ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius. This is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but because of the way we work today, a lot of us are often leading people we don’t have direct authority over. That’s true whether you’re working on a cross-functional team with clients or outside vendors when you’re trying to manage up.
ADI IGNATIUS: When you’re trying to manage your podcast co-host.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, that too. It is very hard. And so today we’re going to talk about the rising importance of indirect influence to persuade people to buy into your ideas, marshal resources, succeed in your work, and advance in your career. Our guest argues that it’s one of the most important skills to develop.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right. Consider me influenced. Tell me what to do.
ALISON BEARD: Well, she argues that it starts with listening and observing. It’s about recognizing the informal networks, emotional dynamics, and hidden decision makers that exist inside every organization and among external stakeholders and knowing how to work with them rather than against them. And she’s going to share some of the best ways to go about that. Pamela Meyer is the founder and CEO of Calibrate. She wrote the book, How to Read the Room: The Art and Science of Social Observation, and the HBR article, Five Ways to Wield Influence When You Lack Authority. Here’s our conversation.
So why is indirect influence so much more important now than it was in the past?
PAMELA MEYER: Well, one of the reasons is that we don’t live in a hierarchical world anymore. In fact, in most organizations, authority is really distributed. And so we need to learn ways to work ourselves around an organization, have influence, but not at the same time cause what we call reactance.
So what we find oftentimes is when someone tries to influence someone and they put pressure on them, it almost always threatens their autonomy. And when their autonomy is threatened, they pull back, they have reactance, and they’re not able to be influenced. And so now what we really need to do is teach people a sort of artful way to make their way through much more complicated organizations with much more complicated people with different ages and different generations at different levels of seniority and find ways to match their path to the person that they’re actually trying to influence.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And we do hear so much about how important it is to be authentic and transparent, but what psychologically is going on that just telling someone what you would like them to do or what you think they should do doesn’t work when you’re not their boss?
PAMELA MEYER: It actually goes back to social determination theory, which is a very stable theory of psychology developed in the ’80s. And it’s a theory of motivation. Human beings have three very profound needs that they express in the workplace. One of those needs is for competence. One of those needs is for relatedness. And one of those needs, which is really profound, is for autonomy. We really need to feel that we have agency.
And what happens with influence and what happens with reactance is that it takes away our sense of autonomy. So what happens, people start distorting the way they express it in the room. Somebody, for example, who, you’ve probably seen this many times at an organization, you can’t get them to do what you want. You just keep asking them. Oftentimes those people are declared, oh, they have executive function issues.
No, that’s not what’s happening usually. It’s usually a bid for autonomy. They just don’t want to be told what to do. And so oftentimes what we need to do is think through psychologically when we’re asking somebody to do something for us or we’re trying to get something done or we’re trying to steer a group. What are the needs that each of these people have? And how can I satisfy that so that I can actually provide them with a sense that they are actually making the decision themselves?
ALISON BEARD: So you talk about five paths to indirect influence. And the first is figuring out who might not be at the top of the org chart, but still has hidden power. So how do you get better at spotting those people?
PAMELA MEYER: I call these people the influence spotters. The bad influence spotter is the one who looks at job titles and says, “Okay, that person has influence.” The good influence spotter walks in the room. They pause. They look around. They’ve done a lot of research on who’s who ahead of time. And then to figure out who actually has influence, they particularly focus on decisions that are being made, who actually influences a hard decision.
So when they can figure that out, who might be influencing the decision, where are the micro alliances, who’s looking at whom when there’s a disagreement. Once they start to spot who has influence, then they do what we call a chain analysis. They actually go back a few chains and they figure out who’s influencing that person. So influence spotters are analytic. There’s an art to it and there’s a science to it. They’re artful observers, but they’re also scientific thinkers. They think through who might be influencing the person who actually has the influence, who’s got their ear.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So I think you’re beginning to answer my next question is sort of when you figure out those people, and I think we all know who they are, like, oh, that person really seems to have a lot of power. How do you bring them on your side?
