# 9 Examples of Influencing Others in the Workplace Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/examples-of-influencing-others-in-the-workplace/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/examples-of-influencing-others-in-the-workplace.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving influence at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Nine concrete examples of influencing others in the workplace - what each move looks like in practice, and how to use them when you have no authority. ## Key facts - Title: 9 Examples of Influencing Others in the Workplace - Category: Influence - Primary skill: Influence - Related skills: Communication, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: examples of influencing others in the workplace - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/examples-of-influencing-others-in-the-workplace/ ## What this page covers - Nine concrete examples of influencing others in the workplace - what each move looks like in practice, and how to use them when you have no authority. - Practical guidance for examples of influencing others in the workplace - How this topic connects to Influence ## Detailed explanation You put the idea into the meeting. Nobody argued with it, and nobody acted on it either. Most examples of influencing others in the workplace come down to a small set of repeatable moves: making the case with evidence, inviting people to shape a plan before it is finished, connecting a request to something the other person values, [building a track record](/knowledge/influence/professional-credibility/) in one specific area, and asking for a small commitment rather than a large one. None of them require a title. What is less obvious is why some of these work far better than others. ## Nine examples of influencing others in the workplace The examples below are organized by the move rather than by seniority. Some come from research on influence tactics; some come from situations that recur across workplace advice. None of them depend on managing anyone. ### 1. Make the case with evidence — then give the evidence a story Gary Yukl and J. Bruce Tracey studied influence at work over more than a decade and identified eleven tactics people commonly use. Rational persuasion — explaining with facts and examples why something serves a shared goal and why it is feasible — is the one most people reach for first, and it holds up well. But numbers on their own rarely move anyone. One product manager, in an example documented in Rework's competency library, paired a 40% drop-off rate with the qualitative user feedback sitting behind it, then built a visual walkthrough so stakeholders could see what the number actually meant. The data made the case defensible. The story made it matter. ### 2. Ask people to shape the plan before it is finished Consultation — asking for suggestions that genuinely improve a plan — ranks alongside rational persuasion among the most effective tactics in Yukl and Tracey's research, and it works in every direction: upward at a manager, sideways at peers, and at people who do not report to you. The mechanism is co-authorship. Someone who helped shape a proposal has a reason to defend it that no amount of persuasion afterward can manufacture. Timing decides whether it works at all. Asked early, it is real input. Asked once the document is written, it reads as a formality, and people can tell. ### 3. Connect the request to what the other person already cares about Inspirational appeal — framing a request around the value or outcome it creates rather than around what you need — was the most effective tactic in Yukl and Tracey's data and, at the same time, the least frequently used. That gap is the opening. Most requests at work are framed from the requester's side: here is what I need, here is my deadline. The version that lands starts from the other person's position — what this takes off their plate, what it makes possible for their team, what problem of theirs it quietly solves. It takes preparation rather than charisma, which is exactly why it can be practiced. ### 4. Build a track record in one specific thing Influence without authority is the framing that dominates advice on this topic, from Harvard Business School Online to Forbes, and the mechanism these sources agree on is substitution: where position power is missing, credibility, expertise and information take its place. This is why influence is distributed oddly across an organization rather than following the org chart. Eat Your Career points out that finance carries disproportionate weight during budgeting and HR carries it during hiring, because that is where their information is the scarce input. Find the decision where you hold the scarce information and you have standing before you open your mouth. Working out where that is starts with an honest read of what you already do well, and a short free assessment showing [where your strengths sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a practical way to get one. ### 5. Volunteer to hold the pen Whoever writes the proposal decides what the proposal says. Whoever drafts the summary decides which points survive the meeting. Taking the initiative — volunteering to prepare, write, or organize — is the one influence move available in your first week, because it requires willingness rather than standing. It is also the least visible, since the influence happens before the discussion rather than during it. The cost is real work nobody assigned you. The return is that the frame everyone argues inside is the one you wrote. ### 6. Give value before you need anything back Reciprocity appears in nearly every list on this topic, usually illustrated with a line close to the one Kent State's professional development center uses: you should go along with my idea because I went along with yours last week. That version is a transaction, and it spends the goodwill it collects. The same instinct works far better in advance and without the invoice — sharing information, connecting two people who should know each other, covering for someone under pressure. This is also where the line between influence and manipulation sits, and it is a clearer line than it looks. Persuasion is open about what it wants. Manipulation works indirectly, and the moment people notice, it takes the credibility everything else depends on with it. ### 7. Say the other person's objection out loud first The behavior that separates people who can move an opponent from people who only convince allies is acknowledging the opposing view before answering