Building Influence Within the Team
A System That Works
A new manager joined an engineering team. He knew that the team was struggling. It worked as a group of individuals rather than a team. People were disengaged and passive.
The manager planned to build his influence by taking on one task that everyone hated doing. He would be maintaining a large, fragile suite of end-to-end tests. By doing this, he would build rapport with the team members and then make the team cohesive, happy, motivated, and more productive.
Things didn’t go as planned. The manager was fixing these tests, but people didn’t become happier. He tried to give pep talks to team members, but people remained disengaged. If anything, it got worse. One of the senior developers and the product owner couldn’t tolerate each other. Some retrospectives ended with shouting and slamming doors. The manager tried to mediate the conflict, but it sparked again. Nothing changed.
The poor manager lasted for a few years, and after that, decided to step down to become an individual contributor. He didn’t want to lead anyone anymore. True story.
I write High-Impact Engineering — a weekly newsletter for engineering managers, directors, and CTOs. This issue is about what actually builds influence — and what quietly destroys it.
A reader asked, how can a manager build influence with the team? In our story, the manager tried sacrifice and cheerleading. Neither worked. Here's what does.
Building influence through positive change
Influence and change management go hand in hand. What he failed to do was drive meaningful change where it actually mattered. The team was disengaged because it lacked ownership and focus, and key conflicts were left unresolved.
Fixing tests didn’t address any of that. And until those problems are tackled directly, no amount of sacrifice or pep talks will move the team forward.
Influence is built in small steps. You cannot flip a switch and make people listen to you and trust you. It requires time, deliberate actions, and demonstrating consistency and integrity.
The good: how to build influence one step at a time
When talking about influence, we will go through the good, the bad, and the ugly parts. Yes, like the movie!
Let’s start with the good. You most likely already have some influence. It can come from your title or your tenure in the company. You don’t start from zero. The question is how to make it compound.
Influence grows when the team makes steps in the right direction, and each positive change is made visible and rewarded. Everything I’ll describe below is a variation on that idea.
Walk the talk
There is a saying that dogs look like their owners. Teams work the same way. Followers look at what leaders do and copy them. It is not a perfect copy, but you can see an echo of the leader’s personality. To influence the team in a certain way, you have to consistently model the behavior you expect. If you expect people to write documentation, write documentation. If you want the team to produce quality work, produce quality work yourself.
Tell what you expect and praise the behavior you want to encourage.
For example, you want developers to start writing end-to-end tests. If someone writes an end-to-end test, announce it after the daily meeting, give a short speech of appreciation, and tell them again why it is an important thing to do.
These seemingly small things give people a clue what is expected from them, and when repeated enough times, there is a very good chance that people will follow. Just remember to be consistent in your behavior, genuine and authentic in giving praise. If not, people will feel it, and this will not work.
Find the second player
But modeling alone has its limits. Doing things alone is playing on hard mode. Take a second player along — it’s more fun and makes the whole quest easier. Talk with someone senior on the team — ideally a formal or informal leader — and explain what you want to do. Set a goal: what behavior change you want to achieve, and model, articulate, and encourage it together.
This move can multiply your influence. When people hear the same narrative from several directions, they become much more susceptible to the change.
From zero to one and beyond
The changes you implement, especially in the beginning, don’t need to be huge. Small tangible progress. It is like learning a new language. Yesterday you didn’t know a single word, today you can introduce yourself in Japanese. Going from zero to one is worth celebrating.
Propose a change or take a topic from the latest retrospective and really follow through. Ensure that the change is done. Then bring it back to the team. Hey, look, we decided to make this improvement, and we’re a little better now. Isn’t it cool?
A common mistake that I myself still make is to make a positive change and forget to celebrate it. Remember to celebrate. It will both improve the mood in the team and also increase your influence. By celebrating, I don’t mean a party (however, it would be a good way of doing it sometimes). It can be just a round of applause for the team at the next daily meeting, a cake, or a message on a company Slack channel. Whatever works for your culture.
I wrote an article about how to implement changes by running experiments. You can read it here. If you want to start improving your team’s process now? Subscribe, and you’ll immediately receive my free Process Experiment Template — complete with hypothesis format, success metrics, weekly tracking, and a rollback plan. Ready to use with your team this week.
The bad
We talked about a few tactics on how to increase influence. But the picture will be incomplete without the other side of the coin — what ruins your influence. Here are the two most common ways I’ve seen it happen.
Router manager
For me, number one is being weak. Being weak does not mean not being an authoritative boss. It is about not having one’s own point of view. Being a router that passes the management will to the team and then reports back on the results. This type of manager is just a middleman who does not understand either the team or the strategic intent. They optimize only for being liked by their boss. They always have to “check with management,” or they drop a decision from yesterday’s meeting and expect the team to execute immediately. People quickly see the lack of agency, and such a manager’s influence tanks.
Going where the wind blows
The other big one is being inconsistent. Saying one thing and doing another, not following up on one’s own commitments. This also creates a bad role model. If a manager doesn’t follow through on what they promised, why should I? In real life, being 100% consistent is close to impossible. Deadlines slip, priorities change, things pile up, and something falls through the cracks. To minimize the damage, it is good to acknowledge openly what happened — and ideally before anyone has to ask about it.
We had good — what you can do, bad — what you shouldn’t do, but we missed ugly. It is something that many managers get wrong, including the one in our story.
The ugly
The manager in our true story did an individual contributor’s job. It wasn’t a bad idea as such. Being closer to the code gives us insight into how the system works, what the team struggles with, keeps our tech skills sharp, and establishes authority among engineers. However, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the managerial duties. True influence comes from enabling the team to become better and more fulfilled. Doing the managerial work, work that no one else but us can do, comes first; the coding comes second, if there is time left.
All management is change management
Looking back at our manager, he wasn’t a bad leader. He cared about his team and was willing to sacrifice for them. But he spent his energy performing leadership — taking on hated tasks, giving pep talks — instead of exercising it. Exercising leadership is about driving change. If change does not happen, the team still executes without focus, ownership is still weak, and people start to squabble over who does what — no pep talk or sacrifice helps.
All management is change management. Model the behavior you expect, follow through on change, and celebrate progress. Influence doesn’t come from pep talks or being liked. It comes from doing great work together.
Subscribe, and you’ll immediately receive my free Process Experiment Template — a ready-to-use Notion template for running your first bottleneck experiment.
If you want hands-on help with driving change in your team and increasing your influence, get in touch by replying to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
I've been on teams where the manager was doing everything right by this playbook. Being consistent, modeling behavior, celebrating wins, but what nobody wanted to say was that one person was toxic and needed to leave. Or that the company above us was sending mixed signals so nothing actually stuck. Sometimes you do everything the post says and it still fails because the real problem isn't management style it's that this person shouldn't be here, or the organisation is broken higher up. You can do your best and still nothing works and sometimes there are times when to quit, is the best option.
Agree with you calling out lack of agency as a problem of weak management. Opposite is also true, having too many of strong opinions. It’s a thin line — to help team being self organized, but with strong guidance.