As I grow in my career, I’ve been thinking lately about how is it that I want to wield “influence”, how it intersects with the way people perceive others, and our historical notions of leadership.
Let’s step back.
About two years ago, one of the quotes I heard was how: understanding if someone is respected for themselves vs the position they hold. The notion is often broken down as “Authority vs Influence”. I wanted to reflect on these terms, and terms I view as related: Influence (vs Authority), Confidence, and Power (Dynamics), and to present my own view as well as cases for reflection, but first a sidebar on titles in enterprise environments.
Personally, I love mostly flat titling across an organization, albeit with a clear reporting structure. I find humans are intrinsically drawn to binning into groups, in-groups vs out-groups, “are you in the trenches with in-group?” vs “are you distant and afar with the out-group”, etc. People also tend to behave strangely when titles are attached. Flat titling helps combat this bias.
However, I’ve also had a weird start to my professional career in that I’ve had buying power early on, and also see the other end from the seller of products side. And often, on the buyers side I see how sales people are attached to titles - “I want to talk to the CISO (/the VP /the Director)”, etc. On the sales side, I’ve also seen how some customers only want to talk to people with the “Director” title and above, and sales organizations respond by making all their sales team Directors. In the current time period, I’d probably recommend companies use more flat titling for internal facing roles and only grander titles for external facing roles.
I think as kids, one of the thoughts that come up is that “I want to be influential” - though perhaps not in those exact same words. We grow up seeing celebrities, presidents, CEOs who have “influence” and aspire to have that “influence”. Whereas I think a better model I learned later in my life is to think about what type of person it is that I want to be and to aspire for impact, not influence.
Let’s unpack how we use the term “influence” colloquially. At it’s simplest, it’s “I want to influence X” or “I want you to influence X” - X being some other person, team, organization, or thought. How do we historically do this? We give talks, have conversions, broadcast our ideas more broadly. Or we default to authority - some power you have other others. But really, I want us to change that narrative and instead lead with impact.
A thought experiment I heard when I was much younger is, let’s say you really believe in a thing:
You believe the thing will have a positive impact on the world.
You stand in front of a large crowd and talk about this thing.
At the end, the whole crowd stands up and applauds your talk.
Have you done justice to the thing you really believe in?
Or did the crowd applaud you for some other reason - title, position, (both forms of Authority), group-think, sameness to the audience, you have some form of power over them?
Honestly, I think leading with impact is the long road. You do things with no expectation of something immediately in return, and only believe that all these small interactions will lead somewhere great some very fuzzy time down the line. But doing so requires giving into a degree of vulnerability, which I’d argue is the better definition of Confidence.
I like to say that if I bring you into a room and I’m the smartest person in it, then I haven’t been doing my job.
Think of a definition for Confidence, and now picture a confident person walking into the room.
What comes to mind?
Now picture how confidence is portrayed in any media you watch.
Are both images the same thing?
Personally, I see confidence as the ability to persevere. To be willing to take risks, try hard things, when the most likely outcome is failure. And develop Confidence in the process, and continue to develop confidence by continuing to try hard things. Going to the above example, if you want to have impact on the world, you have to understand not everyone will agree with you.
One of the people I look up to is Lisa Su, not only for Lisa’s brilliance, wildly successful career, or her bringing AMD’s market cap from $3B to $300B when everyone thought AMD was done for, but I aspire to Lisa’s ability to be humble despite the challenging environments she’s had to overcome. The two other people I look up to in the technology industry is Lisa Lippincott from a previous role, and Michal Zalewski - for the two of them’s ability to do great things, and not need to be center-stage.
In the climbing world, I’ve had the pleasure of running into some of the most accomplished climbers out there, and in my childhood, I’ve met folks who still move forward in some of the most trying of circumstances. The throughline for me in all these people is that degree of humbleness stemming from having have had to face the potential for failure. I think true confidence comes from taking (or being forced to take) bets on yourself when all evidence points to failure, and doing that time and time again.
“All of life is suffering” or so to speak. I’ve been responsible for cybersecurity functions where I’ve seen leaders freeze, divert blame, and where other leaders jump into the trenches together. It’s interesting, because cybersecurity is one of those fields which presents these unexpected events that have to be responded to in real-time, with millions of dollars in reputation or damage on the line, with adversaries that abide by no laws or principals.
I think people that grow up without power understand power intrinsically. But for folks with power, I want us to try and fold an understanding of power dynamics into everything we do.
To start this conversation, let’s say I have power over you, whether in title, reporting structure, or otherwise.
I ask you to do something. Maybe with a chat, maybe without.
You do it.
Did I just influence you or did you do it because I had power over you?
I think we should always aspire to view our influence through the lens of understanding the power dynamics at play. This is the same argument against overusing Authority in the concept of Influence vs. Authority. And for us to view Power from a societal lens - what Power does society grant me, and how do Power Dynamics play out with the people we interact with, who may be granted or not granted power.
That’s it for me, post again in another few years.