Lessons on "Influencing Without Authority"
I just celebrated my 4th anniversary at Facebook. Being a PM at Facebook has been a bootcamp for "Influencing without authority".
Influencing without authority is the process of "Earning every decision that needs to be made, whether big or small".
At Facebook the importance of Influence without authority is amplified by three things.
The decisions are complex and the tradeoffs are nuanced, having significant implications for the billions of users across the world.
Each team is staffed with highly talented people across a number of functions who have strong diverse opinions.
At Facebook's scale most project require ordination across teams and most likely organizations involving large numbers of people.
There are five very obvious principles that I learnt the hard way in Influencing without authority.
Mindset: Influence is about helping a group of people make an informed decision by understanding the tradeoffs between options clearly. It is not about selling an idea or driving home an agenda. In order to influence others, I need to be willing to change my mind based on the facts and not care about whose idea it is.
Trustful relationships: Influencing others requires building trustful relationships. In order to have trustful relationships people I needed to demonstrate through words and actions that (i) I care more about making the right decision for the company than my own or my team's goals (ii) I care about the needs of the other parties who would be impacted by any decision and would represent them well even if they weren't around in a meeting (iii) I had not hidden agenda and laid out all my cards upfront. This applied to both my peers as well as leaders.
Good processes: The outcome of influencing without authority is to get deep alignment on a decision that people will follow through on when the going gets tough. Running a good where people have a change to articulate their POV and agree on the tradeoffs is really important to getting deep alignment. Planning for sufficient time and designing the process well is key. More about processes to get deep alignment here.
Clear decision framework: Every decision eventually boils down making tradeoffs between options across different criteria. The key then is to align on MECE options and criteria first with all the stake holders. Then aligning with them on the values for each option. And finally clearly articulating the tradeoffs between the options and the recommendations from different parties for those options. At Facebook this is called Decision by Traffic Light. My wife made a decision by traffic light to buy a washer dryer set last year. :-)
Writing as a tool to drive alignment: The surprising skill in influence and alignment is writing collaboratively and publicly. This gives people a chance to comment on the content multiple times and for you to address all the incoming feedback asynchronously. This results in getting the best outcomes as the top ideas bubble up and concerns get addressed by the time a document is ready for decision making.
Finally having a high level of emotional intelligence is key to driving great outcomes in high stakes situations.