Every organisation has a formal structure. Executives. Managers. Team leaders. Reporting lines. Delegations of authority. On paper, it should be relatively easy to understand where decisions are made and how information travels.

Then there is the organisation that actually exists.

• The person everyone quietly asks before committing to something.
• The long-serving employee who remembers why the last three attempts failed.
• The administrator who knows how things actually get done.
• The technically junior employee whose opinion can change the mood of an entire team.

None of these people necessarily have significant formal authority. But they may have enormous influence. And leaders who understand only the formal structure of their organisation are working with half the map.

Authority and Influence Are Not the Same Thing

Authority comes with a position. It gives someone the legitimate ability to make decisions, allocate resources, set expectations and hold others accountable. Influence works differently. It exists because other people choose to listen.

Someone may be influential because they are highly competent. They may have credibility built over years. They might understand the organisation unusually well. Perhaps people trust their judgement. Or they may simply have an extraordinary ability to articulate what everyone else is thinking.

This creates an interesting contradiction.

A leader can have authority without much influence, and someone with very little authority can have considerable influence. The strongest organisations understand both.

Watch Where People Look

Meetings reveal considerably more than what is written in the minutes.

• When a difficult idea is proposed, whose reaction do people check?
• When disagreement emerges, whose opinion changes the direction of the conversation?
• When the formal leader finishes speaking, who does everyone expect to speak next?

These small behaviours can reveal where informal influence sits.

Sometimes the influential person is the loudest in the room. Often they aren't. They may speak rarely, but when they do, everyone listens. That distinction matters.

Volume and influence are not the same thing either.

Follow the Information

Information rarely travels neatly through an organisational chart. Some people become natural information hubs. Others know who to ask. Some connect teams that would otherwise operate almost independently. And there are usually people who seem to know what's happening before everyone else does.

This isn't necessarily office politics or gossip. Often these people have built relationships across different parts of the organisation and become trusted conduits of information. They can also play an important role in helping leadership understand what is happening beyond formal reporting.

Reports tell leaders what has been recorded. Informal networks can tell them what people are actually talking about. The distinction can be useful.

Find the Translators

Some influential people perform another function that is easy to underestimate. They translate.

• Senior leadership announces a strategy.
• The team hears the words.
• Then someone explains what those words actually mean for Monday morning.

These people can turn organisational intent into something others understand. They know the language of the organisation, understand the history and can contextualise a decision in ways that formal communication sometimes cannot.

This can be enormously valuable during periods of change. But it also creates risk.

If the influential person doesn't understand the intent, disagrees with it, or simply interprets it differently, their version may become more credible than leadership's.

The message leadership sends isn't always the message the organisation believes.

Notice Who Changes the Temperature

Not all influence is about decisions. Some people influence how a team feels.

When pressure increases, others look to them.

• If they're calm, the group settles.
• If they're cynical, cynicism spreads.
• If they decide an initiative is ridiculous, enthusiasm can disappear remarkably quickly.

These people may never appear on a stakeholder map. They probably should.

Emotional influence is particularly important during uncertainty. People often look sideways before they look upwards, especially when they're trying to work out whether something is safe, credible or worth supporting.

A leader may announce that everything is under control but if the person everyone trusts rolls their eyes afterwards, leadership has another problem.

Influence Can Accelerate Change Or Quietly Kill It

Informal influence becomes particularly important during organisational change.

There is a temptation to identify influential employees and turn them into enthusiastic advocates for whatever leadership has already decided. That misses the point.

Influential people are useful precisely because others believe their judgement is independent. If they become an extension of the corporate communications function, that credibility can disappear quickly.

Instead, involve them early enough to challenge the thinking.

• What are leaders missing?
• Where will the change create friction?
• What will people misunderstand?
• What sounds sensible at the executive level but becomes impractical at the operational level?

If influential people disagree, don't immediately label them resistant. They may be identifying a problem before the formal system has noticed it.

Gatekeepers Have More Influence Than Leaders Sometimes Realise

Influence also exists around formal power.

Executive assistants, administrators, coordinators and other gatekeepers can understand an organisation's rhythms extraordinarily well.

• They know who needs to be involved.
• They know which issue genuinely needs the executive's attention, and which can be resolved elsewhere.
• They understand competing priorities, relationships and often a great deal of organisational history.

Treating these roles as merely administrative can be a significant misreading of how the organisation functions. The person controlling access to authority may not hold the authority themselves. That doesn't make their influence insignificant.

Don't Confuse Influence With Leadership Potential

There is another trap. Once an organisation identifies an influential employee, the instinct can be: "We should make them a manager." Maybe, but remember, influence and leadership capability overlap, but they aren't interchangeable.

Someone may be trusted because of exceptional technical competence. Another may be socially influential but poor at making difficult decisions. Someone may be brilliant at challenging authority but have no interest whatsoever in becoming authority. Promoting them can remove exactly the conditions that made them influential in the first place.

Recognise influence. Use it intelligently. Develop leadership capability where appropriate. But don't assume every informal leader needs a formal title.

Informal Influence Isn't Automatically Good

Influence is a capability. Its value depends on how it is used.

• The same person who can build confidence can spread cynicism.
• The person who connects teams can also control information.
• A respected employee can challenge a poor decision or undermine a perfectly reasonable one.

This is why leaders shouldn't simply find the influential people and attempt to get them "on side." They need to understand why those people are influential.

• Is it expertise?
• Trust?
• Relationships?
• Access to information?
• Organisational history?
• Personality?
• Credibility?
• Fear?

Those distinctions matter.

Because influence tells leaders something about the organisation itself.

Learn to Read Both Organisations

There are effectively two structures operating inside most organisations.

The formal structure defines authority, accountability and responsibility and the informal structure reveals trust, credibility, relationships and influence.

Neither should replace the other.

Formal authority matters. Organisations need clear accountability and decision rights. But leaders who pay attention only to the organisational chart can miss the human network through which their decisions actually travel.

• That matters when implementing change.
• It matters when resolving conflict.
• It matters when trying to understand culture.
• And it matters when a perfectly reasonable decision receives a response nobody in the leadership team anticipated.

Formal authority can make people comply. Influence can make people believe.

Good leaders understand both.