3 Ways to Influence Senior Leaders

Read Time: 8 Minutes

Ready for a model? There are three currencies for managing up: 

• Trust

• Credibility

• Relationships

Here’s an overview of each:

“Trust” is what you’d expect: does the person you are managing up to trust you, do they have faith that you do what you say, and do they perceive you as worth listening to and someone with good judgment? Do they think you have their best interests at heart? The higher their trust in you, the more liberties they’ll allow you to take and the more they are willing to hear you out when you suggest something crazy. 

Trust is built over time and can be resilient to failure, but tends to have a low ceiling of effectiveness, often because of its low visibility.

“Credibility” is different. It’s less about you and the senior person, and more about your perception by the organization. Credibility is kinda like organizational trust. If you’re credible, even if a leader doesn’t like what you’re suggesting, they may support you despite their disagreement because to disagree with someone credible is to take a risk. 

Credibility is very powerful, but also fragile and a great way to make enemies. Bulldoze enough people with credibility and everyone will be waiting for you to fail, and if you do it will destroy your credibility and plummet you into obscurity.

“Relationship” is the third currency. The quality of the relationship you have with the person you are trying to “manage up” will play a big role in how effective you are at it. Relationship masquerades as trust in many environments, and can even double as credibility at times if you have sufficiently strong relationships with enough of the right people. 

The individuals who are fantastic at navigating the political part of organizations tend to be experts at developing and strengthening relationships with the right people, and can then leverage those relationships to drive change. 

I’d love to tell you that “trust” is what you should focus on, but if I’m giving you honest advice, the reality is that you’re going to want to be spending time generating all three. I’ve seen all of them used for great good, and I’ve seen all of them used inappropriately. You want to be trusted, credible, and have good relationships.

How do you do that? Well, let’s walk through all three.

Trust

The most important way to build trust is to be reliable - to do what you say you are going to do. Follow through is huge, because trust is a matter of people feeling like they can count on you. People may not like you, but they’ll trust you if you meet your commitments consistently.

The second way you build trust is by showing you won’t violate your expressed values for personal gain. If you are constantly talking about how honesty is important, but as soon as the chips are down you tell lies, that’ll undermine trust pretty fast. Someone who operates from integrity (living out the values they claim to have) will be someone people trust. Again, others may not like your values, but they will at least trust you to follow them. 

The third way is to prioritize the good of others over yourself - particularly the person who is developing trust in you. If people see you operating with their best interests in mind at personal cost, that creates trust. This doesn’t have to be some giant self-sacrifice, it could just be going a bit above expectations to help someone when you didn’t have to.

When you’re leading teams, having their trust is important, so I especially encourage thinking about how you are following through on what you say you’ll do, honoring your own values, and prioritizing the team over yourself regularly. 

But these also work with people who are more senior than you are. Going the extra mile to help your manager accomplish an objective or being clear about what you can and can’t promise in the next quarter will create trust with the people that observe it. 

As your trust with other people builds, you gain a greater and greater ability to be heard by them. This allows you to make suggestions or give feedback. Suggestions and feedback are two ways that you might be trying to “manage up.” Higher trust increases the chances of being taken seriously by the leaders around you. 

It is a long road, and it requires discipline. But I also find this to be a pretty stable currency for driving change and managing up an organization. The problem with this one? It doesn’t scale well. People have to interact with you or at least observe you operating to develop trust in you. Alone, trust won’t give you the broad influence that other currencies can provide.

Speaking of, let’s talk about credibility.

Credibility

I said above that credibility is like “organizational trust.” When you’re credible, that often implies that a large group of people see you as worth listening to about your area(s) of expertise. 

Credibility scales well and can provide a lot of ammunition for driving change, but it can also be fragile. It takes a pretty huge breach for someone to go from a trusted state to an untrusted state. But going from credible to not credible can sometimes be as simple as not meeting someone’s unrealistic expectations. Even if you were set up to fail, people expected someone credible like you to “figure it out” and when you don’t, regardless of how unreasonable the ask, you lose credibility.

Part of being credible is having an “aura” about you, a belief from others that you can tackle particular types of problems, and this aura is present even if people don’t know you or haven’t worked with you. In this way, credibility is similar to having a good “reputation.” Credibility will open doors and allow you to make big suggestions and be taken seriously. 

The primary way you build credibility is by being seen as responsible for positive outcomes. Even if no one understands how you work and perhaps even disagrees with aspects of how you approach getting to results, if you are able to lead teams to success in a visible, you will start to create credibility for yourself.

Another way you build credibility is by accurately predicting things that will happen in the future. If you’re in a leadership group and you tend to be able to anticipate problems, call out where the failures will happen, and generally give people a warning of what’s coming, that will build credibility.

There’s a third way to gain credibility inside an org, and it’s to be found in agreement with the people in positions of power. Whether right or wrong, supporting or suggesting the same ideas senior leaders are thinking about or presenting will build your credibility as people appreciate that you’re on their side. This is different from building a relationship, as it’s more about them agreeing with your decision making as opposed to enjoying your company. Still, it generates credibility. 

