Mastering Influence

Growing Leadership Capacity from the Inside Out

When we cast about for examples of leadership we are likely to grasp for the political, military, and corporate titans. These established institutional leaders have authority in common. They are able to martial their resources to reward and punish others to fall in line. However, leaders with authority is a narrow subset of leaders and typically a landing place for those that have created a following without authority. They rise to a position of authority via a path of influence. Leadership’s true essence lies in influence—the ability to guide, inspire, and drive change within teams, organizations, and industries.

The Leadership Influence Model outlined in this framework provides a structured approach to developing leadership capabilities, moving from self-leadership to leading others and ultimately applying leadership models effectively in various situations.

The Core Leadership Influence Thesis

At the heart of leadership is influence, not control. Influence is what enables leaders to shape decisions, align stakeholders, and propel organizations toward success. However, influence is a double-edged sword—it can be wielded ethically to inspire, guide, and support, or it can be used manipulatively for self-serving ends.

Leadership effectiveness depends on the ability to:

Recruit and align others toward a vision.
Build credibility and trust.
Position oneself strategically within a network of stakeholders.
Exercise Influence as a currency of exchange, where trust and credibility compound over time.

The Three-Tier Leadership Development Model

Leading Ourselves: The Foundation of Influence

Before leading others, leaders must master self-leadership by developing clarity of purpose, commitment, and personal accountability. Key practices include:

Establishing Purpose: Identifying core values, long-term goals, and the personal mission that fuels leadership efforts.
Unconditional Commitment: Committing fully to a cause without excuses, delays, or conditions.
Self-Accountability: Holding oneself responsible for continuous improvement and results.

Elevating practices such as intense presence, extreme awareness, and tactical focus enable leaders to operate at a high level despite uncertainty or adversity.

Leading Others: The Mechanics of Influence

Once self-leadership is mastered, leaders must engage, recruit, and inspire others. Effective leadership requires:

Emotional Intelligence & