7 tips for leading without authority

Leading a technical workforce requires a rapidly changing skillset. Gone are the days when your title allowed you to boss everyone around, rule with an iron fist, and expect a successful outcome. The mood of leadership now is all about collaboration, mutual elevation, and leading without authority.

Even if you have a job title where you could reasonably expect everyone who reports to you to do as you say, command-and-control leadership no longer has a reasonable shelf life. Moreover, some companies are shifting away from traditional hierarchies, introducing blended teams that can be spun up and wound down as necessary. Either way, as a recent McKinsey report concludes, “The old hierarchical model of leadership is increasingly seen as an obstacle to meeting the complex demands facing today’s organizations.”

Even if traditional modes of leadership work on the people who report to you, IT leaders are still often expected to lead people — in other departments or not in your company — where they have no authority.

Learning the skillsets that go into this subtle art of leadership is not easy. But it is necessary.

According to Keith Ferrazzi, in his bestseller Leading without Authority, this skillset “is a superpower that can help you and those around you do heroic and amazing things. It is a power within us all. Every one of us, whatever our title, can be a better, more effective, more influential, and more engaged leader.”

I spoke to leaders who live and breathe this concept and asked them for actionable tips to help you build your “lead without authority” skillset.

1. Create a shared vision

Bob Rogers is a data scientist and the CEO of Oii.ai, an AI company that automates supply chain design. He is also the chief scientific advisor at BeeKeeperAI, a healthcare AI collaboration platform he co-founded. Rogers has built his career, he says, by being a poster child for leading without authority.

“This is my whole career,” he says. “It starts with creating a shared ownership of vision. In practice, for me, that is all about storytelling. The story you tell creates an end goal and a team all at once.”

By creating a story that captures the dream of where his vision will lead, Rogers is able to bring people to his cause, get people to willingly — enthusiastically — do what he needs them to do, and accomplish amazing things.

He offers an example from his previous role as chief data scientist at Intel: He was trying to help the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) process the 8 million reports of online child exploitation it gets each year. His role gave him no authority. So, he created a story — children in peril — that brought technologists, project managers, and people with the authority he needed to his cause.

His story ultimately convinced Diane Bryant, who at the time was head of Intel’s data center group. “Once she was recruited, she gave us the assets we needed,” he says. “We got a million dollars and permission to take significant amount of the time of an army of volunteers.”

Before Rogers started telling this story to bring people to his cause, the NCMEC had a 60-day backlog on reports of child exploitation — a long time for a child in danger. His team built an AI solution to automate the processing pipeline. “Two weeks after we deployed it,” he says, “They were processing every single thing within 24 hours.”

2. Tell the right kind of story

Drilling down deeper, Rogers notes that to get people to believe in a shared vision, the type of story you tell is important. Rescuing children in peril brings this kind of commitment. Not all stories are that compelling. But they don’t have to be if you tell your story well. “A big mistake that people make,” says Rogers, “is the content of that story.”

You might want to increase revenues or be the largest IT company on the planet. But that’s not the story. “What is the thing people can sign onto and have a personal stake in?” he asks. “How are you going to change the world or make the world a better place?”

Some of your goals can be prosaic. But tell a story that people care about.

His current company isn’t saving children from evil. But his team are big believers in the outcome, as he tells it. “We’re changing the way supply chain is done with AI. We are going to make supply chains work better so people can get toilet paper during the pandemic and pharmaceutical companies can make sure that the drugs supply for critical drugs gets there,” he says.

3. Get agreement on outcomes

In her role as chief product officer at Optimizely, Rupali Jain says, “I can pretty much tell anyone what to do, and they will likely do it. But is that the right thing to do organizationally? Probably not. It makes me the bottleneck for decisions, assumes I know more than folks on the ground, and does not help grow the next level of leaders. I should paint a picture and get people to see the outcome we want so we can get there together.”

This is harder. “When you are leading by influence, you have to first convince someone that the outcome you’re trying to achieve is good,” she says. “Then you have to give up on how you get to the outcome. Both of those are hard.”

But using positional authority to get things done creates even bigger problems. “If you’re not empowering the organization to get to those outcomes,” she says. “You become a bottleneck. Everyone will wait for you to make decisions. You can’t scale. And that’s a big problem.”

