Remember the good ol’ days when you could tell people what to do and they’d do it? Yeah, we don’t either. The reality is in most organizations, you will have times when you need to lead, collaborate, or influence when you don’t have position power or authority. This could be leading a cross-functional project, needing to collaborate with a peer or team that doesn’t report to you, or influence strategic decisions like headcount or budget for departments or functions you don’t have direct oversight for. There are unique challenges and skills associated with this kind of leadership. We’ll hit three important skills here:
- Listening to Learn
- Emotional Agility
- Purpose-Driven Conversations & Feedback
We notice when leaders don’t have direct authority, they tend to come into conversations where they want to influence very well-prepared with a well-thought-out business case or ‘script’ for what they want to say. We think preparation is a great thing – the key is the kind of preparation. Too often in preparing for these conversations, we focus on what we want to communicate or what we want people to understand or what we need. Do you notice the focus here? It’s about us and our points of view. If you supervise people where you have positional authority to complete tasks, this level of clarity is often very important. But when you need to influence or lead when you don’t have authority, we think this focus needs to shift. The preparation that’s necessary now is, what is there you need to learn about how others see the challenge or opportunity that you’re collectively working on? If you want to influence or lead across organizational boundaries, you’ll want to be seen as an ally to accomplishing what’s important to others or avoiding/mitigating what worries them about the mutual challenge.
This requires preparation to understand what you believe you know about their current goals, worries, and situation.You also want to honestly evaluate what you do not yet know. By identifying what you don’t yet know, you can design a conversation that allows you to learn from their perspective. Of course, this requires you to be open to learning from their perspective. Supervising with authority can often be achieved by becoming clear on what you want and then communicating that to those for whom you have authority. Leaders who are effective at leading without authority are skilled at listening to others, learning from others’ experiences and views, and upgrading your own point of view based upon what you learn from others. In this way, you (the leader) can formulate plans that reflect what is important not only to yourself, but for the critical people you are working with.
Which brings us to the next necessary skills – social intelligence and emotional agility. In listening to learn, particularly across boundaries when things like power, politics, agendas, budgets, headcounts, conflicting goals, and compensation all may be in play, we have to be able to listen for the content, the context, and the subtext. This is much more than just being able to play back someone’s words. It’s truly listening to learn something from them and gain an insight into what they’re thinking, what matters to them, or something new about the situation. Listening to learn sounds easier than it often is. When different agendas, opinions, budgets, goals, power dynamics, etc. are at play, it is easy for us to become reactive instead of purposeful. Not succumbing to our normal human reactions of fight and flee is usually difficult. Most of us know how our emotions (like fear, disappointment, frustration, even anger) can get the best of us and have us react in ways that are not useful or constructive. How can we notice our reactivity soon enough to not have them rule our behavior? When we become more aware of our reactive tendencies, we can find a gap between what stimulated us and our typical reactions. This gap is where new choices are possible. From here, we can set our views and biases aside and really open ourselves up to learn something new from another. When learning from another we are then able to see what is important to them, which can help us formulate what is important to both of us (shared purpose). Having a shared purpose for the collaboration makes this emotional agility more accessible and available to everyone in the conversation.
This brings us to the third and maybe most important element in leading without authority: purpose – more specifically, shared purpose. Having a shared purpose that you and those you are leading, collaborating with, or influencing all care deeply about provides a way to listen to different opinions, input, or feedback while noticing if your emotions are aligned with what you want to accomplish. We often say, “let the purpose be the boss,” and in the case of leading without authority we think this is a necessity. Without shared purpose, conversations become about personal preferences and can be dominated by power, personal agendas, or internal politics. With an overt, explicitly shared purpose that stakeholders have helped to craft, leaders have a truing mechanism, something to anchor the conversation to. For example, let’s say there is a peer that you need to collaborate with on a cross-functional process change that may cause more work for your peer or their team. Without a shared purpose, the discussion can easily turn to all the reasons why the suggested changes aren’t going to work for them. With a shared purpose, together you can evaluate how the suggested change contributes to that shared purpose (or doesn’t). Having a shared purpose doesn’t guarantee that the conversations will be easy. What a shared purpose provides is a place to stand that is important to everyone in the conversation, which facilitates more valuable, honest, and meaningful dialogue.
By the way, these skills take years of practice. Our emotions will trip us up routinely; recognizing that and planning for it helps to build and grow as individuals and leaders.
In January, we’ll spend a week with leaders facing the kind of challenges associated with leading without authority. If this sounds like you and you’d like to develop your own skills, join us at the Purposeful Leader.
