What Is Influence? The Meaning, the Types, and Where It Comes From

Influence is the ability to change what other people think, decide or do without forcing them. The other person still makes the choice; influence changes what they want to choose. That is what separates it from authority, and it is why influence is open to you long before anyone reports to you.

If the word makes you think of office politics or people who always get their way, that unease is worth taking seriously. Influence can be used well or badly, and the difference becomes much easier to see once you know where influence actually comes from. Most of its sources, as it turns out, have nothing to do with a job title.

What is influence, and how does it differ from authority?

Merriam-Webster defines influence as the power to cause changes without directly forcing those changes to happen. The word doing the work is “without.” A manager’s instruction gets things moving because of the manager’s position. Influence gets things moving because the other person has been brought to agree, and so the decision stays theirs.

That difference has practical consequences. Power that rests on a position can push people to change, but it tends to produce doing what was asked rather than believing in it. Influence guides people toward making the change themselves, which is why it usually strengthens a working relationship instead of straining it. It also covers most of what you will want at work in your first years: support for an idea, help from someone in another team, a say in how a piece of work gets done. None of those can be ordered. They have to be earned.

Influence is also neutral. Everyone at work exerts some and is on the receiving end of a great deal, whether they mean to be or not: the colleague whose view shapes how a team reads a proposal, the new hire whose careful work makes people check with them first. So the useful question is not whether you have influence. It is what kind you have, and how you use it.

The types of influence: where it comes from

Influence is not a single thing. In 1959, the social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven set out five bases of power that people draw on to affect one another, and Raven added a sixth in 1965. Three of them come with a position. The other three are personal, which means they are open to anyone willing to earn them. Alongside these sources sit the tactics people use to put influence to work.

Positional influence

Legitimate power comes from a formal role and the right to decide that goes with it. Reward power is the ability to give people something they want, such as a better assignment or a good word at review time. Coercive power is the ability to impose penalties. All three belong to the position rather than the person, and they disappear when the position does.

Positional influence can get things done without persuading anyone. People comply because they have to, not because they agree. Early in your career you will have very little of it, which is less of a handicap than it sounds, because the next three sources do not depend on it at all.

Expert influence

Expert influence rests on knowledge and skill that other people need. If you are the one who understands the new reporting tool, or who knows how a particular client thinks, colleagues come to you, and your view on those questions carries weight whatever your title.

It is earned through demonstrated competence, and it accumulates. Each piece of work done well adds a little to it, which is why it is usually the first kind of influence a newcomer gains.

Relational influence

French and Raven called this referent power: influence that comes from being liked, trusted and identified with. People go along with you because they trust you, not because of your role. It is built slowly, through relationships and through being the same reliable person in small matters as in large ones.

This is the source most people sense before they can name it. A colleague who is easy to work with and straight in what they say often has more pull in a team than their title would suggest.

Informational influence

Raven’s sixth base, informational power, comes from holding or sharing information other people need to make a decision. The person who pulled together the customer feedback before a meeting often shapes the outcome of that meeting, simply because the discussion runs on what they brought.

It rests on what you know about the situation rather than on who you are, which makes it one of the most accessible sources for someone new. Doing the groundwork others skip is a form of influence.

Influence through tactics

The sources above describe where influence comes from. Tactics describe how it is used. The leadership researchers Gary Yukl and J. Bruce Tracey studied influence at work and identified eleven distinct tactics people commonly use. The most common of them is rational persuasion: using facts, data and logical argument to show that your proposal is the best option. For a newcomer it is also the most accessible, because it depends on preparation rather than status.

Yukl and Tracey singled out three core tactics as both effective and positive, in that they tend to produce genuine commitment rather than reluctant compliance: rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, which connect a request to what people value and care about, and consultation, which involves people in shaping the idea or change. Consultation and inspirational appeals were the tactics most associated with commitment. The mechanism is ownership. People commit to what they helped build and to what matches what they already care about. That turns a common worry on its head: asking colleagues for their input is not a sign that you lack influence. It is one of the strongest ways to exercise it.

