The engineering leadership skill no title can give you

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Key takeaways:

• Influence is becoming a vital skill for engineering leaders. As hierarchies flatten and AI enables more autonomous work, leading from any position is becoming the most valuable thing in engineering.
• The first step isn’t persuasion – it’s orientation. Know where you stand and where they stand before you try to move anyone.
• Make it as easy as possible to say yes. Package everything someone needs into the ask itself – small, concrete requests get answered immediately.

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You can hold an engineering leadership title and not be a leader. You can also hold no title at all and be a great one. When people say “leadership” with a tone of respect, “influential leadership” is usually what they mean. The rank, not the capability.

Influential leadership is the ability to move people and work forward when nothing about your role obligates anyone to listen to you or do anything you say. This skill has always been useful, but amid the industry-wide change, I believe it is emerging as the key thing setting successful people apart.

Why this is the engineering leadership skill of the moment

For a long time, influence came bundled with rank. You climbed the ladder, a title arrived, and that title granted a reason for people to listen to you. You got the title and then you led. However, the industry is changing. 

Some orgs are flattening broadly. Companies like Anthropic are flattening their titles – nearly everyone is a “member of technical staff” where authority is earned based on the quality of ideas and ability to collaborate, not rank.

At the same time, and even in organizations not making those structural changes, the broad conditions for influence are getting harder. Everyone you need is busier than they’ve ever been.

AI is enabling people to work more autonomously, creating fewer points of collaboration and fewer opportunities for that influence to occur.

The people who are most valuable in this environment are those who can move a room, shape a project, and lead from any position, even when there’s friction. Here’s how I think about approaching the skill of influence.

You can’t move what you can’t see

It’s easy to believe that, if your idea is good enough or argument compelling enough, that others will get on board with what you want to do. This leads to over-focusing on persuasion, on getting others to agree with our logic.

However, logic doesn’t move people. You might have experienced this approach not working very well when you’ve written up a perfectly clear and detailed proposal describing some amazing idea you’ve had… that then sat unread in people’s inboxes.

The best first step in influence is not logic. It’s understanding the current state, and we do that in two parts.

First, get clear on where you are

You can’t move a room or influence a situation until you know where you’re standing in it. Where am I? What do I think? What am I feeling? You need a point of view, and you can’t find one while all of your attention is outwards.

This can feel like slowing down when what you want is speed. However, nearly every bad influence move – the too-long message, the anxiously waiting for a response (wondering if you should send that third message when they haven’t responded to the first two..), the cc to someone’s manager – is how skipping this step manifests.

Make sure you are really clear on your opinion and why it matters. Ensure that any frustration or feelings of powerlessness aren’t masquerading as urgency in your approach.

Then, get clear on where they are

Only once you’re oriented can your attention move outward and actually take anything in. How close can I listen? What am I hearing underneath what’s being said? What question would help me understand where someone else is standing?

This step is where you’re going to find out things like which colleagues are way too busy to engage with you on this right now. Knowing that creates the opportunity to ask them who the next-best person to work with would be. Or that a partner team who was stonewalling your proposal is protecting something within their group that you hadn’t asked about yet. Maybe there is some information you didn’t have that actually means the thing you wanted to do doesn’t make sense in the current or future context.

Resistance almost always has a reason, and the reason is almost never you’re wrong or this idea is wholly bad, but you can only see that with your attention genuinely outward, on the people you are looking to influence.

Make enrollment easy

Once you can see the current situation clearly, what you have is a big, shiny YOU ARE HERE star on a map. The future state you are trying to achieve is the proposed destination marker. Draw a line from point A to point B and you have a mapped journey that you and others can actually reason about, that you can work from together. Here are some of the tactics I use once we have that map.

Start with the end

You’ve created the map based on what you’ve observed and understood. The next best thing to do is get the people you need to care to agree on that end state you defined. Once you all agree, the conversation can be on the nuances of the destination and making sure it’s a place people can get excited about arriving at. You can switch to negotiating the nuances of the exact route you’ll take to get there.

Make requests small and well-scoped

Big or amorphous requests that can’t be completed in-the-moment are added to someone’s task list or backlog. That means your request now has to compete with every other thing they have going on, which isn’t a competition you’re likely to win. However, if your request can be completed quickly, it never enters the task list.

An example of a request that feels more challenging to action looks like, “can you review this doc?” If I get a message like that I know it’s going to take a little time and some focused attention. I’m not sure exactly why I’m reviewing based on this request, so I’m not sure what my role is. All this adds up to this task getting popped onto my TODO list to review at a later time and means you’re stuck waiting.

An example of a request that feels easy to action looks more like:

“I’m looking for your insight on a proposal. If this is something that moves forward, it could eventually affect your team so I want to be sure I’ve represented your perspective. At the moment all I need is agreement that the future state I’ve described makes sense to you. There’s way more information in the linked doc if you want to go deeper, but I’ve pasted it directly below as well so you don’t have to click through. If this makes sense to you, a simple thumbs up is great and I’ll report back with my thoughts on how we get there. If the future state I’ve described doesn’t quite meet your expectations or understanding of the problem, a few bullet points of your thoughts shared here will be a great start for me to iterate and refine.”

In this scenario, you’ve not asked me to try to understand an entire project or initiative, all I have to do is agree that the north star is correct. I don’t have to open the doc if I don’t want to, you’ve packaged up everything I need right here. You’ve reduced the cost of engaging with you to nearly zero, which means I’m far, far more likely to actually engage.

When a live conversation is needed, send your written opinion ahead of time

Asking a group to conjure a shared opinion out of thin air takes time. So give people something concrete to respond to instead. Write down your point of view on the problem at hand (how will we approach this? Who will work on this?) so there is structure for people’s contributions and for a conversation. Send your thoughts ahead of time and be explicit that this is just a starting point – your goal is to have people share where they agree, where they are unsure, and where they totally disagree.

As we’ve already gotten clear on our own view, in plain words on a page, we now have the capacity in a meeting to fully attend to everyone else and to be the person pulling together the shared opinion as it evolves in real time.

Decide and move – with or without them

If you’re struggling to get engagement or full approval on some step, be clear that you have a date in mind to move forward and will do so at that time if you haven’t heard back. This is a gift! It frees the work from depending on any one person’s bandwidth, and it relieves everyone (including you) of the fantasy that total consensus is coming. You won’t figure every single thing out. Decide anyway, and move. Then keep deciding, and keep moving.

Friction is the rep

If you’re an engineer or engineering leader without the sort of title you imagined would finally confer influence, here’s the good news and the slightly annoying news. The good news: you can start practicing all of this immediately! The annoying news: the practice is finding the next moment of discomfort and leaning all the way into it.

Every point of friction with another person is a rep. A colleague who is disengaged, a partner team you can’t find agreement with, a meeting where too many people have opinions and no one has full clarity – that friction is the signal that it’s time to practice your influence. Slow down, orient yourself, orient outward, put something concrete in the room, and then keep things moving.

Influence does not require a mandate or permission. Don’t wait on the org chart to make you effective. You can become the person who moves things regardless of where you sit – which, as ladders get shorter and titles blurrier, is becoming the most valuable person to be.