AMA: Coda Head of Product & Design, Lane Shackleton on Influencing without Authority

The simple answer is to do what you say you’re going to to do. It sounds simple, but it’s not always easy to achieve. When you make good on your commitments over a long period of time, you gain a deep trust from those around you. On the contrary, when you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, you begin to erode the trust of those around you. Again, it sounds simple but it’s not easy to do this over a long time with lots of diverse stakeholders. I find that when I don’t do this well, ...Read More

There are two things I think about in cases like this: fears and steel-manning. I’ve found that one of the fastest ways to help get alignment amongst executives is to start by establishing their fears about a given strategy, plan, write-up, etc. Often disagreements in strategy come down to one person or team worrying about downstream consequences that can often be mitigated once they are out in the open. The other useful tool in these situations is steel-manning. The idea is that often during di ...Read More

Lots of ways! Here are two that I find myself talking about a lot. First, get really good at spotting ambiguity and make it your job to remove it. Ambguity comes in lots of forms. It can be engineers not knowing what to do next, ambiguous next steps coming out of a meeting, or teams being unsure what commitments they are making to each other. In all of these instances (and many more), ambiguity slows down teams. So whether it’s big or small, make it your job to take any ambiguity you see and mak ...Read More

I think it’s important to let team members resolve conflict between themselves whenever possible. If you’re seen as the ‘fixer’ for all conflicts on a team, it puts you in a tough position and disempowers the team. So my first reaction when conflict arises is to attempt to coach the two team members individually on how they can resolve the conflict directly with the other person, without me or someone else having to be formally involved. One of the best tools I know in terms of conflict resoluti ...Read More

Few tips here. First, build trust before you need it. It’s so important to build these relationships before you need to test them. Grab coffee, lunch, ask about people’s family life, etc. If you’re able to build a foundation of trust before you need to influence a different team, you’ll find it’s much easier than starting that relationship cold. Second, understand their priorities. It sounds obvious but you’ve got to start by putting yourself in their shoes. There are some easy ways to do this. ...Read More