You have a strong business case. The objectives are clear. Executive sponsorship is in place. You have prepared thoroughly, your slides are compelling, and the logic is sound. Yet something is not working. Stakeholders seem slow to respond. Meetings end with apparent agreement but little follow-through. People who said yes last week seem to have quietly moved on to other priorities.

The problem is rarely the quality of your argument. It is the assumption that a good argument is enough.

This is the central challenge of leading without authority. In a matrix organisation, you are accountable for outcomes that depend on people you cannot direct, functions you do not control, and priorities you did not set. Formal authority, where it exists at all, rarely extends far enough. And yet progress depends on gaining the genuine commitment of people who have every reason to prioritise something else.

Most leaders respond to this challenge the way they were trained to respond: with better data, clearer logic, and stronger sponsorship. These things matter. But they address the wrong problem. The gap between a compelling case and genuine commitment is not closed by more evidence. It is closed by influence.

Influence without authority is not a soft skill or a political art. It is a learnable leadership capability, grounded in research and built through deliberate practice. It depends on credibility accumulated long before you need it, on understanding what others actually care about rather than assuming your priorities speak for themselves, on choosing approaches that create ownership rather than compliance, and on building the kind of reciprocal relationships that make cooperation a natural response rather than a reluctant concession.

Research consistently supports this. People are influenced not only by the strength of an argument but also by trust, credibility, relationship, and perceived relevance. Before people commit to an initiative, they need confidence in both the message and the messenger. They need to feel understood before they feel persuaded. And they need to feel ownership before they feel commitment.

This article explores what influence actually is, how it is built, and how the most effective matrix leaders use it to create genuine commitment across organisational boundaries. This is article two in the series on matrix leadership. Article one explored the four elements of gaining commitment in a matrix organisation. 

What influence actually is

Before exploring how influence works, it is worth being clear about what it is, and what it is not.

Influence is not authority. Authority is the formal right to direct the actions of others. Influence is the ability to shape thinking, decisions, and behaviour without relying on that formal right. In a matrix organisation, authority is always limited and often shared. Influence, by contrast, can extend as far as your relationships, credibility, and understanding will carry it.

Influence is not manipulation. Manipulation involves concealing your intentions, distorting information, or exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to achieve an outcome the other person would not choose if they understood what was happening. Influence, practised well, is transparent. It involves helping people understand why something matters, how it connects to what they care about, and why their contribution is genuinely important. There is nothing hidden in that process.

Influence is not persuasion alone. Persuasion is a component of influence: the moment of making a case or advocating a position. But influence is a much longer game. It is built through repeated interaction, sustained credibility, and accumulated trust. A single persuasive argument may occasionally produce the outcome you need. Sustained influence produces consistent cooperation over time.

Perhaps most importantly, influence is not an event. It is a practice. The leaders who are most influential in matrix organisations are not those who make the most compelling presentations. They are those who have invested in relationships, demonstrated integrity, shown genuine interest in others’ priorities, and built a reputation that makes people inclined to trust them before a request is ever made.

This distinction matters because it changes where you invest your attention. If influence were primarily about the quality of your argument, you would invest in your analytical skills and your presentation technique. Because influence is primarily about relationship and reputation, you invest long before the moment of request arrives.

Credibility: the foundation that everything else rests on

If influence is a practice, credibility is the foundation on which that practice is built. Without credibility, even the strongest argument will struggle to gain traction. With it, even an imperfect proposal will receive serious consideration.

Research consistently confirms this. Kouzes and Posner, whose study of leadership credibility spans four decades and hundreds of thousands of leaders across the world, found that the qualities followers most consistently demand from those who lead them are honesty, competence, and the ability to inspire. These qualities, taken together, constitute what researchers describe as source credibility: the degree to which others perceive you as worthy of their trust and attention. When source credibility is absent, even technically sound proposals face an uphill struggle. When it is present, leaders gain access to a quality of engagement that no formal authority can mandate.

The most widely used framework for understanding what creates that credibility comes from Mayer, Davis and Schoorman, whose integrative model of organisational trust, published in the Academy of Management Review and among the most cited works in organisational behaviour, identifies three distinct foundations of trustworthiness. Understanding all three matters for matrix leaders.

The first is ability: the cluster of skills, knowledge, and competencies that enable you to operate effectively within a given domain. In matrix environments, ability credibility is particularly demanding because you are frequently working at the boundaries of your own expertise. Colleagues in other functions have no reason to assume you understand their world. Ability credibility must be demonstrated through visible competence, sound judgement, and a track record of delivery. It cannot be assumed or asserted.

