Your title may get you a seat at the table. It doesn’t guarantee you influence at the table.
I’m hearing more and more leaders ask how to influence people they don’t have authority over. And increasingly, that includes the person above them. They want to know how to challenge a boss without sounding insubordinate, how to get an executive to reconsider a decision, how to raise a concern that isn’t going to be particularly welcome, or how to advocate for an idea when the person sitting across from them has considerably more power.
That’s not a junior-leader problem. It’s a leadership problem.
I recently listened to a conversation with Pamela Meyer, author of How to Read the Room, that got me thinking about something we don’t talk about nearly enough: influence has far less to do with where you sit on the org chart and far more to do with how well you understand the people around you.
Here are three shifts I think can make a real difference.
- Stop Reading the Org Chart. Start Reading the People.
We tend to assume influence follows authority. The person with the biggest title speaks, everyone else listens, and the decision gets made.
Except that’s not how most rooms actually work.
The org chart tells you who reports to whom. It doesn’t tell you who listens to whom.
Pay attention to what happens when the conversation gets difficult. Who does the CEO look at before responding? Whose question changes the direction of the conversation? Who seems to have permission to challenge an idea? Who stays quiet but gets pulled into the conversation anyway?
These details matter, particularly when you’re leading up.
Imagine you’re sitting in a meeting and your CEO proposes a direction you believe is going to create a problem. You could jump in with your reasons, your data and your solution. Or you could take a breath and pay attention.
What does the CEO seem most concerned about? Who do they trust? Is this a moment when they’re genuinely open to pushback, or are they defending a decision they’ve already made? Who else looks uncomfortable? What does this person need in order to reconsider without feeling like they’ve lost control?
That last question can change the entire conversation.
Because sometimes what looks like resistance is really a person protecting their autonomy. The harder we push someone, the harder they may push back, not because they disagree with the goal, but because they feel they’re being told what to think or do.
So instead of, “This is what we need to do,” you might say, “Here’s what I think we need to accomplish. How would you approach it?”
You’re still challenging the thinking. You’re simply leaving room for the other person to stay in the conversation.
That’s influence.
- Read the Room Before You Work the Room.
We spend a lot of time teaching leaders how to speak with confidence. How to make their case. How to be more persuasive.
All important. But before you decide what to say, you need to know what you’re walking into.
For example, is the room opening or closing?
You can usually feel the difference. People are leaning in. Questions are curious rather than defensive. Someone challenges an idea and nobody takes it personally. There’s energy, even when there’s disagreement.
Or the room contracts. People get quieter. Arms cross. The jokes stop landing. Someone who normally contributes has checked out. A question gets answered, but you can tell it wasn’t really answered. That’s information.
Your job isn’t always to make your point anyway. Sometimes your job is to change the temperature of the room so your point can actually be heard.
This is especially important when you’re leading up because the stakes are different. When you disagree with a peer, you may have enough relationship equity to recover from a clumsy conversation. When you challenge someone with significantly more authority, you have to think about both the message and the moment.
Maybe your boss needs the data before they’re ready for the recommendation. Maybe the CEO needs to hear your concern, but not in front of the entire executive team. Maybe the conversation you’re tempted to have in the meeting needs to happen privately first.
That isn’t being political. It’s being strategic about people.
And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is name what everyone else is feeling.
For example, someone makes a comment and three people glance at each other, Or, a leader asks a question that nobody answers directly. A normally vocal executive suddenly says, “Whatever you all think is fine.”
The team moves on, but you can feel that it hasn’t actually moved on. Those moments are easy to miss because we’re busy preparing our response. What if we became more interested in what we could notice?
- Make Your Influence About Them, Not Your Need to Be Right.
The room isn’t one audience. It’s a collection of individuals with different priorities, different concerns, different definitions of success and different levels of willingness to speak.
If you deliver one message to all of them and expect it to land the same way, you’re making influence harder than it needs to be.
The strongest communicators don’t just ask, “What do I want to say?” They ask, “What does this person need to hear?” That doesn’t mean manipulating people or becoming someone you’re not. It means having enough curiosity to understand what matters to the person sitting across from you.
If your boss is focused on risk, lead with risk. If they’re worried about resources, address resources. If they’ve already invested their reputation in a particular direction, understand that before you ask them to change course.
And if you want people to trust your challenge, make sure they know you’re challenging the idea, not them. That distinction can make all the difference.
It also means understanding that influence isn’t always about making your case in the moment.
Sometimes the most important conversation happens before the meeting. You talk with the person who has concerns. You build context. You ask questions. You understand what’s really getting in the way. Then you walk into the room better prepared to move the conversation forward.
Because timing matters. Being right at the wrong time can still produce the wrong result. And that may be one of the biggest leadership shifts we need to make. Stop thinking that influence means getting people to agree with you.
Influence is creating enough understanding, trust and openness that people are willing to consider something they weren’t ready to consider before. That’s a very different skill. And a very human one.
We’re entering a world where AI can give us information, analyze a situation and even suggest what we should say. It can help us prepare for the people in the room.
But it can’t replace our responsibility to actually pay attention to them. Because influence has never been just about having the right words. It’s knowing when to speak, when to pause, when to push, when to ask a better question and when to recognize that the conversation happening beneath the conversation is the one that actually matters. Especially when you’re leading up.
Your title may not give you authority. Your role may not give you the final say. But you can still have enormous influence when you understand people well enough to know what will move the conversation forward.
So before you walk into your next meeting thinking about how you’re going to make your case, try something different. Look around. Who has influence? Who needs to be heard? Who has gone quiet? What is the room telling you? Then decide what to do with what you see.
Because you can walk into a room with the right title, the smartest answer and the best strategy and still miss what matters. Or you can walk in, pay attention and notice something everyone else missed.
And sometimes the most influential person in the room isn’t the person with the most authority.
It’s the person who sees what’s really happening and has the courage, judgment and humanity to do something about it.
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