In The Room #28 – Influence isn't something you're handed.

In a room recently, I was working with a group of graduates and early-career professionals on a familiar leadership challenge: how do you create impact before anyone has formally given you the authority to do it? Everyone in the room understood the value of influencing upwards. What made the conversation genuinely interesting was what happened when we moved past the idea of influence and into what it actually costs.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly

If you need the support of someone more senior than you, what's your actual strategy?

Do you wait for them to approach you? Do you assume your work will speak for itself? Do you send the email only once you finally need a decision from them? Or have you already built the relationship, long before anything urgent depended on it?

Most people, if they're honest, will admit their strategy is closer to the first three than the last. That's not a failure of character. It's a failure of timing, and it's remarkably common at every level of seniority, not just early career.

Where Capable People Come Unstuck

Here's the pattern I see constantly, across graduate programs and executive teams alike: people ignore the relational side of influence until they need something changed, approved or prioritised. By the time they act, the deadline is close and the stakes are high, so they arrive heavy-handed with a demand.

When the response isn't what they hoped for, they conclude the other person is difficult, resistant, or unwilling to listen. What they rarely do is ask a harder question: what did I do, or fail to do, in the months leading up to this moment?

The Bucket Filling Problem

Donald Clifton and Tom Rath's concept of bucket filling and bucket dipping, developed through Gallup's research, offers a useful lens for thinking about this (Rath & Clifton, How Full Is Your Bucket?, Gallup Press). The core idea is simple: every interaction either adds something to a relationship or takes something from it.

Interest, recognition, reliability and useful contribution fill the bucket. Appearing only when you want something, ignoring the other person's priorities, or springing an urgent demand on them without warning, dips from it.

It's an appealing idea, and most people who encounter it get the mechanics right and the intent wrong.

The Part Most People Get Wrong

The common misreading treats bucket filling like a savings account: deposit goodwill now, withdraw support later. That's not relational investment. That's a loan with better manners, and the people you're trying to influence are generally better at detecting that distinction than we give them credit for.

The real test of non-transactional relational investment is simple to state and harder to practise: do you keep showing up after you've already got what you needed?

Do you still ask about their priorities once your project has been approved? Do you still make the useful introduction, share the useful information, follow through on the small commitment, once there's nothing left in it for you? If the interest evaporates the moment your need is met, it was never relational to begin with. It was strategic patience wearing a friendly face, and eventually, even if not immediately, people notice.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

If your work will depend on someone's support six months from now, the work starts today, and it doesn't stop once you get what you asked for.

Start understanding their world now, not when you need something from it. Ask what they're trying to achieve. Ask where they're stuck. Contribute something before you're asked to. Then do it again next month, for no reason at all.

This is uncomfortable advice for anyone who likes their effort to have a visible, immediate return. Relational investment of this kind rarely does. That's precisely what makes it credible when it eventually pays off, and what makes its absence so obvious when it doesn't.

The Real Question

Six months from now, someone is going to have to decide whether to back you when it's inconvenient for them to do so. They will already know, before you even ask, whether you were worth that risk.

The only real question is whether you find that out the easy way, through a history of genuine investment, or the hard way, through a request that lands on an empty bucket.

This post is part of the In The Room series, weekly observations on leadership, teams and what really happens when people work together. Reply "Room" to any edition if you'd like the two-minute exercise referenced above.

Reference: Rath, T. & Clifton, D. (2004). How Full Is Your Bucket? Gallup Press.

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