“Why should we listen to you?” the grizzled IT director asked bluntly, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve been here three weeks. Some of us have been running these systems for fifteen years.”
Twenty faces turned to watch my response. As the consultant brought in to lead a critical transformation programme, I had responsibility for outcomes but absolutely no authority over the people who would determine success or failure.
It was a fair question—one that gets to the heart of the consultant’s paradox. We’re hired to drive significant change within organisations where we have no formal power, no place on the org chart, and often, as this IT director pointedly noted, far less institutional knowledge than the people we’re trying to influence.
Welcome to the fifth instalment of “The Unwritten Playbook,” where I’m sharing the consulting truths they don’t teach you in formal training. Today, we’re exploring perhaps the most crucial consulting skill: how to lead effectively when you have responsibility without authority.
One of the most liberating realisations in my consulting career came when I understood that formal authority—the kind that comes with a title and direct reports—is far less powerful than it appears.
I’ve watched senior executives issue directives that were quietly ignored. I’ve seen CEOs announce transformations that never materialised beyond the town hall meeting. Conversely, I’ve witnessed junior staff members with no formal authority drive substantial change through their influence skills.
The authority illusion persists because:
Organisational charts measure reporting lines, not influence flows
→ Who someone reports to rarely determines who they actually listen to
→ Expertise and trust often trump positional authority
Compliance is not commitment
→ Authority can compel behaviour but not engagement
→ Forced actions without buy-in typically produce malicious compliance
Authority creates resistance
→ Formal directives often trigger defensive reactions
→ The more authority is asserted, the more creative the resistance becomes
Authority is contextual
→ Most power is domain-specific (technical, business, political)
→ Authority in one domain rarely transfers effectively to others
I once consulted for a manufacturing firm where the CIO issued a mandate for all departments to adopt a new enterprise system. Six months later, most departments had nominally “implemented” the system—but continued to run parallel shadow processes that rendered the official system a glorified data entry exercise. Authority had produced compliance without commitment.
Unwritten Rule 1️⃣: The most effective leaders in organisations are not necessarily those with the most impressive titles, but those with the most extensive influence networks.
If authority is an overvalued asset, what alternative currencies can consultants use to influence outcomes? This question led me to develop what I call the “influence currency” framework—the five forms of capital consultants can accumulate and spend.
Expertise Capital
→ Built through: Demonstrating relevant knowledge, solving problems, offering insights
→ Spent by: Providing guidance, offering options, explaining implications
→ Strengthened when: Your expertise helps others succeed
→ Depleted when: You overstate your knowledge or apply it inappropriately
Relationship Capital
→ Built through: Active listening, demonstrating empathy, following through on commitments
→ Spent by: Asking for support, requesting information, seeking advocacy
→ Strengthened when: You invest in others’ success without immediate return
→ Depleted when: You take more than you give or violate trust
Process Capital
→ Built through: Creating clarity, facilitating effectively, managing complexity
→ Spent by: Defining approaches, establishing frameworks, structuring decisions
→ Strengthened when: Your processes make progress visible and inclusive
→ Depleted when: Your processes become bureaucratic or self-serving
Outcome Capital
→ Built through: Delivering results, creating business value, solving meaningful problems
→ Spent by: Setting direction, raising standards, challenging the status quo
→ Strengthened when: You connect actions to meaningful outcomes
→ Depleted when: You prioritise activity over impact
Political Capital
→ Built through: Understanding stakeholder motivations, aligning with strategic priorities
→ Spent by: Navigating resistance, securing resources, gaining senior support
→ Strengthened when: You help others achieve their objectives alongside yours
→ Depleted when: You create win-lose situations or ignore political realities
The art of influence is knowing which currency to use in which situation. With the sceptical IT director I mentioned earlier, I built expertise capital by asking thoughtful questions about their systems before suggesting changes. I accumulated relationship capital by acknowledging their team’s historical achievements. Only then could I spend outcome capital by painting a compelling picture of future benefits.
Unwritten Rule 2️⃣: Consultants without authority must consciously build and strategically spend multiple forms of influence currency.
To influence effectively, you must first understand how decisions actually flow through an organisation—which is rarely how they’re supposed to flow on paper.
On a government transformation programme, I spent my first three weeks creating a decision map that revealed:
This mapping exercise completely changed my influence strategy, shifting focus from formal committee presentations to the informal networks where decisions were actually shaped.
To create your own decision map:
Identify the critical decision types for your project
→ Technical approach decisions
→ Resource allocation decisions
→ Timeline/priority decisions
→ Scope change decisions
→ Risk acceptance decisions
For each type, document the formal and informal processes
→ Who initiates
→ Who consults
→ Who influences
→ Who decides
→ Who ratifies
→ Who implements
Look for patterns across recent similar decisions
→ Where did they originate?
