Influence
Informal leadership and informal influence: the power that isn't on the org chart
Every organization has two maps. The org chart shows who reports to whom. The informal map shows whose opinion people check before they act, who can quietly stall a project, and whose nod makes a decision real. Informal leaders live on the second map, and most change succeeds or fails there.
Authority tells people what they must do. Influence decides what they actually do.
What is informal influence?
Informal influence is the ability to shape decisions without formal authority. Social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven described several bases of power. Only some, such as the power to reward or sanction, come with a title. Others, like expertise and being someone people identify with and trust, belong to the person, not the position.
Robert Cialdini's research on persuasion points the same way: people follow those they like, trust and see as credible, and they look to peers to decide what is normal.
Who the informal leaders are
They are rarely hard to find once you look:
- 1The long-tenured specialist everyone calls before touching the system.
- 2The team member new hires are quietly told to ask.
- 3The person whose silence in a meeting makes everyone else hesitate.
- 4The peer who translates leadership announcements into what they really mean.
Working with informal leaders instead of against them
Managers who feel threatened by informal leadership tend to fight it, and they usually lose. A better approach is to bring informal leaders into a decision early, ask for their read on what will break, and give them real ownership of part of the change. Their influence then works for the outcome instead of against it.
The goal is not to make informal power formal. It is to make sure the formal system and the informal one point in the same direction.