At the same time, you can’t sit on the sidelines, letting people make decisions, and then throw them under the bus if a decision doesn’t turn out well. “If you empower people, you better support them,” she says. “If they make a decision and something comes in sideways, and then you disown that decision, you’ve lost your ability to influence without authority.”

4. Build collaboration into your culture

Leading without authority starts with individuals deciding to create change then bringing people together over a shared goal. If you believe in this strategy and want it to work, make it fundamental to your organizational structure.

“We made an intentional transition at the onset of the pandemic to be a fully remote organization,” says Elaine Mak, chief people and performance officer at Valimail. “At the same time, we transitioned from a founder-led to a team-led model.”

That transition involved democratizing decision-making, relying on experts within the organization, and leaning into letting people create outcomes through collaboration.

“I brought the phrase, ‘Don’t be right, get it right,’ into the organization,” says Seth Blank, Valimail’s CTO.

“It’s at the crux of the question of how to lead without authority. If you’re the expert and you bring a team together, come in with humility and ask, ‘How do we do this? How do we learn together?’ If you do that, you can move mountains from anywhere on the organization — if the organization is set up to respond. You need the culture, and you need leaders who expect that. Then people can do amazing things,” Blank says.

5. Put ‘influence’ on your calendar

Even with a culture that believes in this model, if you leave the storytelling and influence-building to chance and individual motivation, it will be easy for people to slip back into old, comfortable, command-and-control methods.

Tripp Cox, CTO of Eagleview, finds that making influence-building a baked-in part of daily work is essential to the success of this style of leadership.

This starts, he says, with putting a task on your calendar.

“At the beginning of every quarterly planning cycle, I spend a couple of hours with everyone across the organization, setting context and explaining our priorities and why the work we are about to embark on is important. It puts that time on the calendar for all of us on a regular cadence,” he says.

If you know you are going to talk to people — and when that’s going to happen — everyone can polish the story they want to tell and give thought to the outcomes they are looking for.

“An operating model like that helps provide a framework and some predictability around engaging with each other, especially when you are distributed across many time zones and have stakeholders who aren’t necessarily under one authority line,” he says.

6. Lean on your expertise

When you are a tech leader, your own expertise is an essential leadership tool — regardless of whether you have the authority to tell people what to do.

“We work with hundreds of engineers and knowledge workers,” says Ashu Varshney, CIO at RingCentral. “They will not respect you simply because you have a title. They need to feel that your feedback is valuable and complementary. They will respect your technical expertise, credibility, and the fact that you are also listening to what they are saying.”

This is true in situations where you have no authority as well. At RingCentral, for example, the IT team is tasked with overseeing technology spending across all business units, but Varshney’s team doesn’t have authority over the people in those teams.

“We want to let these different lines of businesses figure out the tools they need to be productive,” he says. But this can quickly get out of control. Marketing might choose one project management toolset while sales and finance choose something else. Soon you have seven or eight tools that do the same thing and don’t talk to each other. To allow this self-governance while reigning in the chaos, the company set up a governance team managed by IT.

His team has the C-suite’s stamp of authority for this, but it is their expertise that makes it work.

When teams come looking — reluctantly — for permission, they find valuable advice. The IT team might know reasons they would like another tool or that a tool they already use can be configured to do the thing they want. It requires that this team offer that expertise as part of this process and actively work toward a solution with the teams that ask for permission.

“It requires that we not view ‘shadow IT’ as a negative term,” says Varshney, “but rather as a progressive way of enabling digitization across different line of businesses.”

7. Start now to achieve your leadership goals

Leading without authority is not only a tool that allows people with positional authority to create better outcomes, but it is also a toolset you can apply to your career at any stage. Start doing it now, whatever your role. Build a network and build your “leading without authority” muscles. Not only will your willingness to create enthusiasm for your projects, tell stories, and build collaboration get things done, it will likely help you to achieve a role with the positional authority to boss people around — and the knowledge and skill not to do so.

“When we look around for who’s going to lead, regardless of whether it’s leading a team or project or whatever, we look at the people that are already naturally doing it,” says Optimizely’s Jain. “So, if you’re leading without authority, you’re already exhibiting the capabilities and the ability to do something at the next level.”