Unlocking change through informal influencers

While leaders and managers seemingly hold much of the decision-making authority in an organization, considerable power resides with the employees who must practically drive an initiative in order for it to succeed.

Formal authority and a top-down approach may not always succeed in driving change, especially if the change is perceived by the workforce as unbeneficial or at worst, detrimental to their personal aspirations or employment.

On such occasions, one realizes the importance of informal leaders or influencers within teams who can effectively connect with their peers, drive trust, bring people onboard, and make change happen. Informal influencers are nerve centers of the organization who could raise enthusiasm in teams, be experts in their fields, build consensus, act as role models, and hold an aura of charisma, trust, and optimism around them.

We interviewed folks from Clear to find out how they have discovered the power of informal influencers during the course of their careers. Here are some extracts from what we found out.

Atul Raina, Product strategy

I was working on a project with a services company for a banking client. The company was going through some troubles and had defaulted on the loans due. We had been engaged to check the quality of cash flows and project the state of business in the future. We wanted to start by going through the past financials but despite several reminders and escalations, we had not been able to make any progress. We had already met the management and had been assured of full support but things were not moving at the ground level.

My project lead found a colleague in our firm who knew the company very well and was also connected with the management. We included our colleague as a familiar friendly face in the meeting and it worked excellently in initiating the trust-building process. Both sides put up their concerns which were discussed and mitigated. From that meeting onwards, things started moving fast and we were able to get full cooperation from the staff. In the next few days, we were able to build rapport and created the deliverable on-time. Building credibility and trust is an important part of any process. In difficult situations, you just need a friendly face or influencer who can initiate the process and get things to move.

Apurv Jain, Product

I was involved in the overhaul of a major product workflow which spanned across all of the company’s products. Initiating an implementation puts the current one to maintenance and it was a big call to take. Many stakeholders’ buy-in was required to go ahead with the decision, including the product, engineering and business teams as it would have major repercussions on them in the short run. Their initial response would have probably been that this project could wait in the light of other business plans that were already in process.

To convince them of the urgency and importance of initiating this change, I approached experts within the organization. These were primarily team members from key account management and customer success teams who were close to customer pulse as well as internal tax experts who were aware of the issues and tickets that were flowing in from customers on a steady basis as a result of the gaps in the current workflow. I also coordinated with the product analytics team to find out what the ticket data indicated and to deep dive into the issues. Armed with this valuable information, I was able to convincingly argue out the importance of prioritizing this workflow overhaul on an immediate basis.

If these influencers had not been involved, the project would have been deprioritized and would have caused a lot of customer frustration and business loss over time. While it was an expensive and complex project requiring a lot of time and effort, taking it up on a timely basis has helped us plan better for the future. An organization must nurture such valuable individuals as they are true representatives of the customer and are able to look beyond immediate and obvious metrics and help the organization plan better for the future.

Avaneesh Kulshrestha, Category

I was working on a partner distribution program and we were planning to include a new offering to our partners. Our relationship managers were not yet acquainted with the product and needed to be scaled up immediately in order to pass on the information to partners for distribution. This was a cross functional program which required members of the business teams, marketing team, operations team and L&D team, to support the success of this program.

Training the entire team with the help of the L&D team would have taken us too much time. Since this was an urgent task, we had to think of other ways of addressing the challenge. I was able to identify experts in the team who had prior knowledge of the offering and were skilled with partner management.

We asked these members to pilot the program and then help with bringing the rest of the team onboard through internal training and motivation. These members first interacted with partners themselves and were hence able to identify nuances and possible queries that could turn up from the partners’ end. They then proceeded to train the rest of the team members through brief sessions on relevant content and created FAQ and pitch documents for them for easy reference. They also supported their team members by picking up on difficult questions from the partners and resolving them successfully.

This effort helped the team members to scale up quickly and become confident on the product. Had these influencers not been identified, the team would have not been set up for success and our timelines and sales would have been severely impacted. Informal experts or influencers can be considered as the backbone of executing any successful project.

Sanyogita Barabde, Strategy

I was involved in leading the GTM of a newly launched product in an organization I had recently joined. While I was an individual contributor, my work was to mobilize all the teams involved in the project i.e. category, sales, key account management, product, marketing and integrations.

When I first started working on the project, I noticed there were certain individuals who always spoke up in team meetings when a question was addressed to the broader group. Their teammates frequently consulted them for problem solving, or to get a priority item actioned upon even if it was beyond their defined scope of work.

The program by nature demanded a high level of operational agility, learning while doing, and dynamic cross-functional problem solving to adapt to the evolving market situation. I soon realized that it would be operationally inefficient to drive the various work streams through a top-down authority driven route. I naturally started engaging with the ‘hidden influencers’ to drive solutioning as well as execution. They played a pivotal role in aligning their teams on the evolving strategies and also held informal accountability for successful execution.

Functions or teams when operating in silos may work well within a top-down authority driven working model. However, when the situation demands these teams to work close together towards a common goal, these formal structures begin to slow down the momentum. This is when informal influencers play an invaluable role in hyper-accelerating progress which is critical for growth.

Hemant Pawar, HR

I had been tasked with carrying out a time motion study while working in a manufacturing facility to identify ways of optimizing processes on the shop-floor. The frontline workforce was mistrustful of the management’s intent and their first reaction to any management initiative was that of retaliation. I started facing a challenge with recording videos of people carrying out each operation since they were insecure about their job safety. Some came up to me to ask if this study was being done in order to make their work redundant and whether there would be job cuts as a result of this initiative. They insisted that this was an unhelpful study despite me explaining that it could also help us in bettering their ergonomic setup and working conditions, and refused to cooperate.

A unilateral approach of ordering or directing them through their managers would not have worked in this unionized setup. The only way to make the project successful was to help people understand that this was a mutually beneficial collaboration and build trust with them. I started interacting with them on a regular basis to understand them better. Gradually I became familiar with many of the shop floor employees and tried to help them on a personal level with the information and knowledge I had.

I realized that to win the trust of all the workmen, I had to build a relationship with the influencers on the floor and build a relationship with them. I identified such individuals and slowly and steadily brought them onboard by understanding their apprehensions and addressing them. These individuals were crucial in then convincing their colleagues to trust us and support us with the study. The project took about two months to complete but went smoothly once the team was no longer mistrustful. This project made me a huge believer in building relationships and the power of informal leaders in a team.

Conclusion

We can conclude that informal leadership comes in many shapes and forms. It can be by virtue of subject matter expertise or by the ability to invoke confidence, respect and trust in one’s peer group. Informal influence can especially be helpful in scenarios where formal leadership may not work effectively, for example in projects that require cross functional collaboration or an unknown setup. By identifying and harnessing the power of informal influencers in an organization, getting a buy-in from stakeholders and getting things done becomes much faster and easier.