One executive once described his frustration to me this way: “If I’m not chasing them, nothing moves.”
He had capable people. He had explained the priorities, held meetings, and followed up more times than he could count. Yet projects slowed whenever he turned his attention elsewhere. Deadlines became negotiable. Decisions waited. Problems returned to his desk.
From where he stood, the answer seemed obvious: his people lacked initiative.
Perhaps they did. But I have learned not to accept that explanation too quickly.
Sometimes people wait because waiting is what the leader has trained them to do. The leader asks them to take ownership, then changes their decisions. He tells them to act, then requires his approval at every important step. He asks for ideas, but the meeting ends with everyone using his idea anyway.
Eventually, capable people become careful people. They learn that the safest move is to wait for the boss.
Authority can make people act while you are watching. Influence is revealed when they continue making the right moves after you leave. The executive’s complaint appears on the original version of my Influencer’s Playbook page, but the deeper problem is larger than one workshop: leaders can become the force that moves everything and, without meaning to, the reason nothing moves without them.
Influence Is What Happens When You Are Not in the Room
I saw another side of influence in my own company through an employee I will call Rose.
Rose had earned two degrees from a respected Philippine university. She could do many things well. She could have become a trainer, writer, HR professional, manager, or almost anything else a small company needed.
That created a tempting problem for me. Because Rose was capable, I could have filled her day with tasks. She could prepare documents, organise files, photocopy materials, assist during seminars, respond to inquiries, and make sure I had what I needed before meeting a client.
She would have remained busy, and I could have called her dependable.
But at that time, our company had a more urgent problem. Prospective customers would inquire and then disappear.
During our early years, I thought we could compete by offering more training programs. If another company offered thirty programs, I wanted us to offer forty. We kept showing people everything we could teach without first understanding what mattered to them.
So I changed the role I wanted Rose to play.
I asked her to focus on three contributions. She would immerse herself in the customer’s world, advocate for the customer inside our company, and continue building the relationship whether the first inquiry became a sale or not.
That clarity changed how I developed her. She learned to research an organisation before we met its leaders. She studied its website, industry, people, language, and concerns. She learned to enter conversations prepared, ask the next useful question, and bring the customer’s real needs back to us.
Rose did not need to sell hard. Her preparation created credibility.
Sometimes customers became more interested in meeting me because Rose had already raised their expectations. They seemed to think, “If Jef’s employee understands us this well, perhaps Jef will understand us too.”
I had not entered the room yet, but Rose’s work was already influencing how the customer saw us.
That is influence.
It is not merely the ability to give a stirring speech or persuade someone during a meeting. Influence travels through the clarity you create, the standards you model, the questions you teach people to ask, and the judgement they use when you are absent.
The Leader Who Has Every Answer Creates More Questions
Many leaders become indispensable by accident.
They know the business well. They can see problems earlier than others. They make fast decisions and often rescue the team when work begins to fail. Their competence earns trust, so people keep bringing problems to them.
At first, this feels like influence. Everyone seeks the leader’s opinion. Nothing important happens without consultation. The leader is invited to every meeting and copied on every message.
But being needed is not always the same as being influential.
A leader who supplies every answer may prevent other people from developing judgement. A leader who corrects every imperfect move may teach people that initiative is risky. A leader who steps in whenever the team struggles may solve today’s problem while preserving tomorrow’s dependence.
The team does not become stronger merely because it has access to a strong leader. It becomes stronger when the leader’s way of seeing, choosing, and acting becomes available to others.
That was the part I missed with Rose.
I had clarified the contribution and helped her succeed, but I did not capture the practices behind her success well enough. I did not document the questions she asked, the routines she followed, the information she collected, or the way she represented the customer inside our company.
When Rose eventually left, too much of that capability left with her.
I had influenced one talented person. I had not yet built influence into the organisation.
Context Creates Better Decisions Than Constant Control
Netflix uses the phrase context, not control in describing how its leaders should work. The principle does not mean managers disappear and leave employees to guess. Netflix explicitly says it should not be confused with hands-off management. Leaders are expected to give teams the information and clarity needed to exercise sound judgement. You can read the principle in Netflix’s official culture memo.
That distinction is useful far beyond Netflix.
Control tells people what to do in one situation. Context helps them decide what to do when the exact situation changes.
Suppose a manager says, “Do not give a customer a refund without my approval.” The instruction is clear, but every unusual case must now return to the manager.
Context would go further. The manager might explain which customers the company most needs to protect, which problems qualify for immediate recovery, how much can be offered without approval, and when a larger risk must be escalated.
Now employees have boundaries, not chains.
They can move because they understand the win, the risks, and the limits of their authority. The manager remains accountable, but no longer needs to become the answer to every small variation.
This is what influence looks like in daily work. People are not merely following the leader’s last instruction. They are using the leader’s direction to make the next sound decision.
Clarity Comes Before Charisma
Influence is often taught as a communication skill. Leaders learn how to speak with confidence, tell stories, build rapport, read the room, and frame persuasive messages.
Those skills can help. A leader who cannot explain an idea will struggle to build support for it.