PAMELA MEYER: Well, you have to do it gently and carefully. You don’t just call up somebody and you don’t just… For example, let’s say you decide that the CEO’s long time confidant is the real power in the room. You’re not going to just call that person up and say, “Hey, let’s have coffee.” You’re probably going to really insult the person who really owns that decision. So you have to be very artful and very careful about it and kind of make it optional to open up a conversation with that person. Make it gentle, make it optional. Maybe just get to know them a little bit.
You don’t necessarily want to call somebody up and have a direct conversation with them about the exact concern you might have in the moment. You’ve got to be artful about it and you’ve got to kind of work around it and get to know them and bring something to the table. If you think somebody’s the real influencer in the room and you need something from them, also think what are you going to bring to them that’s going to be helpful to them?
ALISON BEARD: And I think one thing that really struck me in working with you on the article and in reading the book is that this advice isn’t just for sort of aspiring leaders who quite obviously don’t have any influence. It’s actually for really senior leaders too, who can’t seem to sort of move the needle in the direction that they want. And so they need to be finding these influence spotters within the C-suite or on the board, right?
PAMELA MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. Part of what’s happened is our culture really rewards what we say and not what we see. It rewards speaking instead of watching. So a lot of people that are sitting on boards who have a lot to do and they’re flooded with noise and information and many, many more decisions and they’re distracted, they’re preoccupied, they have a lot of stuff going on in their working memory. They don’t have time to think thoughtfully about this at all. And so instead of sitting back and observing and trying to figure out who really has influence, they’ll blurt out exactly what needs to get done or they’ll miss the timing in the moment. And they’re backfiring completely when that happens. They really should not be doing that. They should be thinking it through much more slowly, much more thoughtfully. And usually if you do that and you have an eye towards when a room is shifting, you can get a sense of what caused that and where that influence might be.
ALISON BEARD: So the next approach is becoming a backchanneler. What exactly do you mean by that?
PAMELA MEYER: So the backchanneler is the one who takes a meeting that’s really frozen where two factions in a meeting just can’t figure it out and a decision can’t be made. And they pull one of those players or two of those players off to the side. Oftentimes today this happens virtually. It’s not necessarily happening at work. Although it does happen at TGI Fridays, it doesn’t always happen on the telephone. And they have a backchannel conversation. They have a private conversation. They open a backchannel. A backchannel has been a function of diplomatic influence for all of history. And it happens as well at the boardroom level and it happens at the junior level. And backchannelers can be unbelievably, unbelievably talented and they can get a lot done.
But sometimes what we see is the wrong person tries to open up a backchannel. If you’re not trusted and you’re new to an organization and you all of a sudden start opening up a backchannel and kind of lurking in the corners and having private conversations with people, people are just going to consider you a political animal. If you want to be a backchanneler, ask yourself if you’ve earned the trust of people to do that before you open that backchannel because it’s not for everybody.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I mean, again, in this age of transparency, great value placed on being upfront with people, this does seem like a tricky thing to get right. So what advice do you have for people who want to do it without being seen as a manipulative political person?
PAMELA MEYER: So the most important piece of advice is to do it temporarily. Opening up permanent backchannels makes you look like a power grabber and it makes you look transactional. But if you have a particular item that you want done, you have a decision that needs to be made, you have a frozen conversation that needs to be unlocked, open the backchannel and then close it. Say thank you, that was great. Bring it back to the meeting and make it public that you all had that conversation or not. You don’t have to necessarily make it public, but bring the finalization, bring the final decision public so that people understand that the whole thing doesn’t happen in the backchannel.
The best backchannelers, the ones who are the most talented at it that I’ve seen in organization after organization, are the chiefs of staff. They’re the ones that are, they’re pulling someone aside and they’re saying, “Hey, I noticed you were interrupted in that meeting. You didn’t get to talk. I’m putting the postmortem report together. What is it you wanted to say? Let me get that in.” They’re the ones that are observing the room really carefully and they serve usually a CEO or a COO or a CFO. And so people take them very seriously. Sometimes they’re not trusted because they have the ear of power. But the really talented chiefs of staff use the backchannel in a very flexible and a very talented way. And they’re the best backchannelers that I’ve seen.
