How to Influence Without Authority in the Workplace

Nov 8

The two second test and authority borrowing

Vienna, 1847. A young doctor discovered something that would change the world, but nobody cared.

His hospital has two maternity clinics. In one, doctors and medical students deliver the babies. In the other, midwives do.

For years, about 1 in 10 mothers in the doctors' clinic died of fever. In the midwives' clinic, it was closer to 1 in 28.

The women of Vienna knew. Some begged on their knees not to be sent to the doctors' side.

And the young doctor was intrigued, so he began investigating.

Then one of his colleagues cut his finger during an autopsy. He died of the same fever the mothers were dying of.

The young doctor put it together. The doctors walked straight from the autopsy room to the delivery room. Whatever was on their hands was killing these women.

In May 1847, he devised an experiment and made everyone wash with a chlorine solution. In April, 18% of mothers in his clinic had died. By June, it was about 2%. The next year, some months passed without a single death.

His hunch was right. He had the data. It's one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine.

But what followed wasn’t a change in medical practice. It was an outright refusal to adopt his newfound method.

For the rest of his life, most of the doctors who mattered refused to listen to him or his idea.

His name was Ignaz Semmelweis. Today, we call him a pioneer of handwashing in medicine. But in his own lifetime, he was mostly ignored. He landed in the psychiatric ward and passed away ironically due to infection.

If you've ever said "the work should speak for itself," Semmelweis is your cautionary tale.

Today:

How do you influence without authority in the workplace?

Let’s get into it.

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⚡️ 60 SEC INFLUENCE

Associate your name with a promise. Then attach it to someone who has authority.

Before anyone listens or follows you, they run a quick prediction in their head: If I support this person, what happens to me?

That prediction is your professional brand.

"If we bring in Priya, the launch ships on time." That's a promise. Priya doesn't need a title to make it work. She needs people to believe that promise.

What is yours?

The science: Psychologists Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, and Peter Glick found that we size people up on two questions almost instantly:

Warmth. Are you on my side?
Competence. Can you actually deliver?

Semmelweis had all the competence in the world. Then he wrote open letters calling the doctors who doubted him murderers. Competent and cold. People might respect that. But they will rarely lift even a finger to help it, and they didn’t.

But if you don’t have authority at work, this is the crucial next step.

Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett studies sponsorship: a senior person who spends their influence on you and links their reputation to yours. In her research, having a sponsor gave people up to a 30% boost in stretch assignments and pay raises.

Sponsors win too. When you deliver, they look smart for backing you.

That's the trade. A leader lends you their authority. You make them look right for doing it.

Try this: Write your If/Then sentence.

Finish this: "If you bring/back me on ___, you'll get ___." Pick a result someone can see. What is your promise?
Name one person with authority who wants to be associated with that result.
Offer it to them in their language: "I know [their goal] is on your plate. I can help by…” “You care a lot about [value], so do I, and this is what I’m hoping to do…”

Then deliver. And share the credit.

As a person of influence, your job is to make someone with a title believe your promise.

Authority is borrowed until your results make it yours.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

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🔎 DEEP DIVE

The mistake that came after the discovery

Here's the part of the Semmelweis story most people skip.

He actually wasn't alone in his endeavor. Some of the most respected doctors in Vienna were on his side. Ferdinand von Hebra, a famous dermatologist, compared the discovery to Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine. Josef Skoda, a well-known physician, lectured about it.

These were people with real authority. They were ready to lend it to him.

But what did Semmelweis do? He didn’t make it easy for his potential sponsors.

He refused to publish his own results. Hebra ended up writing the first papers about the discovery for him. Semmelweis didn't publish his own book on it until 1861, fourteen years later.

In 1849, his appointment in Vienna wasn't renewed. (Historians point out there was a lot going on: hospital politics, and the fallout from the 1848 revolutions.) Soon after, he left Vienna suddenly for Budapest, without telling the very friends who were defending him. One medical biographer wrote that the hasty move hurt his chances of slowly winning over the skeptics with their help.

And as the pushback grew, so did his anger. Those open letters calling other doctors murderers? They were aimed at the exact people he needed to convince.

He had the proof. He had powerful allies. He walked away from both.

Does that sound familiar to you?

The idea that hands can carry disease did eventually win. It took Louis Pasteur's germ theory and Joseph Lister's work on antiseptics in the 1860s. The idea finally came with an explanation and messengers people trusted.

The facts didn't change. The influence around it did.

Why influence is a prediction

Here's how I think about it.

When someone with power decides whether to back you, they're really predicting their own future. If I put my name next to theirs, will I look smart or foolish six months from now?

Researchers Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman described trust as being willing to be vulnerable to someone, based on what you expect them to do. Put simply, trust is a prediction that keeps coming true.

That's what a professional brand really is. It's the prediction people make about you before you've said a word.

"Bring her in. She'll calm the client down."
"Give it to him. He'll find the problem nobody else sees."
"If she says the numbers work, they work."

Others carry nothing. Brilliant work, no promise attached. (This was me for years, by the way.)

When you have authority, people follow you because they have to (superficially at most, watch how they’d leave when things turn sour.) When you don't, they follow you because they can predict what happens next.

