Influence, Not Authority, Defines Leadership

Here’s where I found myself: riding high and feeling mean, one of just four people selected to lead the implementation of an exciting new process throughout a nearly one million square foot facility with close to a thousand employees. What an incredible opportunity for a kid who barely graduated high school just a few years prior and had only hit college with a stick since. The executives based just north of Chicago had mandated the initiative so what could possibly go wrong?

What I hadn’t realized (yet), was that this was just another in a long history of initiatives pushed down to the plant level by the powers that be. This newest “flavor of the month” made sense to me but most of the employees I was tasked with helping put it into practice had been privy to such pomp and circumstance many times before, and they were far less impressed than I was. And that doesn’t even factor in their supervisors and managers who were held very accountable to maintaining their current productivity averages and department spending with no consideration for the time and resources I’d be asking of them. The ZERO positional authority that I’ve already referenced a few times, that just made my exciting new role an even bigger challenge…

The material Terry covered during his segment of the two-day behavior-based safety observer training detailed the role consequences play in how we each decide what actions we’ll take as we perform our required tasks. While I found it only mildly interesting the first time I begrudgingly sat through it eighteen months prior, I did everything I could to audit the material and how he delivered every time I could once I was in my new role. Since part of my responsibility was explaining lean manufacturing concepts to the groups I’d be working with, and I was still all but terrified to speak to a group of my peers from the front of a room, I knew I needed to learn as much as I could from every resource possible. The unintended benefit I got from watching him explain the “A, B, C’s of Behavioral Analysis” was that I developed a much deeper appreciation for how influence guides behavior much more effectively than authority. It wasn’t until a year or so later that I first read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and became familiar with two of John C. Maxwell’s signature quotes:

• “Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.”
• “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”

During his segment of that training, Terry shared a scenario where he came into the facility on a day where only a select few of his maintenance team members were working. He just happened to enter through a door right beside where an electrician was working without the required safety glasses. Terry explained that he could have pulled the electrician into his office and administered formal discipline action but he chose to explain the potential injury that could occur instead. As you would expect, the electrician put his safety glasses on and continued working while Terry did what he needed to do and left the building. Less than an hour later, the plant manager came through that same door where the electrician was working, still wearing his safety glasses. If Terry would have used his authority to make sure the electrician put on his glasses - or else - it would have yielded an immediate change in behavior, but likely one that would have resulted in those glasses being tossed aside as soon as Terry left. Had the plant manager arrived before Terry, he would have insisted on disciplinary action. Since Terry chose to explain the potential risk of injury instead of relying solely on the authority of his position, he earned a level of influence that resulted in safer behavior.

As I watched Terry deliver that message in session after session, I began to realize how influence can achieve long term results, whether we’re there to oversee the process or not, where authority alone generally only drives results if we’re nearby and ready to crack the proverbial whip. If that doesn’t resonate, think about what kids tend to do when they’re unsupervised. To that end, think about what many adults try to get away with when they’re unsupervised! (How fast do you drive when you’re on an interstate and there’s no police cars in sight?)

The idea that consequences influence behavior was groundbreaking for me. Realizing that feedback was indeed a powerful yet seldom used consequence would soon help me more than I could possibly understand at the time. The kicker was that for any feedback to carry much weight, some level of relationship would need to be established. Maxwell’s statement that “Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less,” is spot-on, but that influence is rooted in the relationships we cultivate. And cultivating any relationship requires having the confidence to establish a connection - so we’ll pick up there soon.