ALISON BEARD: And so the rest of us can learn from how they do it.
PAMELA MEYER: I think so.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. Another path is being a precision mover who knows sort of exactly the right time to exert influence. Why is timing so very important?
PAMELA MEYER: First of all, I just want to say it’s really hard to be a good precision mover because most of us are not regulated enough. We’re not emotionally regulated enough, nor are we strategic thinkers enough to figure out what’s the right time to bring this decision. What’s the time to release this information? What’s the best time to have the labor negotiation? So the strategic thinker tends to be oftentimes the precision mover. It’s very, very hard to get right. One thing that precision movers do really well that most of us don’t even think to do is instead of thinking in moments, they think about time windows. So they’ll say, “Oh, the next quarter might be a good time. Let me just think about when in that quarter I can bring this information forth.” But precision movers often backfire all the time. It’s really hard to do it well.
So let’s say, for example, you have really bad news that you need to release and you’re trying to be a precision mover and you’re being thoughtful about it and you’re like, “I’m just going to hold this back one more week.” Well, someone else is going to release that information. It’s going to completely backfire and you’re going to look evasive. So it’s really easy to be a bad precision mover and it’s really hard to do it well, but I will say that there are CEOs all over this country and all over the world who made their way from being an intern all the way up to the top of the organization by being thoughtful and by being precision movers. So it can deliver absolutely outsized influence, but there are very, very few people that do it extremely well.
ALISON BEARD: So definitely approach with caution, but is there a way to build up those skills so you’re better at it?
PAMELA MEYER: I think you could consider precision moving a micro skill. You could try it in small ways. Let’s say you have a hire you want to bring to your boss. Well, don’t bring the resume up until the perfect time. Let’s say you need to take an extra week off, or let’s say someone’s told you they want to change to a remote work. Or let’s say you’re about to make a hard decision on firing somebody. These are micro decisions. They aren’t major strategic decisions for an organization. Practice those skills. I think it’s a great idea. Go in and try to figure out the best way to time it. And if it backfires, it’s a little bit negative. It’s probably somewhat uncomfortable for you in terms of how you need to navigate next, but you haven’t lost the whole game.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. Let’s move on to being a connector. How does that help the leader themselves gain influence, putting other people together?
PAMELA MEYER: So connectors can give you unbelievable influence if you’re thoughtful about it. I mean, what connectors do is they find gaps and they provide something in the gap. Let’s say a form of expertise. Let’s say there’s a project that’s across many, many divisions. They allow a certain form of coordination. They can also just figure out that two people would really get along and work well together and they’re in two different places and put them together. So connectors can be incredibly influential and many of us can be connectors. You don’t need to be a leader to be a connector. Oftentimes you’ll see connectors are people at much lower levels in an organization and they found they have social skills, they love people. This is a way that they can actually get an on-ramp into an important conversation and have some influence in the room. But connectors also, again, you can be a good connector or a bad connector.
And we’ve all been on the receiving end of that. I mean, when I was single, people would call me up and they’d be like, “Oh, I have a blind date for you to go on.” And so oftentimes I go on that date and I’m like, “That person wasn’t right for me at all.” Sometimes you’re a favor for the other person. It’s not actually mutually beneficial to both people. And so we see this oftentimes. Oftentimes the traditional advice is send somebody a news article, go for coffee, tell them you were just thinking about them. People sniff that out overnight. It is so easy to sniff out someone who’s transactional, who’s collecting people, who’s kind of a surface connector, who wants to have a huge Rolodex. That’s not going to work in this era because we’re in an era where anybody can call anybody.
