Mike Klein:
Most people think influence is something you either have or you don’t. A title, a platform, a personality. The reality is far more interesting – and far more democratic.
When I led a session on Leading Through Influence at Riga Business School, I opened with a provocation: everyone in the room was already playing four distinct influence roles, whether they recognized it or not. The goal of the day wasn’t to teach people how to become influential. It was to help them become more intentional about the influence they were already exercising.
That framing matters. Because once you accept that influence isn’t a rank or a reward, it becomes something you can actually work with.
Two premises before we begin
The whole framework rests on two foundational beliefs.
First: everyone can be a leader. Leadership isn’t confined to the corner office or the executive row. McKinsey defines leadership as a set of mindsets and behaviors that aligns people in a collective direction – enabling them to work together, accomplish shared goals, and adjust to changing environments. Ken Blanchard describes it more simply as coalescing people around a shared vision. Neither definition requires a title.
Second: leadership is distinct from authority or management. You can hold authority without leading. You can lead without formal authority. Conflating the two is one of the most expensive mistakes organizations make – and one of the most common.
With those two premises in place, the four dimensions open up.
Dimension One: The Officer
The Officer is the dimension most people associate with influence by default – the role defined by formal authority, representative function, and accountability. Officers have rank. They have defined objectives. Their influence operates through what they do, what they say, and how they say it.
But formal authority is not a shortcut. If anything, it raises the stakes. The Officer’s influence rises or falls on trust – and trust in a business context is built through consistency between stated priorities and demonstrated behavior.
One exercise I run in this session is deceptively simple: ask people to name their organization’s three top priorities, then name the three most important things they’re personally working on at the moment. When those two lists don’t match, you have a leadership problem – whether the person asking the question holds a senior title or not.
The Officer dimension also forces a practical question: who delivers which message? Not all officers carry the same credibility on all subjects. The mismatch between messenger and message is a recurring source of lost trust and failed communication. Getting that right is less about hierarchy than it is about perceived legitimacy on the specific issue at hand.
Dimension Two: The Follower
This is the dimension most people underestimate – and the one where the most influence is left on the table.
Followership, properly understood, is not passive compliance. It is active engagement in the direction-setting process. And its primary mechanism is one of the most undervalued tools in any organization: asking good questions.
What is important here? What is actually required? What is the desired outcome? What is non-negotiable?
These aren’t questions that signal weakness or uncertainty. They are questions that create clarity – and clarity is the precondition for effective work. Unclarity is not a neutral state. It produces wasted effort, misaligned priorities, and the kind of quiet disengagement that no engagement survey will diagnose correctly.
The Follower dimension also includes something subtler: role modeling. The way a person follows – the behaviors they exhibit while operating within a defined role – becomes a signal to everyone around them. People don’t just follow instructions. They follow behaviors. A Follower who asks sharp questions, surfaces ambiguity, and holds commitments with integrity shapes the culture of a team as surely as any officer above them.
Dimension Three: The Influencer
Here the framework gets into territory that most leadership development programs ignore entirely: the network.
Influence, it turns out, is not transmitted primarily through official channels. It moves through conversations – and a small number of people drive a disproportionate share of those conversations. The research puts it starkly: roughly three percent of people in any organization account for the majority of information flow within it.
This has practical consequences that most communications and leadership strategies fail to account for. The traditional model assumes communication is two-way: sender, receiver, feedback loop. The reality is multi-directional and highly unequal. Some nodes in the network carry enormous weight. Most messages never reach them through formal channels.
Identifying those influencers is a learnable skill. One method I use is the snowball survey – start with a small random group, ask three questions (who do you go to for news and information? for professional advice? for moral support?), compile the names, ask the next batch the same questions, and keep going until the list starts to narrow. The people who keep appearing are your organizational influencers. They are often not the most senior people in the room.
Once identified, the move is not to co-opt or manage them. It is to engage them genuinely – keep them well-informed, invite them into processes early, connect them with each other. An informed influencer becomes a force multiplier. An uninformed one becomes a rumor engine.
The retail case I share in the session illustrates this concisely: a well-designed advent calendar campaign that gave a small group of employees advance information and a reason to share it produced a level of engagement that no broadcast message could have replicated.
Dimension Four: The Volunteer
The final dimension is where the framework turns from networks to initiative.
The Volunteer is the person who takes constructive action without being asked. Not because it’s their job description. Not because someone told them to. Because they saw something that needed doing and did it.
Volunteering as a form of influence operates through two mechanisms in particular.
The first is role modeling through initiative. When someone takes action – raises a hand, solves a problem, bridges a gap – others notice. They calibrate their own sense of what is possible and permissible based on what they see peers and colleagues actually doing. This is influence at its most organic.
The second is superconnection. A superconnector is someone who makes introductions – who sees that two people should know each other and makes it happen. This is one of the highest-leverage influence moves available to anyone at any level. It costs almost nothing. It compounds rapidly. And it positions the connector as someone who thinks in terms of the network rather than just their own node within it.
The Power of One – a phrase I use in the closing section of this session – captures the asymmetric potential of the Volunteer dimension. A single well-timed action, a single introduction, a single question asked in the right room – these can generate ripple effects that dwarf what any formal initiative produces.
Putting it together
What makes this framework useful is that it isn’t hierarchical. You are not an Officer or a Follower or an Influencer or a Volunteer. You are all four, simultaneously, in different relationships and contexts.
The question is not which role you play. The question is how consciously you play each one.
The most effective people I have observed across twenty-five years of organizational work are those who have developed genuine fluency across all four dimensions – who know when to direct, when to ask, when to activate the network, and when to simply act. That fluency is not a personality trait. It is a skill. And like most skills, it improves significantly when you start paying deliberate attention to it.
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Mike Klein is Principal of Changing The Terms and Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine. He teaches a PRSA certificate course on internal communication and leads the #WeLeadComms community.