But people may admire a charismatic leader and still have no idea what to do on Monday.
“Take ownership” sounds inspiring, but what does ownership look like when two departments are waiting for each other? “Move faster” creates urgency, but which approval can the team remove? “Think like an owner” sounds powerful, but what trade-offs is the employee allowed to make?
Clarity gives influence somewhere to land.
People need to know what the team is trying to win, which decisions they own, what boundaries they must respect, and what evidence should cause them to reconsider. When these are unclear, follow-up becomes the leader’s substitute for direction.
The leader keeps chasing because the original message did not travel far enough into the work.
Trust Requires Room to Act
Leaders often say they trust their people while keeping every meaningful decision.
They delegate the task but keep the judgement. They allow someone to prepare the recommendation but reserve the right to rewrite it completely. They ask employees to solve the problem, yet require approval for every step that could actually solve it.
That is not trust. It is supervised assistance.
Real trust gives people a field in which they can act. The field may be small at first. A new supervisor may receive authority over one kind of customer recovery, one recurring schedule issue, or one part of a project. The leader can define the boundaries, agree on checkpoints, and review the result without taking the decision back.
This creates what I call a small bet. The employee gets a genuine chance to exercise judgement, while the organisation limits unnecessary risk.
When the person succeeds, the leader can expand the field. When the person struggles, the leader can coach the decision without turning every mistake into proof that delegation was a bad idea.
Influence grows through these repeated experiences. People begin to understand not only what the leader wants but how responsible action feels.
CEOs Must Stop Becoming the Company’s Fastest Bottleneck
A founder or CEO can become the organisation’s fastest problem-solver and its biggest bottleneck at the same time.
When every important decision returns to the top, the company can move only as quickly as one person can review, correct, and approve. The CEO may work harder each year while the organisation becomes less able to move independently.
The answer is not for the CEO to care less. It is to transfer more context.
Which customers matter most? What promises must never be broken? Which numbers guide the trade-offs? What decisions belong to business-unit leaders? What kind of mistake is acceptable during a controlled experiment, and what risk must always be escalated?
These are not motivational statements. They are decision architecture.
The CEO’s influence becomes stronger when people can carry the company’s intent into choices the CEO will never personally see. A business begins to scale when sound judgement is no longer located in only one chair.
HR Must Develop Influence Inside Real Situations
HR can easily reduce influence to executive presence, communication style, stakeholder management, or persuasion techniques. Those capabilities matter, but they are not enough.
Leadership development should place managers inside the moments where dependence is created. A team is waiting for a decision. Two departments disagree about ownership. An employee brings a problem the manager could solve in thirty seconds. A customer request falls outside the usual process.
What does the manager do?
Does she provide the answer, or help the employee see the decision? Does she give enough context, or hide behind “use your judgement”? Does she create room to act, or take the work back at the first sign of difficulty?
These situations reveal more about influence than a personality assessment.
The proof should not be that managers felt more confident after the program. The stronger proof is that their teams made better decisions with less chasing, fewer unnecessary approvals, and clearer ownership.
Trainers Must Go Beyond Persuasion Techniques
Trainers face the same challenge.
We can fill a workshop with influence models, communication styles, storytelling formulas, and methods for gaining agreement. Participants may enjoy the program and leave with several useful techniques.
But techniques do not automatically change a relationship built around dependence.
A stronger session begins with a real case: “My team will not move unless I follow up.” Instead of immediately teaching persuasion, examine what happens before the follow-up becomes necessary.
Was the desired result clear? Did the person own the decision or only the task? Did the leader provide useful boundaries? What happened the last time someone took initiative and chose differently from the boss?
The answers may reveal that the leader does not need a more persuasive message. The leader may need to stop sending two conflicting messages: “Take ownership” and “Do it exactly as I would.”
Practical leadership training should help leaders see that pattern, practise a different response, and return to work with a play they can use. The goal is not simply to make leaders more convincing. It is to help them create clarity, trust, and conditions in which other people can act responsibly.
Change Your Questions
The executive began with a question many leaders ask: “Why won’t they move unless I chase them?”
That question places the whole problem inside the team.
A more useful set of questions begins with the leader’s contribution. What have I made unclear? Which decision have I refused to release? What happened the last time someone acted without me? Have I given people the context to judge, or only instructions to obey?
These questions do not excuse poor performance. Leaders must still address people who avoid responsibility, ignore agreements, or fail to follow through. But before adding another reminder, meeting, or motivational speech, a leader should examine whether the organisation has made dependence the safest way to work.
Authority can produce movement while you are present. Influence creates enough clarity, judgement, and ownership for the right movement to continue when you are gone. That is the real test—not how quickly people respond when you speak, but how well they lead when you are no longer in the room.
About Jef Menguin
Jef Menguin is a leadership development consultant, professional speaker, and founder of Strategic Learning Consultants. He helps CEOs, HR leaders, and L&D teams connect leadership development to business goals and turn strategic priorities into daily leadership behavior.
Explore his work in leadership training, learn about his motivational speaking programs, or connect with him on LinkedIn.