→ Where did they stall?
→ Where were they modified?
→ Who had effective veto power?
Identify the decision accelerators and blockers
→ Which individuals can move decisions forward?
→ Which groups can delay or derail decisions?
→ What unstated criteria determine outcomes?
The resulting map becomes your influence navigation system, showing where to invest your time and which relationships to prioritise. Often, the most important person to influence isn’t the highest-ranking, but the one with the most connections to other decision nodes.
Unwritten Rule 3️⃣: Formal decision processes tell you who approves decisions; informal networks tell you who shapes them. Focus your influence efforts on the latter.
One of the most common sources of project failure is unclear decision rights. People wait for approvals no one is authorised to give. Decisions made in meetings get unmade afterwards. Multiple groups believe they have final say over the same issues.
The RAPID framework (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) creates clarity without challenging the existing authority structure. Rather than reorganising power, it simply makes existing power flows explicit.
I introduced RAPID to a financial services client where decision paralysis was delaying a critical system replacement. The executive team believed they were empowering their managers to make decisions, while the managers were waiting for executive approval. Meanwhile, compliance and risk teams weren’t clear on when they had veto rights versus advisory input.
The breakthrough came when we visualised the current decision process for system changes:
By explicitly mapping who had which role in which types of decisions, we created clarity without directly challenging anyone’s authority. The CIO could still be the final decision-maker, but everyone understood what that meant and didn’t mean.
The power of RAPID is that it feels like a process improvement rather than a power redistribution, making it palatable even in highly political environments.
Unwritten Rule 4️⃣: Unclear decision rights cause more project failures than technical issues. Clarify who plays which role without challenging the underlying authority structure.
While authority relies primarily on compliance, influence works through multiple channels. Research in social psychology has identified six primary influence strategies that work without formal authority:
Rational Persuasion
→ Leveraging data, logic, and evidence
→ Most effective with: Analytical personalities, technical experts, risk-focused stakeholders
→ Example technique: “The three key factors that support this approach are…”
Inspirational Appeal
→ Connecting to values, aspirations, and purpose
→ Most effective with: Senior leaders, vision-focused stakeholders, change champions
→ Example technique: “This approach allows us to finally deliver the customer experience we’ve always aspired to…”
Consultation
→ Involving others in shaping the approach
→ Most effective with: Implementation teams, detail-oriented stakeholders, potential resistors
→ Example technique: “Before finalising this, I’d like to get your input on how this would work in practice…”
Relationship Building
→ Creating trust and personal connection
→ Most effective with: Long-term stakeholders, relationship-oriented cultures, influence gatekeepers
→ Example technique: “I understand this is challenging given what happened with the last project. What would make you comfortable this time?”
Exchange
→ Finding mutual benefit through trading value
→ Most effective with: Resource controllers, pragmatic stakeholders, competing priorities
→ Example technique: “If we prioritise this component first, how could we help address your department’s reporting needs?”
Coalition Building
→ Mobilising support from multiple stakeholders
→ Most effective with: Distributed decision environments, consensus cultures, complex stakeholder landscapes
→ Example technique: “Both the operations team and finance have identified this as their top priority…”
The most skilled influencers adapt their approach to the specific stakeholder and context. When I work with technical teams, I lead with rational persuasion. With executives, I emphasise inspirational appeals tied to strategic goals. With potential resistors, consultation often defuses opposition before it forms.
On a particularly challenging healthcare project, I mapped each key stakeholder to their preferred influence channel:
This targeted approach helped secure support across diverse stakeholder groups without relying on formal authority.
Unwritten Rule 5️⃣: Match your influence strategy to the stakeholder’s values, thinking style, and position. The right approach with the wrong person is still the wrong approach.
The ultimate form of influence without authority comes from making yourself indispensable by solving problems that nobody else can or will address.
I learned this lesson from a junior consultant who had remarkable influence despite her lack of seniority. While the rest of us focused on our assigned workstreams, she consistently identified and solved integration problems that fell between defined responsibilities. She became the unofficial “fixer” that everyone—including executives—turned to when facing complex challenges.
To position yourself as indispensable:
Identify the gaps between formal responsibilities
→ Look for problems that cross organisational boundaries
→ Pay attention to issues everyone complains about but no one addresses
→ Notice the “white space” in project plans where assumptions hide
Develop integrative expertise
→ Build knowledge that connects technical and business domains
→ Learn the languages of different specialisations
→ Understand how systems interact, not just how they function individually
Cultivate your unique contribution
→ What perspective do you bring that others don’t?
→ What problems are you particularly good at solving?
→ What difficult conversations can you facilitate that others avoid?
