68Managing Yourself
effectively for your team, in order to both keep their trust and also enhance
the work that they can do for the good of the organization.
You might think that purposefully pursuing infl uence is distasteful,
and surely you don’t want to be seen as scheming and manipulating people
to always get your way. But infl uence really isn’t about getting “your” way.
It’s about helping to create positive and productive outcomes for your orga-
nization, with and through others.
To do this, fi rst you need to understand the basis of your power; then
you can wield it to better work with peers, collaborate across silos in your
organization, infl uence your boss, and promote your ideas.
Positional versus personal power
Infl uence is a combination of two kinds of power. Your role as a manager
automatically gives you positional power in your organization—power that
comes from your job description and title, like the ability to hire and fi re
people or approve a budget. In earlier generations, corporate cultures put
a greater emphasis on a manager’s positional power, and there was an ex-
pectation that if you told direct reports to do something, they’d do it with-
out question. But as hierarchies are giving way to fl atter organizations and
looser networks of collaboration, you can’t rely on just your job title to get
things done. As a manager, you need to work through other people—your
direct reports, who can execute your vision; your peers, who can support
it laterally; and your management team, who can make or break it from
above. Getting their buy-in requires a different approach.
To exercise infl uence up and down the chain of command, you need
to also draw effectively on your personal power by cultivating social capi-
tal. Relationships, reputation, reciprocity, institutional knowledge, and
informal know-how—social capital represents all of the trust, value, and
goodwill you’ve created in your organization. For example, when you
increase the organization’s profi ts or help your team secure good year-
end bonuses, you create economic value for your higher-ups and direct
reports alike. Down the line, when you want their buy-in for a new ini-
tiative, they’ll be more likely to accept your plan and throw their weight