The second is integrity: the perception that you adhere consistently to a set of principles, that you do what you say, and that your behaviour is predictable and honest. Integrity credibility is built through consistency between word and action, sustained across many small interactions over time. It is not established through declarations of intent but through the accumulated weight of observable behaviour.

The third is benevolence: the perception that you genuinely care about the interests of others, not only your own agenda or your function’s objectives. In matrix organisations, where leaders are frequently suspected of advancing departmental priorities at the expense of broader ones, benevolence is often the most contested dimension. A leader who is technically capable and personally honest but perceived as self-serving will find their influence limited. People may comply with requests, but they will rarely commit to them.

All three dimensions are necessary, and the absence of any one undermines the others. A leader who is highly competent but perceived as dishonest will find their proposals scrutinised for hidden motives. A leader who is honest and caring but lacks a track record of delivery will struggle to generate confidence when the stakes are high. A leader who is capable and consistent but treats every interaction as a means to advance their own agenda will gain compliance but rarely inspire genuine commitment.

There is one further characteristic of credibility that every matrix leader needs to understand. It is deeply asymmetric. Slovic’s research on trust, replicated across multiple contexts, established what he called the asymmetry principle: negative events damage trust considerably more than equivalent positive events build it. Trust accumulates slowly, through consistent behaviour over time. It can be destroyed far more quickly, sometimes through a single visible failure of integrity or follow-through.

This asymmetry has a direct practical implication. Credibility cannot be built at the moment you need it. By the time you require the trust and confidence of a stakeholder, the conditions that make it possible must already be in place. This means the most important credibility-building work happens not during major initiatives but in the hundreds of small interactions that precede them.

Practical actions:

  • Follow through on every commitment, including small ones. The leader who sends the promised article, shows up on time, and delivers the report when agreed builds credibility through the accumulation of reliable behaviour. The leader who regularly over-commits and under-delivers erodes it just as steadily.
  • Be honest about what you do not know. Acknowledging the limits of your expertise, particularly in areas outside your own function, is a more powerful credibility signal than attempting to project authority you do not possess. It demonstrates both integrity and the self-awareness that benevolence requires.
  • Act visibly in the interests of the wider organisation, not just your own function. When colleagues observe you making a decision that costs your team something but serves a broader organisational goal, your benevolence credibility increases significantly. This is the behaviour that most clearly separates leaders who are trusted from those who are merely respected.

Credibility is not something you claim. It is something others attribute to you, based on what they observe consistently over time.

Understanding what people actually care about

One of the most consistent mistakes leaders make when attempting to influence is that they begin with their own agenda rather than with an understanding of the other person’s world.

This is understandable. You have a clear objective. You have prepared your case. You know what you need. The instinct is to make that case as clearly and compellingly as possible.

The problem is that people do not respond to your priorities. They respond to their own. Before you can influence anyone effectively, you need to understand what they actually care about. Not the position they present in meetings, but the underlying interests, pressures, and concerns that shape how they evaluate any proposal you put to them.

Fisher and Ury, in their foundational work on negotiation, drew a critical distinction between positions and interests. A position is what someone says they want. An interest is why they want it: the underlying need, concern, or goal that the position is designed to protect or advance. Leaders who engage only with positions find themselves in a contest of competing demands. Leaders who understand interests find significantly more room to create outcomes that work for multiple parties.

This distinction is directly applicable to organisational influence. A colleague who says they cannot release resource for your initiative is expressing a position. The interest behind that position might be concern about their own team’s capacity, worry about being exposed if performance drops, uncertainty about whether your initiative will succeed, or a genuine belief that their current priorities are more important. Each of those underlying interests suggests a different response, none of which begins with repeating your original request more forcefully.

Effective matrix leaders invest in understanding stakeholder interests as a systematic discipline, not an occasional activity. They develop a genuine picture of each key stakeholder’s priorities, pressures, and concerns before attempting to influence them. They ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. They observe what issues consistently occupy a colleague’s attention. They seek to understand what success looks like from the other person’s perspective.

Practical actions:

  • Before any significant influence conversation, ask yourself: what does this person actually care about? What are the pressures they are managing? What would make this a good outcome from their perspective?
  • Invest in informal conversations that have no immediate agenda. These conversations reveal the interests and concerns that rarely surface in formal meetings.
  • When you encounter resistance, resist the instinct to push harder on your original case. Instead, ask questions that help you understand what is driving the resistance. The answer will tell you far more about what kind of response will be effective.

