the experience and reputation she'd earned somewhere else and assumed those things would immediately translate.
They didn't.
The credentials were an attempt to skip the foundation. But credibility isn't something you establish by telling people you're credible. Influence doesn't begin with making your case.
You have to earn the opportunity to make the case.
I've seen the opposite happen, too.
Years earlier, I was design leader within a large enterprise organization where design had historically been treated as a service function. We were brought in to execute decisions that had largely been made elsewhere. We wanted to change that and I was tasked to lead an initiative that would shift how the executive product and engineering teams understood the role design could play in shaping the business.
Our first attempt didn't work.
We built a strong strategy. It was thoughtful, well researched, and grounded in what we believed the organization needed. Then we presented it to leadership.
It landed flat.
The problem wasn't the quality of the strategy. We hadn't built enough of the foundation beneath it.
We were asking executives to give significant weight to a perspective that had largely been developed within our own organization. We had not yet built the relationships, credibility, or trust necessary for that perspective to carry the influence we wanted it to have.
So we changed the approach.
Instead of taking the strategy directly to leadership, we spent time with the cross-functional partners who would eventually have to live with it. We worked through the problem together. We listened to their concerns, incorporated their perspectives, challenged our own assumptions, and created smaller opportunities to demonstrate how we thought and operated.
The work took longer.
But something important was changing while we were doing it.
We were building capital. Our partners had more reason to invest their time with us because they could see that we were trying to solve a business problem, not simply advance a design agenda. As we worked together, they had opportunities to observe our judgment. Small wins accumulated into credibility. And over time, consistency built trust.
When we eventually brought the strategy back to leadership, the strategy itself wasn't radically different.
What had changed was who believed in it.
It was no longer a perspective coming from the design organization asking to be heard. It had become a shared perspective shaped by the people who would ultimately have to make it real.
We hadn't made the argument louder. We had built the conditions around the argument.
And that changed its influence.
Influence Compounds
The experience also taught me something else.
Building influence isn't something you eventually finish. Every time your scope changes, the context changes with it. A new organization. A new leadership team. A bigger responsibility. A different business problem. Even a promotion can put you in rooms where people haven't yet had the opportunity to watch you operate.
The capital you've built still matters. But it doesn't transfer completely. You have to learn what matters in the new environment, build new relationships, demonstrate your judgment in new circumstances, and give people new reasons to trust you.
That's why I think of capital, credibility, and trust less as a checklist and more as a flywheel. They can develop independently, reinforce one another, and create new opportunities to contribute. As your standing grows, you're invited into more consequential conversations. Those opportunities give you more chances to demonstrate judgment, build credibility, and deepen trust.
Then the cycle begins again.
Influence compounds.
That's important because influence can be difficult to see while you're building it. Most of the behaviors that create influence don't feel particularly influential at the time. You're investing in a relationship, helping someone solve a problem, sharing an idea, making a difficult decision well, or following through when it would be easier not to.
None of those moments necessarily changes a decision. Together, they change how people experience you. And over time, that changes how much weight your judgment carries.
That's why I don't think leaders should wait until they need influence to start building it. By then, the decision may already be too close, the relationships too shallow, and the trust too thin.
Influence has to be built continuously, long before the moment when you need it.
Developing Influence in Others
This is the lens I use with my own team, particularly with leaders who are early in their careers or new to an organization.
Someone can be capable, thoughtful, and full of good ideas and still find that their perspective isn't carrying the weight they expected. When that happens, the instinct is often to ask, "How do I get more influence?"
I think there's a better question: What can I do today that makes my judgment more valuable tomorrow?
That shifts the focus from appearing influential to becoming someone people have reason to listen to. It means learning what the organization values, building relationships before you need them, finding opportunities to demonstrate judgment, making the people around you more successful, and following through consistently, especially when things get difficult.
These aren't tactics for gaining influence. They're the behaviors that, repeated over time, change how people experience your judgment.
As a leader, my role is to help people see those dynamics and create opportunities for them to build what they're missing. Sometimes that means helping someone understand how capital is earned in a new organization. Sometimes it means putting them in a room where they can demonstrate their judgment. Sometimes it means giving them the space to lead a piece of work I could have led myself.
I'm not giving them influence. I'm helping them build the conditions for it.
As they do, something changes. They get invited into more consequential work. Their ideas carry farther. They have more opportunity to shape outcomes rather than simply respond to them.
I want them to have more opportunities to do meaningful work.
More influence creates those opportunities.
