Influence Isn't a Personality Trait. It's a Practice

Ask most professionals why they aren't more influential at work, and they will give you some version of the same answer.

I'm not naturally that kind of person. Or: I don't like playing politics. Or, most commonly: I'll have more influence when I have more authority.

All three answers feel reasonable. None of them are quite true. And collectively, they are responsible for keeping more capable people stuck than almost any other belief about how careers work.

Influence is not a personality type. It is not a gift some people are born with and others aren't. It is not something that arrives automatically when your title changes. It is a skill - practised, refined, and built deliberately over time. And like most skills, the people who develop it earliest are the ones who stop waiting for permission to start.

What Influence Actually Is

The most common misunderstanding about influence is that it is about persuasion - about being compelling enough, or likeable enough, or politically savvy enough to get people to do what you want.

That is not influence. That is performance. And it rarely lasts.

Real influence is quieter and more structural. It is about understanding how decisions actually get made in your organisation - not how the org chart suggests they should be made, but how they actually are. It is about knowing whose judgment is trusted in which rooms, what problems the people with formal authority are genuinely trying to solve, and how to position your thinking so that it lands as useful rather than ambitious.

In short: influence is about being genuinely relevant to the things that matter - before anyone asks you to be.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Consider two professionals in the same organisation, at the same level, with comparable track records.

The first waits for her quarterly review to share what she has been working on. She delivers well, documents everything, and trusts that her results will speak for themselves. She is frustrated that decisions seem to get made without her input, and she is not sure why she keeps being overlooked for the kinds of projects that would stretch her.

The second has made a habit of something small but consistent: before major decisions get formalised, she sends a brief note to a senior colleague - not asking for anything, just sharing a relevant observation or a piece of analysis that connects to something she knows they are thinking about. She does not do this to be seen. She does it because she has noticed that the people who get invited into decisions are the ones who have already demonstrated they have something worth hearing.

Same organisation. Same level. Entirely different trajectories.

The difference is not personality. It is practice.

The Politics Problem

Here is where many principled professionals get stuck. They associate influence-building with politics, and they associate politics with compromise - with saying things they don't mean, flattering people they don't respect, or manoeuvring in ways that feel dishonest.

That version of politics is real, and it is worth avoiding.

But there is another version, and it is not optional. Every organisation - regardless of sector, size, or how flat its structure claims to be - has an informal layer: relationships that carry weight, conversations that happen before the formal ones, patterns of trust that determine who gets heard. Pretending that layer doesn't exist doesn't make you principled. It makes you absent from the conversations that shape your environment.

Navigating that layer with integrity means something specific: understanding the dynamics well enough to contribute honestly to them, rather than being shaped by them without realising it. It means knowing the difference between a room where you should speak and a room where you should listen. It means building relationships across levels and functions - not transactionally, but genuinely - so that when your perspective matters, there is already a foundation for it to land on.

How You Build It

Influence, practised deliberately, looks like a set of small, consistent choices over time.

It looks like asking better questions in meetings rather than waiting to make statements. Like connecting your work explicitly to the priorities of the people above you - not to flatter them, but because that connection is real and making it visible is useful. Like seeking out the colleagues who are trusted and learning how they think, not to imitate them, but to understand the standard.

None of this requires a title. All of it requires intention.

And it requires starting before you feel ready - because the professionals who wait until they have authority to practise influence discover, usually too late, that influence is precisely what authority is built on.

This is one of the things the EMERGE community is built around: the practical, honest work of becoming the kind of leader your organisation hasn't yet had to formally recognise. If you're finding your footing in that work, you're in the right place.

And if you haven't yet taken the Leadership Compass, it's a useful place to start - not because it will tell you who you are, but because it will show you exactly where to focus.

Take the Leadership Compass