Understanding precedes influencing. Leaders who skip this step are, in effect, trying to persuade people they do not yet understand.

Choosing the right approach

Once you understand a stakeholder’s interests and have built sufficient credibility to be heard, the question becomes which influence approach is most likely to generate genuine commitment rather than surface compliance.

Research by Gary Yukl and colleagues, developed over several decades and validated through the Influence Behavior Questionnaire, identified a set of proactive influence tactics that leaders commonly use. Of these, four emerged as the most important: rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, and collaboration.

Each has its place, but they are not equally effective at producing commitment.

Rational persuasion, using logical arguments and factual evidence, is the most commonly used tactic in organisations. It is also the most overused. It works well when the other person is already open to the idea, shares your analytical framework, and has no significant competing interests at stake. In those conditions, a well-reasoned case will often be sufficient. In most matrix situations, however, those conditions do not fully apply. Rational persuasion is necessary but rarely sufficient on its own.

Inspirational appeal, connecting a request to the other person’s values, aspirations, and sense of purpose, works at a different level. Rather than engaging the analytical mind, it engages the emotional and motivational one. When you can genuinely connect an initiative to something a colleague cares about deeply, whether the customer outcome they want to achieve, the professional legacy they are building, or the problem they have always wanted to solve, you create a qualitatively different kind of engagement. This requires knowing enough about the person to make the appeal genuine. An inspirational appeal that feels manufactured or generic produces the opposite of the intended effect.

Consultation, involving people in planning and decision-making before a commitment is sought, is one of the most consistently effective tactics for generating genuine commitment. Yukl’s research found it reliably produced commitment rather than mere compliance, because it creates ownership. When people have contributed to shaping an approach, they have a stake in its success. They are no longer evaluating your proposal. They are, in part, evaluating their own.

Collaboration, actively offering resources, assistance, or support to make it easier for the other person to contribute, works by reducing the friction associated with cooperation. It is qualitatively different from exchange, which is explicitly transactional. Collaboration says: I am genuinely invested in making this work for both of us. That signal, when credible, significantly increases the likelihood of sustained commitment.

The practical implication for matrix leaders is pointed. Most leaders default heavily towards rational persuasion and underinvest in consultation and collaboration. Rational persuasion is faster, requires less relationship investment, and feels more like leadership. Consultation and collaboration require patience, humility, and a willingness to share ownership of the outcome. They also produce significantly better results.

Practical actions:

  • Before preparing your case, ask which of the four approaches is most likely to produce genuine commitment from this particular stakeholder. The answer will often be consultation or collaboration rather than rational persuasion alone.
  • Combine approaches deliberately. An inspirational appeal that connects to values, followed by consultation that creates ownership, followed by collaboration that reduces friction, is considerably more powerful than any single approach used alone.
  • Notice your own defaults. Most leaders have one or two approaches they reach for habitually. Developing a broader repertoire requires deliberate attention.

Political skill: the capability nobody talks about

There is a dimension of influence that leadership development programmes consistently underaddress, partly because it makes people uncomfortable. That dimension is political skill.

Political skill is not the same as political behaviour. Political behaviour, manoeuvring for personal advantage, building alliances to outflank rivals, managing appearances at the expense of substance, is a legitimate concern in any organisation, and one that effective leaders learn to navigate without participating in.

Political skill, as defined by Gerald Ferris and colleagues in research spanning more than two decades, is something different and considerably more constructive. It is the ability to understand others and to use that understanding to influence them in ways that enhance personal and organisational objectives.

Ferris identified four components of political skill, each of which has direct relevance to matrix leadership.

Social astuteness is the ability to observe and accurately interpret social situations. Politically skilled leaders notice what is happening in the room: who defers to whom, where the real concerns lie beneath the surface of a polite meeting, what is not being said. This is not cynicism; it is attentiveness. And in matrix environments, where much of the most important communication is indirect, it is invaluable.

Interpersonal influence is the ability to adapt your style and approach to different people and contexts. Matrix leaders interact with a wide range of stakeholders: different functions, different seniority levels, different professional cultures. The approach that works with a technically-minded engineer will not work with a commercially-focused sales director. Interpersonal influence is the flexibility to adjust without losing authenticity.

