Influence Without Authority. Cohen Allan R.

angry or wanting to retaliate. Out of fear, usually untested (and often unfounded), they decide they can't go ahead. Even the idea that pushing might make the other person not like you can paralyze some people.

      Fear of failing. Most significant initiatives involve risk of failure/rejection, but some may be so concerned about embarrassment or shame that no attempt at influence is better than a refusal – or being accepted and then having the project or activity fail.

      Overcome the Barriers: Use an Influence Model to Guide You

      Can you get past these barriers (and others we will introduce in later chapters)? We will help you step back and use some new guidelines. The challenge will be to overcome your own feelings and reactions, so that you can better diagnose just what is required and learn to get past the fears and misconceptions that block you. The next chapter develops the Cohen-Bradford Influence without Authority model and builds your learning from there.

      Plan, But Do Not Come Across as Self-Seeking

      This may sound calculating – and it is. But it is deliberate planning about how to get work done, not calculation for your personal benefit. If people perceive you as interested only in your own advancement or success, they will be wary, resistant, or go underground to retaliate later. In this way, influence in organizations over time goes to the sincere, those genuinely interested in the welfare of others, those who make lots of connections and often engage in mutually profitable exchanges. Machiavellian, self-seeking behavior may work for a while but eventually creates enemies or lack of interest in being helpful, which renders you ineffective. Someone who wants to get you can trade negative actions for your behavior, and this payback can be unpleasant. If your organization has a negative culture where only self-seeking gets rewarded, it eventually suffers and declines. People who care about the organization's objectives get disenchanted and leave as soon as they can, and those who stay spread bitterness.

      Get “Two for the Price of One”

      The discussion so far has focused on achieving your task objectives by setting up a win-win outcome. That is primary, but it often produces an important secondary benefit: a more positive work relationship. The influence process of working to understand the world of the other, of speaking to their needs, of paying attention how to work together, and in having the other satisfied with the outcome usually has a positive effect on the relationship.

      Research suggests that “having good work relationships” is a key factor valued at work. (Have you ever been in a negative work climate? It can be poisonous.) Often people are hesitant to push for new ideas for fear of alienating others – and sometimes that is the unfortunate outcome. But we are suggesting that using the Cohen-Bradford Influence model offers the possibility of simultaneously achieving task success and incrementally building the positive work relationships most people prefer.

      The Book's Organization

      Here's how we do it. This chapter has introduced the need for influence and the benefits of learning a more systematic way of thinking about how to get it. Chapter 2 spells out the core influence model, and Chapters 3 through 7 provide more detail about each stage of the model. Then in a series of Practical Application chapters, we use the influence model in familiar situations to demonstrate how to get what you need to do good work. We include two new chapters on gender and influence and distance and influence. You may want to read selectively among these application chapters to fit your current situation, and then return later as you move into other, more complex settings.

      In addition, we offer on our website several cases and numerous extended examples of people who had to go through many obstacles to acquire influence (http://www.influencewithoutauthority.com). (For more detail about these examples and the lessons we draw from them, see Appendix A on pages 279–284.)

      This book can help you get ahead by showing you how to make good things happen for the organization and for those you deal with. More power to you.

Core Premises

      ● Influence is about trades, exchanging something the other values in return for what you want.

      ● Relationships matter; the more good ones you have, the greater your odds of finding the right people to trade with and having some goodwill to help the trades along. And for many, relationships are important in their own right.

      ● Influence at work requires that you know what you are doing, have reasonable plans, are competent at the task at hand – but that often isn't enough. It is just the price of admission.

      ● You have to want influence for the ultimate good of the organization. In the short term, that may not be necessary, but genuine care for the organization's goals makes you more credible and trustworthy, keeps you from being seen as only in it for yourself, and prevents those whom you have influenced from ruining your reputation or seeking retaliation.

      ● Your difficulty with influence often rests, unfortunately, with you. Sometimes you just don't know what to do, which is relatively easy to fix. But at certain critical moments, we all do things that keep us from being as effective as we could be. While occasionally the other party is truly impossible, far more often, your influence deficit comes from something you are doing – or failing to do.

      ● Just about everyone is potentially much more influential than they think they are.

      PART II

      THE INFLUENCE MODEL

CHAPTER 2

      THE INFLUENCE MODEL: TRADING WHAT THEY WANT FOR WHAT YOU'VE GOT (USING RECIPROCITY AND EXCHANGE)

      I have done enough for you, Apollo; now it's your turn to do something for me.

– Rough translation of inscription on a Greek statue of the God Apollo, 700–675 B.C., demonstrating ancient understanding of the concept of reciprocity.2

      Come that's very well – very well indeed!

      Thank you, good sir – I owe you one.

– George Colman, The Poor Gentleman, Act IV, Scene 1, (1762), demonstrating an artistic understanding of reciprocity in the 18th century

      To address the kinds of challenges we have described in Chapter 1, how can you influence those over whom you have no authority? The short answer is that to have influence, you need resources that other people want to trade for what you want. This key to influence is based on a principle that underlies all human interaction, the Law of Reciprocity.

      Ignore the Law of Reciprocity at Your Peril

      Reciprocity is the almost universal belief that people should be paid back for what they do —that one good (or bad) turn deserves another.3 This belief about behavior, evident in primitive and not-so-primitive societies all around the world, carries over into organizational life. One form in work settings is “an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.”

      People generally expect that, over time, those people they have done things for “owe them,” and will roughly balance the ledger, repaying costly acts with equally valuable ones. This underlying belief in how things are supposed to work allows people in difficult organizational situations to gain cooperation. A classic study of prison guards found that threats and punishments alone did not let the guards control prisoners, who greatly outnumbered them.4 The guards did favors for the prisoners, such as overlooking small rule infractions or providing cigarettes, for cooperation from prisoners in keeping order. All the formal authority in the world can't keep rebellious prisoners in line; they exchange their cooperation for favors making their confinement more tolerable, not out of respect for “the rules.”

      Even at much higher levels

4

Gresham M. Sykes, Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (New York: Atheneum, 1969).