It’s not the way it used to be. You can use LinkedIn, you can use any other platform, and you can find your way through any connection to connecting with anybody you want. So I tell people, dial it back. Be much more thoughtful about it. If you want to be a valid connector, somebody that people really listen to and you don’t want to waste their time, only connect people when you know that both sides are going to benefit from it. Because if you don’t, they’re not going to take you seriously and they’re going to sense that you’re doing it for yourself rather than for them.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I’m laughing because I just got an email from a college friend who said, “Oh, I have someone in Boston who you might want to interview.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t want to interview that person. Why would you think I want to interview that person?”
PAMELA MEYER: I mean, informational interviews are out, sending around news articles that might be interesting, out. Would you meet my daughter’s friend? Out. Yeah.
ALISON BEARD: Exactly.
PAMELA MEYER: Don’t do favors. Only be someone who’s known for really thinking through what people need and you’ll have incredible influence from it.
ALISON BEARD: The final path to influence is being a pulse reader. So explain a little bit more about what you mean by that.
PAMELA MEYER: So the pulse reader is the person who reads the vibe of the room. They’re the person who understands what people need from a kind of heart perspective. Indra Nooyi, the former head of PepsiCo, she ran a $64 billion company, 260,000 employees. And she was famous for writing letters to 400 of her best employees’ parents every year to tell them in a paragraph what they accomplished as essentially sending a message, “You raised a successful person and I’ve noticed it.” She got at the heart of what mattered in that culture. And that’s incredibly, incredibly influential. And the pulse readers are able to do that. They’re able to kind of observe what the room needs, but the really good ones also have the ability to articulate what it needs.
So if you’re someone who figures out, “Oh, everybody’s really stressed out because AI is coming in and it’s going to take everybody’s jobs. There’s ambient dread all over the organization. I need to really help with this.” It’s not going to work unless they can actually name in the moment in a way that people resonate with what’s actually happening. So that’s the art and science of it. Again, you can be a great pulse reader, but if you don’t have the ability to actually talk in an articulate way about what’s going on, nobody’s going to pay attention to you.
ALISON BEARD: So again, how do you develop those skills if they don’t come naturally to you?
PAMELA MEYER: So there are a couple ways that you can do that. As a pulse reader, the most important skill you can take on is pausing. Walking in the room, pausing, trying to think through what will make this room better. Getting out of your own self-monitoring, getting out of your own self-consciousness and thinking through who in this room needs something? What do they need? Do they need a sense of relatedness? Do they need to be given more agency? Are they somebody where they’re making bids for competence and they actually need me to acknowledge that they are competent?
Start with pausing, observing the room, and trying to figure out what it is people need. And if that’s too complex for you and it’s a really busy day and it’s an incredibly busy meeting and you don’t have time to figure all that out, step back and ask yourself, you know what?
As you look at each person in the room, are they a visionary or are they a detailed person? Just make it that binary. If you start to do that and you start to think about people that way, you’ll just get out of your own way and you’ll start to read the pulse. People do this with kids when they’re teaching them how to identify their emotions.
You can make a list of all the possible emotions you might see in a room. You might actually ask, are people nervous? Are they anxious? Are they dreading something? Are they warm? What’s actually happening in the room? And use that vocabulary to start naming it. And you’d be amazed if you actually walk into a room with that list of vocabulary words and you start to throw them out there. You’ll know. It’s like a fishing expedition.
You throw it out there, you’ll know, people will start nodding. They’ll start looking at you. You’ll get a sense when you throw out what you think is happening, they’ll give you the positive feedback that what you said is actually the real case. I’ve often had a situation where I’ll walk in a room and I’ll say, “You know what? I think the problem is we’ve got a trust issue here. We really don’t trust that this outside vendor that we’re working with is going to deliver. Let’s just be clear about it. Do we need to back up and re-license or do we need to confront them directly? What do we need to do?” The minute you say there’s a trust issue, the heads start nodding. All of a sudden you’ve kind of named what’s at the core of it.
ALISON BEARD: And this seems like something that everyone can get better at because it really involves staying quiet, listening, looking. It doesn’t require those sort of timing skills or political skills. It’s much more about being empathetic.