Networking ability in Ferris’s framework refers to the capacity to build diverse and useful relationships across organisational boundaries, a capability explored in depth in the next article in this series. Here the relevant point is that networking is itself a component of political skill, not a separate activity. Leaders who build strong networks are more politically skilled, because they have access to information, perspectives, and relationships that less connected leaders do not.

Apparent sincerity is perhaps the most interesting component. Ferris’s research found that politically skilled leaders are perceived as genuine, authentic, and non-manipulative, even when exercising considerable influence. This is not about performing sincerity. Leaders who appear sincere but are not tend to be found out, and the credibility damage is severe. Rather, it reflects a genuine orientation towards others’ interests alongside your own, which is, ultimately, the foundation of ethical influence.

The reason political skill matters so much in matrix organisations is that these environments are inherently political. Resources are contested. Priorities compete. Influence is exercised in multiple directions simultaneously. Leaders who lack political skill find themselves surprised by resistance they did not see coming, excluded from conversations that shape decisions before they are formally made, and unable to understand why their perfectly reasonable proposals consistently fail to gain traction.

Practical actions:

  • Pay attention to the informal dynamics of every meeting you attend. Who speaks last? Whose concerns shift the conversation? Who is conspicuously silent? These observations tell you where the real influence lies.
  • Develop the habit of adapting your communication style to your audience without losing your core message. The content of what you are trying to achieve remains constant; the way you frame and present it should vary considerably.
  • Reflect regularly on how you are perceived, not just what you intend. Political skill requires an accurate understanding of your own reputation and the impression you create in different contexts.

Political skill is not optional for matrix leaders. It is the perceptual and social intelligence that allows all other influence capabilities to be deployed effectively.

Reciprocity and the long game

One of the most robust findings in the psychology of influence is the power of reciprocity. Robert Cialdini, whose research on influence remains among the most widely cited in organisational and social psychology, identified reciprocity as one of the fundamental principles that shape human behaviour. People feel a strong obligation to return what they have received. Giving creates a sense of obligation in the recipient that makes future requests significantly easier to honour.

In organisational settings, this principle operates in ways that are both powerful and frequently misunderstood.

The most common misunderstanding is to treat reciprocity as a form of transactional exchange: I will help you now so that you will help me later. This calculation is visible to most colleagues and tends to undermine the very trust it is attempting to build. People can usually tell when they are being helped instrumentally rather than genuinely. And when they can tell, the social obligation that reciprocity generates is significantly weakened.

The most effective matrix leaders operate from a different orientation. They give information, support, introductions, time, and recognition without maintaining a mental ledger of what is owed to them. They invest in colleagues’ success because they genuinely care about organisational outcomes, not because they are banking credit for future withdrawal. The paradox is that this orientation, genuine generosity rather than strategic exchange, tends to produce considerably stronger reciprocal obligations over time.

This is, in part, because trust and reputation amplify the effect. When colleagues know from experience that you give without immediately seeking a return, your requests carry a different quality. They are received as genuine asks from someone whose motives are trusted, rather than as the next move in a transactional game.

There is a further dimension worth noting. Reciprocity in organisational influence is not only about favours. Information is one of the most valuable currencies in a matrix organisation, where knowledge is distributed across functions and boundaries. Leaders who consistently share useful insights, surface relevant intelligence, and connect colleagues with information they need, without waiting to be asked, build significant social capital over time. They become people others want to help, because helping them feels like participating in an exchange that has already been consistently generous.

Practical actions:

  • Look for regular opportunities to be useful to colleagues outside your own function, without any immediate request attached.
  • Share information and insights proactively. If you encounter something that would be valuable to a colleague, send it without being asked.
  • Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other. This costs you very little and creates genuine goodwill on both sides.

Reciprocity is not a tactic to deploy. It is an orientation to sustain.

Gaining commitment, not just compliance

The distinction between compliance and commitment is easy to state and surprisingly difficult to achieve in practice.

Compliance means the person does what you asked. They attend the meeting, release the resource, sign off the document. On the surface, the influence attempt has succeeded. But compliance is fragile. It depends on continued pressure or obligation. Remove the pressure and the behaviour often stops. Compliance does not generate the discretionary effort, creativity, and sustained engagement that complex matrix initiatives require.

Commitment means the person genuinely wants the initiative to succeed. They bring ideas you did not ask for. They solve problems before escalating them. They defend the initiative when you are not in the room. Commitment generates the kind of engagement that no level of formal authority can mandate.

