One of the easiest mistakes to make as a leader is to forget how long you have already been thinking. An idea arrives, you turn it over for weeks, question it, talk it through with a few people, solve some of its obvious problems and gradually reach the point where it feels clear. Then you present it to everyone else and wonder why they do not immediately see what you see. From your perspective, you have explained the destination. From theirs, you have appeared halfway through a conversation they did not know was happening.
I learned that fairly painfully while working in Germany. We were introducing a new way of starting the working day, influenced partly by conversations I had already had with colleagues who had experience of the approach. In my head, the reasoning had developed over time. Some other members of the team had not been part of any of that thinking. I effectively presented them with the result and then interpreted some of their response as resistance. Looking back, their reaction was hardly surprising. They were not resisting a journey we had taken together. I had started travelling without them and was now asking why they were not beside me.
The mistake became more obvious because I did not stop. Once I realised that people were behind the thinking, I tried to catch them up while continuing to move forward. At that stage of my leadership, stopping did not really feel like a legitimate option. Continuing felt decisive. Pausing felt as though I might be losing momentum. With hindsight, the more confident decision would probably have been to stop, go back and rebuild enough understanding before moving again. Sometimes leadership is not about maintaining momentum. Sometimes it is about recognising that the momentum is carrying you away from the people you need with you.
There was a similar lesson in a much bigger structural decision. I believed the organisation needed an additional senior leadership role. It was growing quickly, the existing structures were being outgrown and there was too great a gap between me and the wider team. At executive level, the need made sense. To many colleagues, however, what they saw was another management position being created when money could have been spent elsewhere. Again, I had access to the problem that had produced the decision. They were largely presented with the decision itself. I still believe the role was needed. The mistake was assuming that because the decision was mine to make, the thinking behind it did not need to be shared more effectively.
That distinction matters. Involvement does not guarantee buy-in, and leaders should be wary of pretending that every decision is democratic when it is not. Sometimes responsibility genuinely sits with a particular role or group. But participation and decision rights are not the same thing. People can be brought into the problem without being given a veto over the solution. They can understand the pressures, alternatives and trade-offs even when the final decision remains elsewhere. Involvement may not create agreement. What it can do is reduce unnecessary resistance and improve the quality of the conversation around a decision.
Germany became an extraordinary learning environment for me because it challenged assumptions that had survived several previous organisations and countries. Much of my earlier experience had been relatively top down. In some contexts, people were also less likely to challenge someone in authority openly. That can be deceptively comfortable for a leader. If people do what you ask, it is easy to conclude that you have influenced them successfully. But compliance is not the same as agreement. People can accept a decision, carry it out and then complain about it somewhere you cannot hear them. Silence can look remarkably like buy-in when you are the person at the top.
Germany made that much harder to ignore. Consultation, different expectations around participation and structures such as works councils meant that simply arriving with an approach that had worked elsewhere was not enough. In retrospect, that was exactly what I needed. I had accumulated evidence that certain ways of leading could produce results, but I had been too ready to treat contextual success as proof of a universally good approach. The absence of challenge in one culture had sometimes reinforced habits that another culture immediately questioned.
That experience changed the way I think about fresh eyes. I want new people to bring their previous experience. It would be absurd to recruit capable people and then ask them to forget everything they have learned. But experience should widen the possibilities we consider, not close the discussion. “At my last organisation, we did it this way” is useful information. It is not, by itself, an argument. The more useful questions are what would this improve here, why would it improve it here, and what part are you prepared to play in making it work? Context gets a vote.
I have been on the other side of that conversation too. In a later role, someone brought me an idea that I thought had real potential. I did not simply approve it because I liked it, nor dismiss it because it had come from elsewhere. I brought another colleague into a follow-up conversation, deliberately someone whose perspective differed from mine. They could test what I was seeing from another angle. In the end, they agreed that the idea had merit. What mattered was not that my first reaction had been validated. The idea had survived contact with another perspective.
