Data People Need Influence Without Authority
A skill that anyone can build over time with practice
“It’s frustrating and I don’t like it,” said John, an analytics engineer on my team back in the day. He was grumpy but also endearing in his literal and vocal assessment of whatever situation he found himself in.
In this particular case, John’s displeasure was directed at the engineering org we relied on for product instrumentation. My data team reported up to the CMO, and these engineers reported up to the CTO, which meant we didn’t always have a shared sense of priorities. Also, the engineering org was fairly large, with many subteams and a revolving door of SDMs (or so it seemed from our vantage point). To top it all off, we were geographically separate, so there were timezone and cultural differences that widened the gap between us even more.
I never fully closed that gap. John stayed frustrated, and looking back, I could have pushed harder to bring our teams together. Not every situation like this resolves itself neatly. To get our teams to work together effectively, we needed to exert influence. And because our respective reporting lines did not converge until the CEO, it had to be that special kind: influence without authority.
This article is not a step-by-step guide on how to flex influence without authority. You can get ChatGPT to give you a pretty good list of tips about that. It is, however, an argument in favor of building up your influence-without-authority skills as a data person, because I really do believe it’s underrated.
Data teams especially need influence without authority because we’re often embroiled in situations that, on one hand, we don’t own, but on the other hand, we’re expected to solve. We collaborate with and depend on many other business functions including engineering, product, marketing, finance, legal, and whoever else happens to be around. Because of how we’re positioned, a common way we drive change is through influence without authority.
I don’t see influence as the kind of thing that requires formal training. I believe, instead, that it’s a skill anyone can build over time through practice. Meanwhile, I’ve found that it’s surprisingly hard to articulate. I struggled more than usual to write this article, and I had to salvage it from the trash to turn it into what you’re reading now.
Straight from the dustbin, here are two stories about influence without authority, with my own take to help you understand what worked.
Exhibit A: Saying yes before you know what you’re doing
About 15 years ago, as I was still just beginning to find my way as a leader, I somehow wound up as the mediator in a conflict between two global data community nonprofits. There was some overlapping space between them, and I was involved in both, and the executive director of one group asked me to step in. For whatever reason it did not scare me. I like conflict resolution, so I said yes. I found myself sitting between them, first over email and then quite literally in person at a conference, where we drafted and redrafted and finally agreed to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that described the partnership. I didn’t even know what an MOU was, and I’d never seen one before. I just knew that we needed to find terms that everyone could agree to, so I did it.
Here’s what made this work: I was seen as neutral not because I lacked a position, but because I held a position on both sides. I sat on the board of one nonprofit, and I’d co-founded the event series that had become the other org’s protective turf. That gave me standing with each of them, which is different from having authority over either of them. On one side was a president with a fiery, convicted personality who wasn’t going to back down. On the other side was an industry leader who’d assumed stewardship of an event series (years after we’d built it together), and was actively encouraging organizers around the world to keep hosting it locally. Both of them were good people, but neither one wanted to budge. I was even-tempered enough, and connected enough to both sides, to step into the middle of it. The skill is simply a willingness to occupy a tough spot that belongs to you more than anyone else.
Exhibit B: Handing off the solution to make it stick
One situation that I handled in the past few years involved data quality. Like so many data teams, we faced an ongoing series of problems with our product instrumentation. It was wrong, it was missing, it double-fired, it was good-until-it-wasn’t, you name it. I’m sure you can relate. To address this, I led the writing of a data quality SLA that had been considered in theory but not yet built out. As someone representing data consumers, I was feeling the pain of not having one, so I picked it up after its original author left the company. I iterated on revisions to describe how to handle data quality problems for different classes of data based on importance to the business. As the SLA approached publication, I handed it off to a peer who was better positioned to drive long-term adoption. He did the hard work of socializing it with engineering teams. Eventually the SLA reached nearly 1,000 software engineers, who agreed to (and, amazingly, actually did) treat the highest-priority class of these problems with the urgency deserved.
To be honest, part of my motivation was wanting a stretch project outside of my own reporting line, one that would help me build my case for promotion. I was spending time on a problem that technically belonged to someone else’s team, because they didn’t have the energy to solve it and I did. That’s influence without authority in the most basic sense: doing work you have every reason to expect someone else to do, because you’re the one who actually wants it to exist. The handoff part was important. This other team was the right owner for the SLA operationally, since they were upstream from the teams like mine that depended on it. I recognized that the SLA would only make a long-term impact if the team with real operational leverage thought of it as their own.
I realize that influence without authority might seem like a chore. Here’s this work that no one else wants, the kind that requires lots of back-and-forth with other human beings, which plenty of data folks (especially the introverts) are loath to do. But it’s also a great way to earn trust, because it’s unclaimed.
Trust-building is timeless, even during the disruptive period we find ourselves in now. The mechanical parts of data work like SQL and dashboards are becoming much easier and more automated. Soft skills are still in demand, though. Things like reading the room, earning trust with folks who are far beyond your reporting line, and persuading people who’ve got other motivations. Data teams still sit at the crossroads of all the business functions, and I don’t see that changing. Given where we’re at and where we’re headed, the ability to influence without authority is more important than ever.