Let me paint a picture that might feel familiar.
You're accountable for the outcome of a program. You've built the plan, you own the timeline, your name is on it. But the people who actually have to execute it? They don't report to you. They have their own managers, their own priorities, and at least three other things they've been told are also urgent this week.
Welcome to program management! Welcome to Chief of Staff life. Welcome to basically every ops role at a company that's scaling faster than its org chart.
This is the reality that nobody really prepares you for: you are responsible for things you cannot control, and the lever you have? Relationships.
In theory, influencing without authority sounds like a leadership superpower. In practice, however, jt can feel like pushing a boulder uphill while everyone around you has a bulldozer.
When you don't have positional power, you can't mandate. You can't just tell someone to prioritize your thing. You can't force a decision. You can't make people care about your timeline if they don't already care about the outcome.
What you can do is make people want to work with you. And that distinction, between someone who has to work with you and someone who wants to, is everything.
I've said this in every interview I've ever had, and it's something I preach in my day-to-day work, and I mean it every time: relationships are the most important part of this job.
Not because it's a nice thing to say, but because it's true.
When you need an engineer to reprioritize something last minute, the relationship is what makes that conversation possible. When you need a VP to show up to a meeting they've already declined twice, the relationship is what gets them in the room. When something goes sideways and you need someone to be honest with you about why, the relationship is what makes them feel safe enough to actually tell you.
Without the relationship, you're just another person sending a Slack message that's easy to ignore.
It starts before you need anything. The biggest mistake I see is people trying to build relationships at the moment of need. That's not relationship building, that's asking for a favor from a stranger. Real influence is built in the quiet moments: the check-in that wasn't on the agenda, the time you asked someone what they were actually working on instead of just what was blocking your project, the moment you remembered something personal and acknowledged it. Those deposits matter enormously when you need to make a withdrawal.
It requires you to understand what people actually care about. Your priorities are not their priorities. If you walk into every interaction leading with your timeline, your dependencies, your needs, you're going to hit a wall quickly. The most effective ops leaders and program managers I know spend real time understanding what the people around them are trying to accomplish, what pressure they're under, what success looks like to them, and then they find the overlap. "Here's how this helps you" lands very differently than "here's what I need from you."
It means being the person who makes things easier, not harder. People gravitate toward people who make their lives better and away from people who make their lives harder. Simple as that. If every interaction someone has with you involves a status request, a deadline reminder, or an escalation, you're training them to dread your name in their inbox. If your interactions involve solving problems, removing blockers, making decisions easier, and occasionally just being a human being who sees them, that's a completely different dynamic.
It requires you to give things away. Credit, visibility, recognition. When you don't have authority, generosity is one of your most powerful tools. Publicly acknowledging someone's contribution, making sure their name is attached to the win, advocating for them in a room they're not in. These things build the kind of loyalty and goodwill that no org chart can manufacture.
I've seen technically excellent program managers completely stall out because they treated influence as a process problem instead of a people problem. They built beautiful project plans, ran tight meetings, and had every dependency mapped. But, they couldn't get anyone to actually move because they'd never invested in the relationships that make movement possible.
People want to follow and work with people they trust - full stop.
When the relationships aren't there:
Learn what people are proud of and reference it. Everyone has something they've built or done that they're quietly proud of. Find it and remember it.
Be honest about constraints, yours and theirs. Nothing builds trust faster than someone who tells you the truth about what's hard instead of pretending everything is fine.
Show up for things that aren't about your program. If someone has a launch, a presentation, a big moment, and you acknowledge it without an agenda attached, that lands.
Ask for their opinion before you need their buy-in. People who feel consulted early are a lot more likely to commit later.
And when things go sideways, which they will, own what's yours. A program manager who can say "I missed that" is someone people want to work with. One who always has an external reason is someone people learn to route around.
Influence without authority isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic one. And in roles like ours, it's often the difference between a program that actually ships and one that dies in a planning doc somewhere.
The authority was never the point. The trust is.
------------------------------------------------------------
Carly Keydel is a strategic operations and program management leader with 13+ years of experience leading cross-functional programs across early-stage startups and scaling organizations. She writes about operations, leadership, and the human side of getting things done. If this resonated, she'd love to connect.
