If you’ve worked in internal communications for any length of time, the idea of influencing without authority probably isn’t new.
Many of us have read Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford’s “Influence Without Authority.” We’ve learned about becoming a “Trusted Advisor” from David H. Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford. We’ve built strong stakeholder relationships, brought data to the conversation and earned credibility with senior leaders. We’ve pulled our own chair up to the proverbial table.
But a finding from our recent Culture at Work Study has us looking at this familiar challenge a little differently: More than half of respondents agreed that the people responsible for improving culture often lack the authority to change the systems shaping it.
Our research also reinforced just how much organizational systems, along with leadership behavior, determine whether what an organization communicates is actually credible to employees. At the same time, communicators are increasingly expected to influence outcomes like culture, trust, behavior change and business performance — even though many of the forces shaping those outcomes sit elsewhere in the organization.
That creates an interesting tension.
What happens when you are increasingly accountable for an outcome, but don’t control many of the things that determine whether that outcome is possible?
Since publishing the research, we’ve been talking with practitioners about that question. Those conversations haven’t produced a simple answer.
In fact, they’ve mostly made the question more complicated. But a few ideas have surfaced that are changing how we think about accountability, authority and what effective influence looks like.
Influence isn’t always direct
One practitioner shared an example that will probably sound familiar. Her organization had created an initiative in direct response to employee feedback. The team had done the work to explain to senior leaders why their visible participation mattered, even providing leaders with relevant feedback from their own teams. Then most of those leaders didn’t show up.
From an employee’s perspective, the contradiction was hard to miss. The organization said the initiative mattered, while the behavior of its leaders suggested otherwise. Communications and HR could see the disconnect, had raised it and had made the case for a different approach. What they couldn’t do was make a senior leader participate.
What was interesting was how this practitioner thought about what could happen next. Another conversation between them and the leader might not be the most effective route. While a trusted direct report saying, “My team noticed you weren’t there, and they’re questioning whether this is really a priority,” might carry significantly more weight.
It’s a subtle but important shift in how we think about influence. The question isn’t always, “How do I influence this person?” Sometimes it’s asking, “Who influences this person?”
Organizations are networks, not just org charts. That makes influence without authority more complicated than simply becoming more persuasive. Formal authority is one source of power, but so are credibility, expertise, relationships, trust and access.
The communicator who sees a problem most clearly may not be the person best positioned to influence the person who can solve it. In some situations, the most effective role for internal communications may be recognizing those relationships and helping the right people see what’s at stake.
It’s a subtle but important shift in how we think about influence. The question isn’t always, “How do I influence this person?” Sometimes it’s asking, “Who influences this person?”
Trusted advisors must tell the truth
Another practitioner pushed the conversation in a different direction. In her view, internal communications needs “more teeth.”
Communicators are increasingly asked to drive adoption, build confidence, increase engagement, strengthen culture and change behavior. Those are meaningful outcomes, but they are rarely produced by communication alone.
Employees may not have access to the tool they’re being asked to adopt. A process may be cumbersome. A leader’s behavior may contradict what the organization is saying. The necessary stakeholder engagement may not have happened. Still, the request often lands in communications: We need people to do this. Can you help us communicate it?
The easy answer is yes. The more valuable answer may be to question the premise.
As this practitioner put it, being helpful does not mean accepting the brief you’ve been given. If the conditions required for success aren’t there, producing a better communication strategy doesn’t necessarily help the organization. It may simply make communications responsible for an outcome it was never positioned to create.
This gets to the heart of what it means to be a trusted advisor. We often talk about trusted advisors in terms of relationships and credibility, but trust also requires candor. Long-term value to leaders doesn’t come from agreeing with every request. It comes from exercising judgment. That includes the willingness to surface uncomfortable employee truths, challenge unrealistic expectations and say when another communication won’t solve the underlying problem.
There’s a career implication in that, too. Consistently accepting the brief, producing the requested deliverable and then taking responsibility for the result can reinforce the perception that communications owns outcomes it can only partially influence. Over time, that can make it harder, not easier, to operate as a strategic advisor.
There is some risk in being the person who says, “I don’t think this will accomplish what you want it to accomplish, and here’s why.” But there is also risk in becoming known as the person who will reliably execute a request without challenging whether it makes sense. The credibility required to influence consequential decisions is built in part by demonstrating that your judgment is worth listening to, even when what you have to say is inconvenient.
Influence still has limits
A third conversation raised what may be the hardest question of all. This practitioner wasn’t struggling to understand where power sat in her organization. She knew. She and her colleagues had brought forward evidence, made the case and tried repeatedly to influence the people who could change the outcome. Yet, nothing changed.
Her question was simple: Where does my responsibility end?
That question has stayed with us because conversations about influence without authority can carry an implicit assumption that if we were more persuasive, more strategic or better at stakeholder management, eventually we could get to the right outcome. But that puts an enormous amount of responsibility on the individual practitioner and ignores a fairly obvious reality: influence has limits.
Sometimes a leader understands the recommendation and makes a different decision. Sometimes a system rewards exactly the behavior we are trying to change. Sometimes the people with authority aren’t aligned with one another. And sometimes the organization simply isn’t ready to act. A communicator can identify those barriers, bring forward evidence and advise on the consequences without having the authority to remove them.
At some point, there must be a distinction between contributing to an outcome and controlling it.
A communicator should be able to recognize that they surfaced the issue, made the recommendation and did what was reasonably within their role. That isn’t an abdication of responsibility. It’s an acknowledgment that organizational outcomes are produced by organizations, not by internal communicators alone.
That distinction isn’t unique to communications. Anyone being asked to influence culture, trust, transformation, employee behavior or business performance can find themselves accountable for an outcome shaped by decisions and systems they don’t control. But it feels particularly important for internal communicators as the profession moves closer to these business-critical outcomes. The more consequential the outcome, the more likely it is to depend on leadership behavior, organizational systems, incentives, decision-making and other factors outside the function’s control.
A tension worth exploring
We don’t think there’s a tidy framework that resolves accountability without authority, and we’re not sure there should be. Context matters. Relationships matter. Organizational dynamics matter. The stakes of the outcome matter. External pressures matter.
What these conversations have done is make us increasingly interested in the distinction between being accountable for influencing an outcome and being accountable for producing it.
That distinction may become even more important as the role of internal communications continues to evolve against the AI landscape. The profession is moving further into work connected to transformation, culture, employee experience, trust and business performance. At the same time, AI is changing how some of the more traditional work of communications gets done. That creates tremendous opportunity for communicators to contribute at a more strategic level, but it also puts them closer to outcomes that no single function can own.
Maybe that is what makes this old idea feel newly relevant. Influence without authority was once largely a question of how to get things done when you weren’t the decision-maker. Increasingly, it may also be a question of how to navigate responsibility for outcomes that depend on an entire organizational system.
The answer can’t simply be more accountability. And it probably can’t simply be “influence harder.”
The more interesting question is how communicators use their judgment, relationships and unique view across the organization to influence the outcomes they can, while being clear-eyed about what the organization itself must own.
That’s complicated work. And it’s a tension that will be familiar to many of the HR, IC, culture and employee experience partners working alongside each other. As the expectations placed on all of these functions continue to grow, figuring out the difference between what we can influence and what we truly own may be some of the most important work ahead.