PAMELA MEYER: I think so, but I think it also involves understanding that there’s an element of timing to this as well. A pulse reader can read the pulse, run away and write the right memo, not necessarily name it in the moment. So if you’re in a room and the room is, this is going to sound a bit metaphysical, but you’ll be able to feel it if you actually walk in the room and you try to practice this. If you ask yourself, is this room expansive or is it contracting? Are people still frictionless? Are the jokes not landing? Are people blurting out kind of a bad laugh at a bad joke? Do you have a sense that people are kind of withdrawing? In that kind of contracted environment, you don’t necessarily, even if you know what the problem is and even if you know you could name exactly what’s at the pulse of that. It’s not necessarily the right time to do that because there’s already an incredible amount of tension in the room. Maybe you just wait.
If you’ve got a room that’s expansive and there’s like a frothy, happy, almost like a, I wouldn’t say happy, but let’s say there’s a room that’s expansive and there’s a big argument going on, but there’s trust in the room and you kind of feel the friction and the room feels like people are willing to kind of get into the muddy middle of it. That’s a time when you really can be a pulse reader. You can have an incredible impact.
ALISON BEARD: In the executives that you counsel and coach, are you trying to get them to build all of these skills in tandem or do you tend to encourage them to focus on particular ones?
PAMELA MEYER: So I spend a lot of time coaching people not only to develop these skills, because you certainly need room reading skills and you certainly need to be able to walk into a room and understand and intuit where the power alliances are, who’s got influence, who’s withdrawn, who’s actually taking up too much space and shouldn’t be. All of that I can teach them to do. But I also spend an enormous amount of time with executives retraining them on how to prepare to walk into the room because there’s a lot you need to do before you even walk in the room to be effective.
I teach them what I call the triple B method. We actually profile people. We look at their background, their behavior, their beliefs. We figure everything out we can about them before you walk in the room. For example, I know you and I went to high school right down the street from each other.
ALISON BEARD: Oh, I didn’t realize that.
PAMELA MEYER: Yes. I went to Sidwell, you went to Walt Whitman.
ALISON BEARD: Yep. Okay.
PAMELA MEYER: I know you were a star athlete in college. Still hold the record for best assists in volleyball.
ALISON BEARD: Wow. You’ve done a deep dive.
PAMELA MEYER: Yeah, of course. I know you care about your local community. I know a lot about you before I walk in the room. And we train executives to do that and to try to understand as much as they possibly can about somebody. Not just their background, but also what are their belief systems? What kind of behavioral, we call it behavioral residue, they may leave in the room.
Really, who are they as a whole person? Why? Because if you want influence downstream, you’re going to need some way to connect with them. You need rapport. You need to understand them in a much more deep way. And certainly you can, I mean, you can use AI to kind of speed read somebody in the bathroom right before you meet them if you don’t have a chance to do that. But what we do is much deeper and it’s much more thoughtful.
And we actually spend a lot of time retraining professionals on how to invest the time to do that well because that is where they get their edge. There are a lot of people that can walk in and kind of wing it in a meeting, but managers tell me over and over again when I consult to them, please tell my staff to prepare because I know who’s prepared and who’s not when they walk in the room.
ALISON BEARD: And tell listeners about your own unique background that’s prepared you to teach executives on these skills, these reading the room skills?
PAMELA MEYER: Well, so I spent over a decade teaching people how to detect deception and how to elicit information from people. We use this on inside threat detection and on figuring out when people might be deceptive and certainly in negotiation. And I did that for a very, very long time and I still do that. I still train people all the time on lie spotting and deception detection, but the environment’s changed. We’re in the middle of a trust epidemic now. And so what used to be kind of a quaint polarization, people are in different silos, it’s much more embittered. People really feel it. And the reason I wrote this book, How to Read the Room, is because I really want to get people back to a much more reasonable and thoughtful conversation into that middle ground and learning how to kind of be brokers of trust because we’ve got a real problem. Everybody, every single person, every single audience that I talk to, every single organization I work with will tell me, yes, people are way too polarized and we’ve got to do something about it because we’re all going to have to get along.
