You Don't Have an Authority Problem. You Have a Blind Spot Problem.
HBR argues that most authority problems are actually blind-spot problems — there's usually someone shaping outcomes in a business who isn't on the org chart, and most leaders never think to ask what that person thinks.
Prompted by “You Don't Have an Authority Problem. You Have a Blind Spot Problem.”, Harvard Business Review (Pamela Meyer).
Most executives think their influence problem is about tactics — the right words, the right timing. Usually it's simpler than that: there's someone shaping outcomes in your business right now who isn't on your org chart, and you haven't asked what they think in months.
HBR tells the story of a newly appointed chief innovation officer at a Fortune 100 company who kept hitting quiet resistance to every initiative she launched. She noticed other executives glancing at one quiet division head before responding to her, and traced it back to a retired COO who held no formal role but whose opinion on risk still governed the old guard's thinking. Once she talked to him directly, the resistance disappeared within a week.
Who's the person on your team like that?
That's a Fortune 100 problem, but the smaller version is worse, not better, at a tighter company. In a huge organization, informal influence is diffuse and takes real work to trace. In yours, it's usually one person — the ops manager everyone quietly checks with, the old customer contact nobody officially reports to anymore, the former partner who still gets a call before big decisions. You could find that person in a week if you looked. Most CEOs never do.
Try this at your next leadership meeting: ask out loud, "Who in this company has more real influence over how a decision lands than their title suggests — and when's the last time we actually asked them anything?" Watch who hesitates before answering.
Finding the blind spot before someone else names it for you is a lot of what happens in 1:1 Coaching.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