That is increasingly how I think about influence. It is often described as the ability to bring people with you, which is certainly part of leadership. But there is something incomplete about a model in which influence travels only one way. If I expect other people to remain open to my reasoning, I have to remain open to theirs. If I want them to change their minds when the evidence warrants it, they need to see that I can do the same. Otherwise, an invitation to challenge me is little more than theatre.
I have told teams explicitly that I do not want people saying yes to me all the time. But saying that is the easy part. Leaders frequently say that their door is always open, that challenge is welcome and that they want honest feedback. People judge those claims by what happens afterwards. If somebody challenges a decision and I become defensive, dismissive or visibly irritated, they have learned something much more powerful than anything I said about openness. They may still come through the door next time, but perhaps with a safer subject. Eventually they may stop coming at all.
That was something experience had to teach me. Earlier in my career, I could be far too vocal with my immediate thoughts and feelings. I had also completed a Master’s degree shortly before taking on my first significant senior leadership role. I had plenty of ideas about leadership and professional development. What I did not yet have was the same depth of experience in living those ideas when somebody was standing in front of me disagreeing with them. It is possible to believe intellectually in challenge while still reacting badly when challenge becomes personal. The test of an open culture is not whether the leader says disagreement is allowed. It is whether people have watched disagreement happen safely.
There is a balance. People do not want a leader who changes direction every time somebody raises an objection. Being influenceable is not the same as being indecisive. Leaders still have to make decisions, sometimes unpopular ones, and there will be occasions when I hear a challenge, respect it and still decide not to change course. Over time, the people I have worked with most closely have become comfortable with that. They know they can question me without the relationship being damaged, but they also know that being heard does not guarantee getting the answer they want. Mutual respect has to survive both outcomes.
When somebody does change my mind, I think it is important to say so. There is no particular virtue in pretending that the revised decision was mine all along. Admitting that another person’s reasoning was better does not automatically weaken authority. Used honestly, it can strengthen the credibility of future decisions because people know the conclusion was not protected merely because it belonged to the leader. Of course, constant reversals create a different problem. Nobody wants to follow somebody who cannot decide. But there is a considerable distance between thoughtful revision and habitual flip-flopping.
Influence also depends on knowing when not to use it. Earlier in my leadership, I probably underestimated how much relationships remember. I now see little value in fighting equally hard for everything. If another part of an organisation carries most of the consequences of a scheduling decision or a change to a shared information system, I may have a preference without needing that preference to prevail. Sometimes the right thing to do is let the people most affected have greater weight and then genuinely support the outcome.
That is not quite the same as keeping a ledger of favours. I do not want leadership relationships reduced to, “I gave you that, so now you owe me this.” But there is a form of reciprocity in healthy senior teams. If I have demonstrated that I can compromise when something matters more to you than it does to me, then when a decision has major consequences for my area, I hope you will approach it with the same organisational generosity. Influence is partly built through people learning that you do not insist on winning simply because you can.
I have worked with leaders who fight relentlessly for their own area, and there is something admirable in that. People deserve leaders who will advocate for them. The difficulty comes when everything becomes a battle. If every issue is presented as critical, colleagues eventually lose the ability to distinguish genuine principle from preference. It can also reveal a more serious problem: perhaps the leadership team is not really operating as a team at all, but as representatives of competing territories. At some point I find myself wanting to ask, “Help me understand why you have to fight for absolutely everything. Are we actually trying to reach the same destination?”
Organisational politics sits uncomfortably inside that conversation. I am not interested in proving that my area is better than somebody else’s or advertising myself simply to establish status. I would rather spend the energy trying to make the work good than telling everybody how good it is. But organisations contain competing priorities, limited resources, personalities, histories and relationships. Pretending politics does not exist does not make leadership purer. It simply makes us less conscious of the forces already affecting decisions.
There is a line, though, and I do not think it is always perfectly clear. I have occasionally said to someone, in effect, “This is not the decision I would have made, but I will support it.” That can have an interesting effect. Once somebody knows the decision is genuinely theirs, they may go through hell or high water to make it succeed. Their ownership increases. There is also, if I am being candid, a slightly underhand element to recognising that effect and using it deliberately. If the decision fails, my original judgement may appear vindicated. If it succeeds, the organisation wins and the other person has demonstrated that their judgement was better than mine. Used sparingly and accompanied by genuine support, that can create autonomy. Used cynically, it could become manipulation.