The more positive the environment you’re in, the better work you’re going to get from people. If you push them down and you take autonomy and agency away from them, they’re going to withdraw and they’re going to become embittered and you’re not going to get their best work. So you can have a room full of absolutely brilliant people and if they can’t read each other, it’s very emotionally expensive for the organization and for them. So I teach people to read each other, to read the power dynamics, and also to really focus on how to develop trust in teams because that ends up being much, much more important downstream than just having a collection of geniuses in the room.
ALISON BEARD: So is the idea that leaders can either do all of these things themselves or if they’re more senior in the organization, make sure that they have people on their teams to play each one of these indirect influencing roles?
PAMELA MEYER: I think every leader needs a panoply of talented, diverse, skilled people around them. I don’t think it makes sense to say, “Okay, I need one backchanneler, one influencer, one precision timer.” What I do think you can do with leaders though is to attune them to these skills. So when they’re interviewing people and when they’re developing people to kind of note, does this person have the emotional intelligence to be a pulse reader? Does this person have the strategic long-term thinking skill to be a precision timer? Does this person have enough personal sway if they were an influence spotter to actually be able to have a conversation with the person who’s the most influential in the room? So I think it’s a matter of not finding somebody who can go on every path, but on thinking through a new set of skills that will help people read the room and be more influential long term. But I think it would be very dangerous to select just for somebody who’s good on these skills.
The bottom line is that it’s a great idea to have diversity across your team, but you shouldn’t take every path literally. These are skills, they’re composite skills. So it’s worth understanding what the paths are so you can really select for those skills here and there. So if somebody walks in the door and they have emotional intelligence, that’s great, but you might want to ask yourself, do they have the ability to be kind of regulated enough to be a precision mover as well? Would they be able to withhold information for two weeks if you ask them to do that? Does somebody have the pulse reading skill?
Well, you don’t necessarily want to ask yourself, do I need a pulse reader in the room? But you might want somebody who’s articulate enough about how they describe what happened in a room that the emotional resonance of it was able to be understood. So you don’t want to create a phantom cabinet of every single path taker, but you do want to focus on the skills and see if you can start to select for them a bit.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s say our listeners have heard this podcast, they’re bought into the idea of exerting indirect influence more effectively. What is something or a few things that they should do in the next week or the next month to start building these muscles?
PAMELA MEYER: The first thing you want to do is you want to just think of the room as not one audience. When you walk into the room, pause, get a sense of the vibe, look around, be prepared, know as much as you can before you walk in the room, but realize this is a collection of individuals with very different needs. So it’s not one audience. Do not focus on how you’re going to sound, what people are going to think about you, your performance. Focus on how you can make that room better. Once you do that, you’ll be able to pick a path to influence. The second thing I think is that you probably want to think through, like if you’re trying to figure out what’s happening with influence in the room, where are the influencers? Where can I make a difference? You probably want to watch the room and take particular note of when there’s a challenge to authority, when there’s an inflection point, when there’s a battle, when a joke lands badly, when something happens in the room that kind of shifts the energy.
One thing that you can do that you probably didn’t do before, instead of watching the action and getting the popcorn out and saying, “Whoa, those two are really having a fight,” look around the room. Who’s glancing at who? Who’s already landed on a Slack channel? Who’s leaning towards someone else? Where are those micro alliances starting to form? Once you start to look past the action in the room and instead at the patterns that occur after something important has happened, after there’s been a major shift, once you start to focus on that and really build that muscle, you’ll start to see paths to influence everywhere.
ALISON BEARD: Wonderful. Well, thank you for teaching me and our listeners how to build more influence in our organizations. Thanks so much for being on the show.
PAMELA MEYER: Goodbye. It’s been great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Pamela Meyer, founder and CEO of Calibrate and author of the book, How to Read the Room: The Art and Science of Social Observation, and the HBR article, Five Ways to Wield Influence When You Lack Authority.
Next week, Adi speaks with Jared Diamond about some of history’s great leaders and how much of what they accomplished was due to chance. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, and senior production editor, Kristin Murphy Romano. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