Final thing: we often see people as credible even if we’ve never worked with them if they’ve worked at a really impressive company in the past, or have done something that is known to be very difficult. Popular influencers on social media are credible mostly because… they are popular. Credibility is driven by the general sense we feel in the people around us about a person. 

Your credibility will usually be linked to your expertise. That can be specific (“Ayyan is great at making decisions about back-end architecture.”) or much broader (“Jorge just seems to get game dev and understand how things should work.”) In both cases, as long as you’re operating in your area of credibility, you will have an increased ability to “manage up” the hierarchy. 

Be careful with credibility when you have it. Swing it around like a club and you’ll likely pop yourself in the head at some point and lose it, and plenty of people will be happy to see you fall.

Relationship

OK, so another technique for managing up is to develop relationships with people.

When many people hear this, they think about someone playing politics, engaging in the influence game, and generally being shady. That’s probably because they’ve seen or heard of that happening. But building relationships isn't definitionally immoral, especially when you combine a strong relationship with real trust.

Here’s the thing: a person who is incredibly reliable and highly reputable (has trust and credibility) but who gets on everyone’s nerves through rudeness, aggression, or some other offensive trait is in an unstable position. They are able to influence change, but they will be resented for it. People will want that individual to fail and may even take steps to make that happen.

You don’t want to be in that unstable position. It’s better to be on good terms with the people around you and especially those above you. This means building trust for sure, but it also means developing a relationship with them where you seek to understand them, demonstrate empathy, and help them out. 

Developing good relationships is not exactly the same as making friends. They may overlap, but you can have great working relationships with people without needing to have everyone calling each other “friends,” and those effective relationships do lead to you being able to suggest things and manage up much more easily. 

Some simple ways to build relationships are to… spend time with people. Try to get to know them. Understand who they are by listening well. If you can help them, do so. Share memes, figure out what they like or find funny and connect with them around those things. Meet them where they are at and demonstrate that you care. Spend time with them.

As a guideline, the more time you spend with someone without it being confrontational, the more you’ll develop a relationship with them. I’ve seen this over and over. Just spending time with people leads to a relationship that enhances or even replaces the professional trust or credibility they have in you.

The scary thing about relationships: you don’t need to be reliably good at your job or good at creating strong outcomes to develop a friendship with someone. Playing games with them, sharing hobbies, listening to them and providing encouragement, demonstrating your appreciation and like of them, going to lunches and being a good conversationalist, all of these things will build a strong relationship.

Now, if you’re trying to become friends only to take advantage of the relationship, most of the time you’ll get found out. This is especially true if it’s a regular pattern with many people. It’s not likely to end well for you. We have a whole slew of names for people like this, such as “suckups” and “brown nosers.”

BUT, some people are quite good at developing these fake friendships for their own benefit and manage to pull it off at scale. From the outside, you may not like that person. Usually it doesn’t matter, because if they’ve succeeded they are protected through the relationships they’ve already developed.

This is the great strength and weakness of relationship building. Strong relationships allow someone to end up in a position of authority with a lot of influence. If you’ve got great relationships with all your stakeholders, you can move mountains. I’ve seen highly effective leaders on teams pull this off and it can make everything so much easier for the team.

Simultaneously, building relationship currency doesn’t require competence or character. If you can develop strong relationships you can get a pass on capability and the relationships you have will overcome any lack of credibility or trust that you would be unable to earn.

The real kicker? The people I’ve seen in that position usually truly believe they deserve the position they are in and believe they are highly competent, despite sometimes massive evidence to the contrary. They are not insincere. They are victims of their own relationship building skills, and by extension so is everyone else.

Conclusion

OK, so there you have it. Three currencies that allow you to manage up. 

Trust is harder to build but I find it more resilient. Unfortunately, it requires relatively direct exposure to accumulate.

Credibility is very powerful but also fragile, and can be seen as threatening. If you become credible (or show up credible), you can move a lot of stuff quickly, and it scales well. Just don’t mess up.

Relationship is the trump card and a two-edged sword. I see it as the most powerful but also the cause of many poor leaders in positions of significant authority. Used well, it can smooth the road for teams and bypass clunky bureaucracies with a short conversation.

As you seek to manage up in your organization, an honest question to ask about the people you are hoping to influence:

• Does this senior leader trust me? If so, how much and in what ways?

• Am I viewed as credible in this organization or to this senior leader?

• How strong is my relationship with them?

There are techniques to use to manage up, things like understanding what the leaders want and helping them get there, various negotiation techniques, or using coalition building to create momentum.

I wanted to take a different approach to thinking about managing up. The techniques are out there and may work, so don’t ignore them.

But if you’re not trusted, credible, or in a strong working relationship, it doesn’t matter. To “manage up” in a way that causes real change requires cashing in one or more of these currencies. If you’re at a zero bank balance (or worse, a negative balance), all the fancy techniques in the world will get you nowhere.

In all organizations, managing up will usually take time and effort. You’re going to the people who have authority over you and attempting to drive change. Healthier organizations (and leaders) make this easier - sometimes shockingly so. But it’s always harder than peer to peer relationships or influencing those you have explicit authority over.

So take stock, think about how much of each currency you have in the bank, and spend wisely.

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