The uncomfortable part of leadership is that motives are rarely completely pure. I can be embarrassed that I was wrong and still be genuinely pleased that somebody else was right. I can support another person’s decision while retaining doubts about it. I can choose not to fight an issue partly because I believe it is the right organisational choice and partly because I know relationships have memories. The answer is not to pretend ego and politics disappear when we become experienced leaders. It is to become conscious enough of them that they do not quietly take control.
I have also learned that refusing to play status games carries a cost. Years ago, an additional responsibility became available around leading professional development across an organisation. There was no extra pay and it meant more work, but I wanted the opportunity. I was passed over for somebody who had been much more effective at communicating their capability to the person making the decision, and I became their understudy. I supported them. I would still support them if I could replay the situation. But much of what followed was discussion rather than action, while I and several colleagues began doing practical work alongside it because we felt something actually needed to happen.
Interestingly, I still do not think the lesson is that I should have promoted myself more aggressively. If I could return to that moment, I would be more likely to ask the leader, “Help me understand why I wasn’t given the opportunity.” I would want to understand the judgement rather than kick up a fuss about the outcome. And once the decision had been made, I would still support the person appointed. What I might do differently is challenge harder when talking begins to substitute for doing. Losing the role matters less to me than watching an organisation fail to move.
That is probably why influence, for me, has become less about winning. Winning an argument can produce compliance without commitment. Winning a role can produce status without impact. Getting your preferred decision can leave relationships weaker than before. Conversely, giving way does not mean you have been defeated, and changing your mind does not mean somebody has taken authority away from you. The more useful question is what happens next. Does the decision improve something? Do people understand enough to act? Can the relationship withstand disagreement? Is there room for better information to alter the course?
There is a personal side to this that I have had to acknowledge as well. I do not take compliments particularly easily. Recently I opened an old notebook while looking for some spare paper and found several letters and notes from people at a previous organisation. I had thought I had thrown them away. My wife had kept them. Reading them again was unexpectedly humbling. People had written about ways I had supported them, helped them develop or improved aspects of the organisation. My instinct still tried to minimise some of it: perhaps they were simply being kind. Then another part of me had to acknowledge the obvious. People do not generally sit down, put pen to paper and write those things unless they mean something.
There is a strange connection to influence in that. We can be wary of other people’s negative judgements while being equally unwilling to accept their positive ones. We can insist that we do not want to prove ourselves and then make our contribution unnecessarily invisible. I still have little appetite for performative self promotion, but perhaps there is a difference between demanding recognition and being willing to recognise evidence of your own impact. Influence does not require shouting about yourself. Nor does humility require pretending that your work has made no difference.
The strongest leadership relationships I have experienced eventually reach a point where influence becomes genuinely reciprocal. People will challenge a decision not because they are trying to undermine the leader, but because they trust the relationship enough to disagree. The leader can hear that challenge without treating it as disloyalty. Sometimes the challenge changes the decision. Sometimes it does not. Either way, people leave knowing that their contribution was considered rather than merely tolerated.
That, to me, is a much more demanding form of influence than persuasion. It requires leaders to bring people through enough of their thinking that confusion is not casually labelled resistance. It requires us to know when our preference matters and when somebody else’s should carry more weight. It asks us to welcome experience without worshipping precedent, to recognise politics without becoming consumed by it, and to create enough safety that disagreement reaches us before it disappears into corridors and private conversations.
A leader should be able to influence people. I still think leadership involves inspiring people towards a common goal. But the older I get, the less impressed I am by influence that only works in one direction. If everybody around me can be moved by my thinking but nobody can move mine, that is not evidence of exceptional leadership. It may simply mean I have become very difficult to challenge.
Perhaps the better test is not how often people follow our ideas, but whether thoughtful people still believe it is worth bringing us theirs. When they do, we do not have to agree. We do not have to surrender the decision. But we should remain capable of hearing something that changes our mind. The moment a leader becomes impossible to influence may also be the moment their own influence begins to lose its value.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.