Herbert Kelman’s research on the processes of social influence provides a useful framework for understanding how commitment develops. Kelman identified three distinct processes through which people are influenced, each producing a qualitatively different outcome.

Compliance, in Kelman’s framework, occurs when people change their behaviour because they expect a reward or want to avoid a negative consequence. The behaviour is entirely dependent on the continued presence of the influencing agent. When the reward disappears or the threat recedes, the behaviour stops.

Identification occurs when people change their behaviour because they want to maintain a satisfying relationship with the influencing agent, or because they want to be associated with someone they respect or admire. This produces more durable behaviour change, because it is rooted in relationship rather than calculation. But it remains dependent on the quality of that relationship.

Internalisation occurs when people change their behaviour because the new behaviour is consistent with their own values and beliefs. They do what is asked not because of external pressure or relationship, but because they have come to see it as genuinely the right thing to do. This is the most durable form of influence, and the hardest to achieve.

The practical implication is clear. Compliance is produced by pressure and incentive. Identification is produced by relationship and respect. Internalisation is produced by helping people connect the initiative to their own values and sense of purpose. In matrix organisations, where the sustained commitment of people you cannot formally direct is essential to success, internalisation is the goal. Consultation, inspirational appeal, and genuine involvement in shaping the outcome are the primary means of achieving it.

Practical actions:

  • After any significant influence conversation, ask yourself honestly: did I achieve compliance or commitment? The answer will tell you how much work remains.
  • Invest in helping stakeholders connect the initiative to their own priorities and values, not just to your organisational objectives.
  • Watch for the signals of genuine commitment: people who volunteer ideas, raise problems early, and advocate for the initiative in your absence. Distinguish these from the signals of polite compliance.

The goal of influence in a matrix organisation is not to get people to do what you want. It is to create sufficient shared purpose that people choose to contribute their best thinking and effort to an outcome they have genuinely made their own.

Wrapping up

Influence in a matrix organisation is not a skill you deploy at the moment you need something. It is a practice you sustain consistently over time.

It begins with credibility, built through competence, character, and the accumulated effect of reliable behaviour. It depends on genuine understanding of what others care about, rather than the assumption that your priorities are self-evidently important. It requires choosing the right approach for the right person in the right context, and research is clear that consultation and collaboration produce commitment where rational persuasion alone produces compliance. It demands the political awareness to read the dynamics of complex organisations without becoming cynical or manipulative. It is sustained through reciprocity, a genuine orientation towards others’ success that creates the social capital on which future influence rests.

And it is ultimately measured not by whether people did what you asked, but by whether they chose to invest their expertise, energy, and commitment in an outcome they have genuinely made their own.

The leaders who do this well are often not those who feel most influential. They are those who feel most trusted. That distinction is not accidental. In matrix organisations, trust is influence.

Three questions for reflection

  1. When you encounter resistance to an initiative you believe in, what is your instinctive response? What does that tell you about your default influence approach?
  2. Which of the four approaches (rational persuasion, inspirational appeal, consultation, or collaboration) do you rely on most heavily? Which do you underuse?
  3. Think of a stakeholder whose support you have found difficult to secure. How well do you genuinely understand their underlying interests, pressures, and concerns?

Sources

Cialdini, R.B. (2021) Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New and expanded edn. New York: Harper Business.

Ferris, G.R., Treadway, D.C., Kolodinsky, R.W., Hochwarter, W.A., Kacmar, C.J., Douglas, C. and Frink, D.D. (2005) Development and validation of the political skill inventory. Journal of Management, 31(1), pp. 126–152.

Fisher, R. and Ury, W. (1981) Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Kelman, H.C. (1958) Compliance, identification, and internalization: Three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2(1), pp. 51–60.

Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2011) Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it. 2nd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2023) The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations. 7th edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Mayer, R.C., Davis, J.H. and Schoorman, F.D. (1995) An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), pp. 709–734.

Slovic, P. (1993) Perceived risk, trust, and democracy. Risk Analysis, 13(6), pp. 675–682.

Yukl, G. (2013) Leadership in organizations. 8th edn. Harlow: Pearson.

Yukl, G. and Tracey, J.B. (1992) Consequences of influence tactics used with subordinates, peers, and the boss. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), pp. 525–535.

Yukl, G., Seifert, C.F. and Chavez, C. (2008) Validation of the extended influence behavior questionnaire. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(5), pp. 609–621.