How do you influence across the org without formal authority?

Question

Accepted Answer

Tech leads rarely have formal power over other teams or even their own, you can't *order* people. Your leadership runs on **influence: trust, credibility, relationships, and persuasion**. This is the core skill of senior technical leadership, and it's learnable.

## How to build influence

```text
✓ Build CREDIBILITY — be right often, deliver, admit when you're wrong
✓ Build RELATIONSHIPS before you need them — not just when you want something
✓ Understand others' GOALS — frame your ask in terms of what they care about
✓ Give before you take — help others; reciprocity is real
✓ Use DATA and reasoning, not just opinion or title
✓ Find allies and build coalitions for big changes
✓ Make it easy to say yes — lower the cost of agreeing with you
```

## Frame in their interests

People help you when helping you helps *them*. Don't argue "do this because I think it's right." Show how it advances *their* goals: "This shared library saves your team the work of building auth too." Influence is finding the overlap between what you want and what they want.

## A concrete example

You want three teams to adopt a shared logging standard. You can't mandate it. So you build it, make it genuinely easier than what they have, pilot it with one friendly team, show the wins, and let momentum and word-of-mouth carry it. Adoption by attraction, not decree.

## A pitfall

Trying to compensate for a lack of authority by acting authoritarian, demanding compliance you can't enforce. It breeds resentment and quiet resistance, and it doesn't work.

## Why it matters

Almost everything a TL achieves beyond their own keyboard happens through other people who don't report to them.

Influence is the multiplier on all your other skills, the difference between a good engineer and a leader the whole org follows.