Create visibility for “invisible” problems
→ Articulate unspoken risks or assumptions
→ Connect symptoms to systemic causes
→ Translate between stakeholder viewpoints
Deliver disproportionate value in unexpected areas
→ Solve small but irritating problems that create goodwill
→ Produce insights that help others succeed
→ Create tools or frameworks that outlast your involvement
On a troubled SAP implementation, I built influence not through my assigned role leading the technical workstream, but by creating a cross-functional issue resolution process that no one had asked for but everyone needed. This unofficial contribution became more valuable than my formal deliverables, creating influence that extended far beyond my nominal responsibility.
Unwritten Rule 6️⃣: Authority comes from above, but indispensability grows from below—by solving problems others can’t or won’t address.
Sometimes the most effective leadership is invisible. The highest form of influence is when others believe the ideas were theirs all along.
I worked with a masterful consultant who never presented his own ideas directly. Instead, he would say, “I was thinking about what John mentioned last week…” or “Building on Sarah’s approach…” He would carefully seed concepts in one-on-one conversations, then publicly attribute elements to different stakeholders when presenting the synthesised solution.
The art of stealth leadership includes:
Planting seeds rather than fully-grown plants
→ Share partial ideas that others can complete
→ Ask leading questions that guide thinking
→ Offer options rather than recommendations
Distributing ownership broadly
→ Give credit generously and specifically
→ Create opportunities for others to contribute visibly
→ Position yourself as the integrator, not the originator
Leading from behind
→ Create frameworks for others to fill
→ Facilitate rather than direct
→ Ask the questions that need asking
Making others the heroes
→ Ensure key stakeholders receive recognition
→ Prepare others to present successfully
→ Focus attention on team achievements, not your contribution
The most elegant use of stealth leadership I’ve witnessed was during a contentious ERP implementation. The lead consultant never once directly advocated for her preferred approach. Instead, she created a series of workshops where stakeholders “discovered” the solution she had envisioned from the beginning—but with full buy-in because they believed they had created it themselves.
Unwritten Rule 7️⃣: The most powerful influence often leaves no fingerprints. True leadership success is when others don’t need to be reminded who led them.
Let me share a real example that integrates these principles:
I joined a government digital transformation programme that was significantly behind schedule and facing potential cancellation. As an external consultant with no formal authority, I needed to influence a complex stakeholder environment that included:
Rather than pushing my recommendations immediately, I applied systematic influence:
First, I created a decision map
→ Identified the true decision-makers (not the nominal ones)
→ Mapped the informal influence networks
→ Located the respected voices in each stakeholder group
Next, I built targeted influence currency
→ With technical teams: Expertise currency through thoughtful questions
→ With programme leadership: Process currency by facilitating better governance
→ With business owners: Relationship currency through dedicated listening sessions
→ With governance board: Outcome currency by refocusing on business value
Then, I applied tailored influence strategies
→ For analytical stakeholders: Rational persuasion with data on current trajectory
→ For operational teams: Consultation on implementation challenges
→ For senior leaders: Inspirational appeal to original programme vision
→ For resistant middle management: Exchange that addressed their pain points
Finally, I practised stealth leadership
→ Created a collaborative recovery planning process
→ Ensured each stakeholder group contributed visibly
→ Positioned myself as integrator rather than saviour
→ Distributed credit for the turnaround widely
The programme successfully reset without finger-pointing or dramatic personnel changes. Within three months, we had rebuilt confidence and established a new baseline for delivery. Key stakeholders who had been calling for cancellation became advocates for the refreshed approach—and most believed the solution had emerged from their collective expertise rather than from external intervention.
Leadership without authority isn’t just a consulting skill—it’s the future of leadership itself. As organisations become more networked and less hierarchical, the ability to influence across boundaries becomes more valuable than the ability to direct from above.
For consultants, this shift plays to our natural advantages. We’ve always operated without formal authority, relying instead on expertise, relationships, and the value we create. The techniques that once seemed like compensatory skills for our lack of authority are now the primary toolkit for modern leadership.
The most successful consultants I’ve known share a paradoxical quality: they drive significant change while leaving minimal evidence of their personal influence. They don’t need to be the loudest voice or the named authority. They measure their success not by how indispensable they become, but by how effectively the organisation can sustain positive change after they leave.
As you develop your consulting career, invest consciously in your influence capabilities. Map decision networks, build diverse influence currencies, tailor your approach to different stakeholders, and practice the art of invisible leadership. These skills will serve you not just in consulting, but in any leadership role you may take on.
In the next post in this series, I’ll explore “The Modern Consultant’s Arsenal: Tools, Techniques and AI Superpowers”—the unwritten rules of working smarter with the technologies and methods that multiply your effectiveness.
Until then, remember that true influence isn’t measured by how many people do what you tell them, but by how many important changes happen because you were there.
Photo by rob walsh on Unsplash
