The project is delayed because Finance has not produced the figures. The new process will not land because IT is busy with something else. The client deadline is at risk because two teams in different parts of the business need to agree, and neither reports to you. Most working managers spend more of their week trying to move things forward through people they cannot instruct than they do managing their own direct reports — and almost no one is trained in how to do it.
This is a practical guide to influencing without authority: getting work done through peers, stakeholders, suppliers, and senior people who are not obliged to say yes. It is the central skill of modern matrix organisations, and it is mostly learned by accident.
Why authority is overrated, even when you have it
Managers who have just been promoted often assume the lever of formal authority will resolve the influence problem. It does not, and it does not for the people above them either. A direct instruction works for narrow tasks where compliance is sufficient — submit the timesheet, attend the meeting. It fails on anything that requires genuine effort, judgement, or care, which is most of the work that actually matters.
The shorthand version: you can compel attendance; you cannot compel engagement.
This matters because most of the things that go badly in organisations go badly through people who are technically doing what they were told. Quiet non-compliance — turning up but not contributing, completing the letter of the request but not the spirit, slow-walking the change — is the default response to instruction without buy-in. Skilled influencers know this and have effectively abandoned reliance on positional authority, even where they have it. They behave the same way with their team as they do with a peer two divisions away, because the underlying mechanics are the same.
Start with what they get out of it
The single most useful framework in this area is Cohen and Bradford’s “Currencies of Exchange”, from their work on influence in flat and matrix organisations. The premise is straightforward: every working relationship involves exchange, and influence operates by understanding what the other person values — their currency — and what you are able to offer in return.
The currencies that matter at work fall into rough groups:
- Task currencies — resources, useful information, technical support, a fast turnaround on something they need
- Position currencies — visibility, recognition, useful contacts, reputation
- Relationship currencies — being listened to, being understood, personal support during a difficult period
- Personal currencies — gratitude, ownership of something they care about, the sense of having done genuinely good work
Most failed influence attempts are currency mismatches. The manager who keeps emphasising organisational priority to a finance colleague whose actual currency is being treated as a peer rather than a service function. The senior leader who keeps offering visibility to someone whose real currency is being left alone to do interesting work. You can press hard, for a long time, in the wrong currency and get almost nothing.
The skill is not manipulation. It is paying attention to what people actually care about — which is often quite different from what their job title suggests they care about — and structuring asks accordingly.
Make the ask easy to say yes to
Most asks land badly because they are vague, large, or arrive without enough context to act on.
Compare:
“Could you help out on the new reporting workstream? It’s quite a big piece of work.”
with:
“We need someone with your knowledge of the legacy data to validate three specific queries — about an hour each, by Friday next week. Without this, the deck goes to the SLT with the wrong numbers; with it, it lands cleanly and you’ll be named on the brief. Can I send the queries over now?”
The second is harder to write. It is significantly easier to say yes to. It states the time cost, the value, the risk if they decline, and the upside if they agree — and it ends with a specific small action (“can I send the queries over now”) rather than an open-ended commitment.
The principle, more generally: the cognitive load of saying yes should be lower than the cognitive load of saying no. Most people are not declining requests because they object to them — they are declining because saying yes is unclear and saying no is easy.
Cialdini’s six, used carefully
Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — are well-known and worth knowing. They get a slightly bad name because they are often presented as manipulation tactics. Used cynically they are; used well they describe how decisions actually get made under time pressure, which is how almost all workplace decisions get made.
The ones that matter most for working managers:
Reciprocity. People are wired to return favours. Managers who consistently make small contributions — sharing useful information, covering for someone, visibly surfacing a colleague’s work to senior people — accumulate genuine social capital that is available later. The mistake is treating this as an explicit transaction (“I helped you last month, so…”). It works precisely because it is not framed that way.
Commitment and consistency. People who have publicly agreed to a small step are significantly more likely to take a larger one. The implication: get visible alignment on the principle before you ask for the resource. “Can we agree this is worth doing?” before “Can you give me three days of your team’s time?”
Liking. A consistent finding across decades of research: people say yes more readily to people they like, and they like people who genuinely listen, remember what was said, and treat them as competent adults. This is not about chemistry. It is about paying attention.
The two principles to use with caution are scarcity and authority. Both work, and both are easy to deploy in ways that erode trust if overused — especially manufactured urgency (“I need this by EOD”) that turns out not to have been urgent. Each time you do this and get away with it, your future asks lose weight.
Credibility is built before you need it
A pattern visible in nearly every effective cross-functional manager: they are influential when they need to be because they invested in being known, useful and reliable before they had any specific ask on the table.
This shows up in small habits:
- Showing up occasionally to meetings they do not strictly need to attend, in areas of the business they need to understand
- Responding quickly to other people’s requests for help, especially when it is mildly inconvenient
- Naming other people’s contributions accurately and visibly, in writing as well as in person
- Not over-claiming credit, ever, for anything
None of this is performative. People notice the manager who, when their own piece of work is finished, takes ten minutes to help a colleague who is stuck. They notice the one who replies to a Friday afternoon question on Monday morning rather than three days later. These are unglamorous habits, and they compound.
The corollary: managers who are only visible when they need something develop a reputation for exactly that, and find each subsequent ask measurably harder.
When influence fails
Some common patterns that go wrong, and what tends to work better.
Escalating too early. The instinct, when a peer is not delivering, is to go to their manager. This usually buys you one specific thing and costs you the working relationship — and the next ask gets significantly harder because the person now knows you will escalate when stuck. Escalation is a tool of last resort and should look like one. Try harder, for longer, in better currencies first.
Confusing the ask with the rationale. “We need to do X because of Y” assumes the other person values Y. If they do not, the rationale is at best irrelevant and at worst irritating. The skill is figuring out, in advance, what rationale will land with this specific person — which means knowing them well enough to know what they actually care about.
Going around someone. Almost always discovered, almost always remembered, almost always more expensive than the original difficulty. If you cannot get a yes from the person whose territory you are in, addressing that directly — even uncomfortably — is cheaper in the long run than routing around them and hoping they will not notice.
Treating influence as a series of one-offs. The most common pattern in failed cross-functional work is treating each ask as a discrete transaction, rather than as part of an ongoing relationship. Every conversation is part of the next one. The person who received a slightly inconsiderate ask in March remembers it in June, even if they appeared to comply at the time.
A short field test
Before the next significant ask of a peer or stakeholder, three questions are usually enough to tell you whether you are ready to make it.
- What does this person actually value? Not what their job title suggests, not what your org chart implies. What currency do they trade in?
- Why is this in their interest, in their currency, this week? Not in the organisation’s interest. Not in yours.
- What is the smallest specific thing I am asking for? Does my ask state the time cost, the value, and the next step explicitly?
If you can answer those three in a sentence each, the conversation usually goes well. If you cannot, it is almost always worth another fifteen minutes of thinking before you send the message — and the difference between asks that took fifteen extra minutes of preparation and those that did not is, in aggregate over a year, one of the largest sources of variation in how effective a manager actually is.
Related reading
- Conflict, negotiation and influencing — broader category context including negotiation tactics and stakeholder management
- Communication skills — the listening, questioning and feedback foundations that underpin all influence work
- Leading teams — applies the same principles inside the team you do formally manage, where they matter just as much
Managers who want to build influence, stakeholder management and cross-functional leadership skills can find structured CPD pathways at SkillsCircle, developed by Accipio. For those formalising their management development with a recognised qualification, Aicura offers CMI-accredited leadership programmes, including levy-funded apprenticeship routes.