What Is Influencing at Work?

Tuesday, 18 August 2026

What is influencing at work?

Start with an example. A project needs two days of a data analyst’s time. The analyst sits in another division, has their own priorities and reports to someone who has never heard of your project. You have no authority over any part of that chain. Whether the work happens depends entirely on what you do next, and none of the options available to you involve telling anyone to do anything.

That situation is the ordinary condition of modern work rather than an unusual bind, and influencing is the capability it calls for. Influencing means getting someone to genuinely agree to a course of action through the merits of the case, the strength of the relationship or their own interest in the outcome, rather than through instruction. It applies upward to people senior to you, sideways to peers in other teams, and outward to suppliers, partners and regulators.

It also applies downward, which surprises people who assume authority settles the matter. A manager can direct a team member to complete a task. What they cannot direct is the effort, care and initiative the person brings to it, and those are usually what determine whether the work is any good.

What is the difference between compliance and commitment?

This distinction is the single most useful idea in the research. Cecilia Falbe and Gary Yukl analysed hundreds of real influence attempts from the perspective of the person being influenced and coded each outcome as commitment, compliance or resistance. Commitment means the person agrees internally and applies effort. Compliance means they do it because they have to. Resistance means they avoid, delay or object.

Reading outcomes this way changes how you judge your own success. An influence attempt that ends with a reluctant yes looks like a win in the meeting and behaves like a loss over the following month, because compliance produces the minimum specified and nothing more. It also expires the moment attention moves elsewhere. If you find yourself repeatedly chasing something you thought was agreed, you probably secured compliance and recorded it as commitment.

Which influencing tactics work best?

The evidence on this is unusually consistent. Falbe and Yukl found the most effective tactics were inspirational appeal, which connects the request to values or to something the person cares about, and consultation, which involves the other person in shaping how it will be done. The least effective were pressure, legitimating, meaning appeals to your own authority or to policy, and coalition tactics, meaning enlisting others to apply weight. Rational persuasion, ingratiation, personal appeals and exchange sat in between. Overall, soft tactics generally outperformed hard ones.

A companion study by Gary Yukl and Bruce Tracey, which rated managers against reports from their subordinates, peers and boss, reached broadly the same conclusion about rational persuasion, inspirational appeal and consultation being the most effective, with pressure and legitimating among the weakest. The reason those three work is not mysterious. Each treats the other person as someone whose genuine agreement is worth having rather than as an obstacle to be moved, and consultation goes furthest because helping design something converts a person from an audience into a part owner.

Rational persuasion deserves a note, since most professionals reach for it first. It performs respectably rather than brilliantly, and it works best when the relationship is already sound and the person is genuinely undecided. Presented to someone who has a stake in the current answer, a stronger argument frequently produces a better organised objection.

Why is influencing harder than it used to be?

Structures have flattened and work has become more cross functional, so the number of people whose agreement you need has grown while your formal authority over them has not. The problem is well documented in the Australian public sector. The Independent Review of the Australian Public Service led by David Thodey found that siloed approaches, rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic rules were creating barriers to effective delivery, and that fragmentation and siloed behaviour produced narrow responses to complex problems and poor service and project delivery.

The practical consequence for an individual is that the hardest part of many jobs is no longer the technical work. It is assembling agreement across boundaries that the organisation chart does not encourage anyone to cross. If your organisation makes joined up work difficult, influencing is not a soft skill layered on top of the job. It is how the job gets done at all.

Why do good ideas go nowhere?

There is a large gap between raising an idea and influencing a decision, and most people underestimate it. The 2025 Australian Public Service Employee Census, which drew 151,771 responses at an 81 per cent response rate, found 83 per cent of employees believe one of their responsibilities is to continually look for new ways to improve how work is done. Willingness is clearly not the constraint.

What separates a suggestion from an influence attempt is preparation done before the conversation. Suggestions are raised in the meeting where the decision is made, to a person who has not thought about it, in competition with everything else on the agenda. Influence attempts arrive with the objection already answered, with one or two people already spoken to, framed in terms of a problem the decision maker already accepts they have. The idea is often identical. The groundwork is not.

The other common failure is a timing error. By the time an item appears on an agenda, most of the real deciding has usually happened in corridors, drafts and side conversations. Influencing at the meeting is influencing at the last available moment, which is why people who seem effortlessly persuasive in the room are often just the ones who did the work the previous week.

How do you build influencing skills?

A handful of habits carry most of the weight. Work out what the other person is accountable for and frame your request in those terms, since people respond to their own objectives rather than yours. Ask for input before you have finished the plan, which is consultation used deliberately rather than as courtesy. Test the case with one sceptical person before you take it anywhere formal. Be useful to colleagues before you need something, because that is what makes a request feel like an exchange rather than an imposition. Distinguish the decision maker from the influencer, who is frequently a trusted adviser rather than the person who signs.

It is also worth noticing your own default tactic. Under time pressure, most people escalate to whatever has worked before, and the two tactics people reach for when tired are exactly the two the research finds weakest: pressure and appeals to authority. Both feel decisive, and both reliably purchase compliance at the cost of the commitment you actually needed.

What none of this survives is the moment when you have prepared properly and the answer is still no. Reading whether the objection is about resources, risk or something nobody has said out loud, then deciding whether to press, trade or withdraw, is the part that responds to practice rather than reading. That is what AcademyGlobal (AG) built its Influencing to Achieve Better Outcomes training around, working through the stakeholders participants are currently stuck with rather than invented ones.

The test of whether you influenced anyone is not whether they agreed in the meeting. It is whether anything was different a month later.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between influencing and manipulation?

Whether the other person can see clearly what they are agreeing to. Influencing survives disclosure, so explaining your approach would not change the answer. Manipulation depends on hidden information, false urgency or a distorted set of options, and it works once at the cost of the relationship.

How do you influence someone more senior than you?

Frame the request against what they are accountable for, bring the decision rather than the problem, and be explicit about what you need from them. Senior people are usually short of time rather than short of willingness, so arriving with an analysed recommendation and a clear ask is more persuasive than raising an issue for them to solve.

How do you influence without authority?

The same way you influence with it, since authority mostly buys compliance anyway. Understand the other person’s objectives and constraints, involve them early enough that they shape the approach, build credibility through delivery on smaller things, and make the exchange visible so helping you is not pure cost to them.

What is a stakeholder map and is it useful?

A simple record of who is affected by a decision, what each person cares about, how much influence they hold and where they currently sit. It is useful when it changes your sequencing, since it usually reveals someone who should be spoken to before the meeting rather than in it. It is not useful as a document that gets filed.

Can influencing skills be learned?

Yes, because the effective tactics are behaviours rather than traits. Consultation, framing a request against someone else’s objectives and preparing for likely objections are all learnable and observable. What takes longer is the credibility that makes any of them land, which accrues through delivery over time.

References

Australian Public Service Commission (2025). APS Employee Census 2025.

Falbe, C. M. and Yukl, G. (1992). Consequences for Managers of Using Single Influence Tactics and Combinations of Tactics. Academy of Management Journal.

Thodey, D. et al. (2019). Our Public Service, Our Future: Independent Review of the Australian Public Service. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Yukl, G. and Tracey, J. B. (1992). Consequences of Influence Tactics Used With Subordinates, Peers, and the Boss. Journal of Applied Psychology.