How to Build Your Influence Before Getting Promoted
A simple definition of leadership power is “influence potential.” If you want to influence the world in a positive way as almost all of the women I have worked with want to do, you have to have power. One of my motivations for working with aspiring leaders is to help women who are excelling at their careers grow to become even more influential and make even more of a positive difference in their careers, across their teams, and in the world. Mastering the four types of power is vital if you are an aspiring leader that is seeking upward roles of positional power. If you want to jump right in, download my Leadership Power workbook today and begin your journey from respected professional to transformational leader.
This reference guide for the four types of power is based on work from Sally Helgeson, researcher, author, and coach. When researching to write one of her books, Sally spent a day with Ted Jenkins, the fourth person hired at Intel. Over his long career, Ted had seen brilliant employees change the world, and he’d seen brilliant employees crash and burn. He asserted that those who thrived understood and cultivated four kinds of power in organizations. They outline four keys to leadership power.
Power of Expertise
The first kind of power is the power of expertise. It is embedded in the skills and knowledge you bring to your role and those you develop over time, through training or by daily practice. Expertise is required across all organizational functions–innovation & development, marketing & sales, operations & finance—for building success. Therefore, demonstrating expertise can be a key way to set yourself apart from your peers. The expertise you develop is wired in your brain and body, and is intrinsic to you as you build it over time, increasing with use rather than diminishing. And, you take this power with you throughout your career. However, cultivating expertise at the expense of other kinds of power will not position you as a leader.
As a non-engineer and female tech leader, I took pride in leaning into my power of Expertise. I loved the deep analysis of our processes, digging into data for making decisions, exploring how and why we built components of code the way we did, and speaking up in meetings about all the nitty-gritty details of the key functionality of our products. But as I moved up in my career, I realized I wasn’t leading if I was spending my time ‘learning and knowing’ all the detailed work at the level of expertise I was focusing on. If I wanted to lead, I needed to make time to embrace other dimensions of influence.
Power of Connections
The second kind of power is the power of connections, or the power of whom you know. For many of us, connections are built as we dedicate our time to a company, hold different jobs, work across functions, and build a professional network. Networking with people in your industry as well as key clients and leaders in your community is also important. Connections serve as investments you can leverage to accomplish cross-functional goals and may also help to get your contributions noticed. The power of connections is the reason that high-functioning teams can transform an entire organization: people know how to find skills and leverage resources pulled together from unexpected places.
Building connections has always felt natural to me. It’s something I’ve probably done since I was in preschool! I remember a situation from my mid-career where I was new to an industry and a role. I had been with the company for about 3 months. A person that worked for me remarked, “You know so many people here!” Honestly, it wasn’t by accident! I had studied the org chart. I had taken the time in my new role to meet leaders across the organization to understand their vision, goals, and pain points. I asked other influencers to meet me for coffee, just to connect and learn more about the industry. I wanted to connect the work my organization was doing to theirs. I knew those connections would serve my team and the company in the long run. But expertise and connections were not enough for me to build my influence. I also needed to gain authority.
Power of Personal Authority
The third kind of power is the power of personal authority or charisma, which is rooted in the confidence you inspire in others and resides in our ability to gain respect among people we work with, regardless of the position we hold. It would be rare to start your career with high amounts of personal authority; it grows as your experience and reputation develops over time. With authority, there’s another element: a strong presence, a distinctive way of speaking and listening. I think of this as being a leader that others want to follow. This authority doesn’t demand respect, it inspires loyalty and trust, or to some degree, an inspired devotion from others. Having strong personal authority often spurs colleagues to seek out our observations and judgments, which increases their power as well as ours. Personal authority is what sets the most successful leaders apart, whether or not their authority is tied to position.
Authority can take years to build, and mine certainly did across various companies and roles. One of the quickest ways to building authority is to become someone others can trust. Do what you say you will do. Provide direct feedback where it is warranted. Be a partner to others through crisis. All of those things helped me to build my power of authority. In addition, even in situations where I didn’t have authority based on longer-term expertise or connections, I focused on channeling courage and confidence in speaking and presenting my ideas to others. It’s more than just “fake it until you make it.” Building authority is most impactful when you’re able to consistently build on your ideas and clearly present them to others.
Power of Position
The fourth kind of power is the power of position, or where you stand in the hierarchy of an official organizational chart. It is determined by your title, your job description, your place in the chain of command. But while positional power is substantial, giving formal control over specific resources and the right to make certain decisions, it is always extrinsic, unrelated to individual talents or merits. This means that however exalted, our position is always a slot that we are temporarily filling. It preexists our tenure and will endure after we have gone. Therefore, it’s very important to remember that positional power is most effective when supported by the power of personal authority. Without it, others may not trust their leader’s decisions.
While each type of power is important, leaders and organizations are most healthy when all four types of power are in balance. When positional power overrides all else, decisions tend to get made arbitrarily, with insufficient information and without much support. Truly toxic organizations tend to view employees with expertise, connections, or personal authority as threats to the absolute authority of positional leaders. Innovative companies that have been successful at drawing ideas from people at every level comes from the value the company has placed on non-positional power across teams and talents.
Remembering the four types of power can be helpful if you are an aspiring leader that is seeking upward roles of positional power. Expertise, connections, and personal authority are all non-positional kinds of power you should nurture and practice throughout your career. The more you develop these complementary powers, the more prepared you’ll be to grow your influence when you are promoted into a positional power role.
Ready to amplify your leadership impact? Through my specialized coaching program, we’ll identify your unique power strengths, address your blind spots, and develop strategies to balance all four dimensions of leadership influence. Don’t just climb the ladder—build a foundation of influence that feels authentic and inspires lasting change. Schedule a FREE coaching chat and download my Leadership Power workbook today and begin your journey from respected professional to transformational leader. Your next level of impact is waiting.
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