Application:

Ask three colleagues: "When people think of me, what do they expect I'll deliver?" “What will they expect to get?” Write down their exact words.
If their answers are fuzzy, your promise is fuzzy. Pick something you want to own, and say it the same way every time.
Before your next big meeting, decide on the one sentence you want people to repeat about you afterward. (Carmen Simon calls this controlling your 10%. People forget most of what you say. Choose what survives.)

The two-second test: warmth, then competence

Susan Fiske and her colleagues have studied how people size each other up for decades. Across cultures, the same two questions keep showing up:

Warmth: Do you mean well toward me?
Competence: Can you act on it?

Warmth comes first. Researchers have found people pick up on warmth faster than competence, often in a fraction of a second.

It makes sense if you think like our ancestors. Before you care whether a stranger is strong, you need to know whether they're a friend or a threat.

Mix the two together and you get four very different reactions:

Warm and competent: people admire you and want to help you.
Warm but not competent: people like you, and feel a little sorry for you.
Competent but cold: people respect you, and quietly resent you.
Neither: people avoid you.

Semmelweis landed squarely in the third box. So do a lot of brilliant experts. They lead with being right. And they wonder why people don’t follow or back them.

Josh Bandoch put it well on the podcast when he described the "logic tsunami," hitting people with more and more proof: "Has that ever persuaded you of anything in your life?"

When you don't have authority, warmth is your way in. Competence is what keeps the door open.

Application:

Lead with their goal before your idea. "I know you're trying to hit X. Here's something that might help" feels different than "Here's my proposal."
When someone pushes back, get curious before you get to convincing. Ask what's worrying them.
Share credit loudly and often. Nothing signals "I'm on your side" faster.

(Warmth doesn’t mean being all bubbly and friendly. Think about a really good brain surgeon, even if that person is awkward, as long as you feel that he or she has YOUR best interests at heart, it builds trust.)

Borrowed authority: how sponsorship really works

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has spent years studying how people really climb the corporate ladder. Her biggest finding is a distinction most professionals miss.

A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor spends their influence on you.

A sponsor is a senior person who puts your name forward in meetings you're not in, pushes for your next role, and links their reputation to yours.

That last part is the key. Sponsorship is a risk for them. If you flop, they look bad.

So people with power sponsor the person they can predict will make them look good. That's often a different person from the smartest one in the building.

Hewlett's surveys of nearly 10,000 workers found sponsorship gave people up to a 30% boost in stretch assignments and pay raises. She also found a gap: women had twice as many mentors as men, and half as many sponsors.

And it pays both ways. In her later research, senior executives who sponsored rising talent were 53% more likely to be promoted than those who didn't.

This connects to an old finding from Robert Cialdini. In 1976, he noticed college students were more likely to wear their school's clothing the Monday after their football team won. People love to be linked to winners. Psychologists call it basking in reflected glory.

Sponsors do a version of the same thing. They want to be linked to your wins. So give them some.

Application:

Find the leaders whose goals your work already serves. Those are your likely sponsors, not just the most senior person you know.
Don't ask "Will you sponsor me?" Make an offer instead: "I'd love to help with [their priority]. Here's what I could take on."
When you deliver, make your sponsor look good. Tell their boss what they made possible.

Where people go wrong

1. Waiting to be discovered. This is the Semmelweis mistake. You assume good work will travel on its own. It doesn't. Someone has to carry it.

2. Borrowing authority you haven't earned. Name-dropping a senior leader without their blessing. Overselling what you'll deliver. Sooner or later, the result doesn't match the promise. That's the fastest way to lose a sponsor, and your reputation with them.

3. Being right loudly. Winning the argument and losing the people. Every time you prove someone wrong in public, you make it harder for them to back you later.

4. Hiding your promise. Brilliant in the room, invisible everywhere else. If the people with power can't describe what you deliver, they can't recommend you.

A note on doing this ethically

Borrowed authority is a loan, and it comes with responsibility. Only make promises you can keep. Only use a leader's name with their permission. And when you’ve delivered results, give credit to everyone who helped with it.

Influence without authority should make the people around you look better, never worse.

The playbook

Write your If/Then sentence. "If you bring me in on ___, you'll get ___."
Lead with warmth. Start with their goal before your idea.
Find the leaders your work already helps. Those are your likely sponsors.
Offer before you ask. Take something off their plate.
Deliver, then credit. Make them look right for backing you.
Repeat the promise. Same words, every time, until other people start saying it for you.

Semmelweis was right in 1847, but the world took decades to catch up because he didn’t know how to grow his influence.

You don't have to wait that long. Being right gives you a case. A clear promise and the right people backing it give you influence when you have no formal authority.

References

Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(3), 366–375.
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83.
Hewlett, S. A. (2013). Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hewlett, S. A. (2019). The Sponsor Effect: How to Be a Better Leader by Investing in Others. Harvard Business Review Press.
Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598.
Loudon, I. (1997). The Tragedy of Childbed Fever. Oxford University Press.
James Lind Library: "How dramatic were the effects of handwashing on maternal mortality observed by Ignaz Semmelweis?" Link