it. Chron describes it as [listening closely](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/active-listening/) to those who disagree and naming their position back to them. It works because acknowledgment lowers the other person's need to defend, and someone who is not defending can actually hear a proposal. The version that fails is the acknowledgment that is really a setup — one sentence of apparent agreement before the word "but." A useful test: if you cannot state their position in words they would sign off on, you have not understood it yet. ### 8. Bring your manager a proposal, not a problem Most of the influence a junior employee actually needs runs upward, at the one person who controls their scope, their visibility and their resources. Yukl and Tracey's research covers this direction explicitly, and the effective tactics hold there too — rational persuasion and consultation work on a boss. In practice that means arriving with a proposed course of action rather than an open question, and making your results visible over time so a recommendation lands against a record instead of into a vacuum. It also means [being honest when honesty is uncomfortable](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-disagree-with-your-boss/), because a manager who has been told a hard thing once tends to believe you the next time. ### 9. Ask for a small win — then deliver it When a full yes looks unlikely, ask for something bounded. The product-manager example ends on exactly this move: a small test that would not delay any other work. It costs almost nothing to approve, and if it works, the result argues for the rest better than you could. The part most advice skips is what comes after. The yes is the midpoint, not the finish — [following up on what was agreed](/knowledge/influence/follow-up-after-a-meeting/), keeping the momentum, and seeing it through to a change people can point to is what turns one agreement into a reputation. ### If you need these as interview or review answers A meaningful share of people looking for examples of influencing others need them in evidence form. CareerBuilder and interview-question banks such as Yardstick both treat "tell me about a time you influenced someone" as a standard question, and competency frameworks list influencing as a rateable behavior. The format they expect is the same shape as the examples above: the situation, the specific thing you did, and what changed because you did it. Choose one that actually happened and keep the outcome concrete. ## What makes these examples work when you try them Read back through the nine and something becomes noticeable: almost none of the difficulty sits in knowing the move. It sits in the execution — the preparation before the conversation, the phrasing inside it, and the relationship it lands in. **Influence** is the capability the whole list runs on. Its core is not persuasive talent but a reputation built on delivered results, a habit of thinking past your own remit, and a willingness to ask when the worst answer is no. The methodical part matters most: working out what is genuinely in it for the other person, planning the conversation rather than improvising it, and staying with the thing after the yes. That is learnable behavior, and none of it depends on being the most confident voice in the room. **Communication** is where most sound cases come apart. Leading with the main point rather than the buildup, being direct enough that nobody has to reconstruct what you meant, staying brief, and adapting to how the other person actually takes in information. It also covers choosing the medium: when you need to persuade, negotiate, or handle something contested, a conversation does work that a message cannot. Hearing an objection all the way to its end does more persuasive work than any phrasing you could choose. **Working with Your Manager** governs the direction of influence you will use most. It rests on treating the relationship as a partnership toward the same purpose rather than something to be maneuvered — delivering your part, aligning with your manager before you take something wider, using one-on-ones to shape what your job actually contains, and being honest when it costs you something. Those behaviors compound into the kind of standing that makes a proposal land. Guessing which of the three is your actual bottleneck is slower than checking. The free Job Skills Test scores each of them, along with the other nine in **the set of twelve work skills** the framework treats as buildable rather than fixed, so a reading of [where each skill stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) tells you where the next effort is worth spending. ## Where this leaves you Some of these examples will already describe things you do without filing them under influence — the colleague you check with before committing, the write-up you volunteered for, the meeting you prepared for while everyone else improvised. Those are the same materials, used deliberately. You can carry considerably more weight in the decisions you care about without becoming a different person at work; a gap in any of this is something not yet learned rather than a fixed limit. It also counts for more as you go, not less — the bigger the work gets, the more of it depends on people who do not report to you and never will. You read nine examples looking for the ones you could actually use, which is a different activity from reading them for reassurance. That is the part most people skip. ## See where yours stands The only thing left is finding out where you are starting from. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer questions about how you handle real situations at work, and it shows you where you stand across all twelve — influence, communication and working with your manager among them — and which one would make the biggest difference if you developed it next. Nothing to prepare, and nobody else to involve. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Nine concrete examples of influencing others in the workplace - what each move looks like in practice, and how to use them when you have no authority. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Influence. It also relates to Communication, Working with Your Manager. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/examples-of-influencing-others-in-the-workplace/ Preferred summary: "Nine concrete examples of influencing others in the workplace - what each move looks like in practice, and how to use them when you have no authority." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.