How to Gain Influence as a Leader for Better Outcomes and Increased Productivity
Let’s talk about influence. My coaching clients often ask me to help them gain confidence and influence others—to rally others to their cause. Yet many of them also believe that wielding power over others is disliked and inappropriate.
Influence is different. It is not manipulation or force. It’s more about gaining the trust and credibility that inspires others to follow you. As leaders, we can significantly benefit from becoming influencers, both at work and in our personal lives. It will boost productivity, teamwork, and results.
While telling people what to do often seems like the shortest, easiest road to your goal, it can actually be the worst in the long run. How many times have you felt that you weren’t asked the right way to do something? Or you thought of a better way yet had to do it the other way? Did you resist, feel frustrated, or not follow the directions?
Influencing avoids these pitfalls. You will give others the power to overcome challenges, create change and find better solutions. Influencing gains many benefits in the long run, whether at home as a parent or at work as a leader. We’ll go over three barriers to avoid and three skills to develop.
Three Big Barriers to Becoming an Influencer
In his book Real Influence: Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In, Mark Goulston talks about several limiting behaviors that cause us to reach for an authoritarian approach instead of exercising influence. (It’s a great book to pick up for a deeper dive after this article.)

* Lack of Trust. The #1 barrier to influencing is lack of trust. Your followers need to trust you. (And you need to trust yourself and your team.) Under today’s stress levels, however, our behavior is distorted. We tell people what to do without a thought to negative impact on engagement. We don’t pause to get buy-in, look for input or better solutions than ours, or consider the personalities of others. In this state, we dictate.

A common symptom? You want people to do something you feel is important, but others are simply not responding. Directing restricts others’ ability to trust us. When we pull authority, they sense the one-way communication, which feels like a lack of confidence in them. Many executives are unable to lead and facilitate change simply because they push, tell, and direct, and it doesn’t work.
The most successful leaders report that the two most valuable lessons their mentors gave them included the opportunity to fail and to learn from challenges. Yet it’s easy to feel you cannot take the risk of those under you failing (which may be seen as your poor performance), nor afford the time to listen for even a few minutes to others’ ideas. This perception is an illusion.

* Close-Minded Solutions. Another limitation (from Real Influence) is the assumptions we make. We respond based on past experience, yet our knowledge base drives us to behave the same way, day after day, situation after situation.

When our ideas are less effective and we still push them, we cannot influence others. In the long run, telling our team what to do creates disconnection, damages trust, hurts your reputation, and disempowers others from making decisions, learning, or proposing better solutions. And it blocks new solutions.
Is this you? Close-minded leaders often find people knocking at their door with problems and no solutions, waiting for an answer. When I work with this type of leader, and they never understand why their team is not performing and providing solutions themselves! When you can empower others to do their job and even to experiment, you will gain influence.

* The Dark Side of “I Can Do Better.” Sports psychologist Stan Beecham explains that an “I can do better” mindset actually holds us back from becoming an influencer.