Power and influence in teams

Power is the ability to impose your will on others, whereas influence is the ability to deeply affect behaviors and beliefs.

As a leader, you’ll need to use your power once in a while to steer the ship. But when you use influence to lead, you’ll slowly build deeper trust and loyalty with your team.

When you lose a position of power, you lose the power that came with it, but not the influence you generated.

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Power leadership

Power leadership uses sources of power instead of influence to motivate others to act.

With power leadership, you can influence how others act, but it won’t necessarily change what people believe and how committed they are.

Power leadership also tends to centralize power and decision-making to one person.

Instead of working to develop trust in your team and get your team to trust you, you focus on finding external ways to drive performance.

If you rely solely on power leadership, you don’t necessarily try to get feedback from your team. Although, it doesn’t mean you aren’t willing to listen when it comes your way.

Power relies heavily on forcing team members to do something through the use of threats, whether they’re implied or explicit. Intimidation is achieved by creating the belief that if an employee does not comply, they will face punishment whether that means being fired, losing out on a promotion or being berated in a public space. This kind of negative leadership can create the feeling amongst team members that they have no choice but to do things a certain way.

Power remains in the hands of one person, or a small group. This independent approach to leadership means that the team is not consulted during the decision-making process, and are often micromanaged to ensure that the leader’s methods are upheld. This undemocratic response to leadership removes a sense of responsibility from the team, decreasing morale.

Influence leadership

Influence leadership is having an impact on the beliefs and actions of the people you are leading.

You notice how the people you lead become motivated and committed, and you use what you know to generate positive results.

Influence leadership in management is based on two-way trust with the people you lead. 59% of leaders consider employee feedback a high priority, and building this trust can help make way for this feedback.

As an influential leader, this means you are not only open to receiving constructive feedback, but actively encourage it. You understand that feedback is necessary to improve the wellness of the entire team and help you improve as a leader.

Influence understands that teamwork is a dependent process: the team is dependent on their leader for guidance and the leader is dependent on employees to produce excellent work. As a result, there is a shift from autocratic decision-making to an emphasis on transparency and getting the team involved at various stages of a project’s inception. This approach means that team members feel valued, and as a result, produce work that reflects that.

Influence leads to an entirely voluntary approach to completing work. Through the use of positive affirmations and encouragement, influence results in the team feeling that they have a choice in both the work they’re required to complete as well as the means they take to get it done. Threats are traded in for persuasion and negotiation to allow employees more control over the work they’re doing.