Where influence ends and manipulation begins

Because influence is neutral, what makes it ethical is how it is used, and the line is drawn by intent and transparency. Influence tries to persuade while respecting the other person’s freedom to say no. It works in the open, and it aims at an outcome that serves them as well as you. Manipulation relies on self-serving and often deceptive tactics designed to alter how someone sees things or what they do, and it serves the manipulator at the other person’s expense.

A practical test: would your approach still work if the other person could see exactly what you were doing and why? Laying out your reasons, naming the drawbacks and asking for input all pass that test easily. Hiding an agenda, creating false urgency or playing on someone’s insecurities do not. Seen this way, wanting more influence at work is not a step toward becoming manipulative. The personal sources of influence, expertise, trust and useful information, only hold up when they are used openly.

Why influence matters before you have a title

Personal influence builds up over time. Expertise is shown through repeated good work, and trust grows as colleagues come to know you. A proposal from someone with an established track record is heard differently from the same proposal from someone nobody knows yet. That is the most useful way to understand influence early in a career: it is built before it is used, not summoned at the moment you need it.

Plenty of people sense this well before they can say how it works. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work put the question to us directly:

Something I feel I’m missing — and I think you can only learn it through experience — is how to gain power and influence at a workplace. In other words, how do I turn the fact that I’m really good at networking and at talking with lots of people into real influence, or into moving up more easily?

I’ve sometimes seen people who are really good at positioning themselves to be the one who gets brought along. I think I’m actually quite good at that naturally, but I would like to know what I’m doing that works, and what doesn’t.

She is right that experience plays a part, but the pieces are not a mystery. Being good with people is the raw material of relational influence. Turning it into real influence usually means pairing it with expertise others rely on, information they need, and ideas prepared well enough to persuade. Each of those can be practiced on purpose, and the hard part is usually seeing which of them you already have. Before you guess, it helps to see what is already working in your own skills, so your effort goes where it is missing.

The skills behind lasting influence

Look back over the types of influence and one thing stands out: very little of it is handed out. Most of it is what builds up from how someone works, week after week, and that comes down to a small number of habits.

Influence is, in the framework’s terms, a skill in its own right, with two halves. One is a well-earned reputation: delivering consistently, acting with integrity, becoming known for specific expertise and talking straight rather than playing politics. The other is technique: preparing around what the other person stands to gain, pitching with rapport and an honest account of the drawbacks, and following through until the idea is actually in place. Taking the initiative belongs here too, including simply being willing to ask.

Communication is where influence actually travels. An idea you never voice has no effect, so speaking up comes first. After that, stating your main point first, keeping it clear and brief, and adapting to how the other person takes in information make your case easier to accept. A genuine desire to understand the other side is the listening half of influence, and it is exactly what consultation depends on.

Networking builds the relationships that relational influence runs on. That means relationships made before you need them, value given without keeping score, and connections that reach across teams and up and down the hierarchy. The colleagues who back your idea next year are likely to be the ones you helped this year, and treating those relationships as personal rather than transactional is what keeps influence on the right side of the line.

The free Job Skills Test is a quick way to find your best starting point among these three. It scores them alongside the other nine work skills it covers, and every one of them improves with practice, so a weaker score is simply the place to begin.

It may already be starting

Some of this may already be taking shape in how you work. If a teammate forwards you questions because you are the one who understands the client’s data, or someone asks your opinion before sending a proposal upward, that is influence forming, with no pitch and no title involved. Nothing here asks you to become louder or more political. These are habits you can grow while staying yourself, starting with whichever matters most in your role right now.

Influence also compounds. The trust you earn on small things now is what gets you heard on bigger ones later, and waiting until the stakes are high means starting from scratch just when it counts. Beginning while the stakes are modest costs very little, and a clear view of your current skills makes that beginning concrete.

Take stock of your influence skills

All that remains is a clear picture of where you start. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, including influence, communication and networking, and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference for you.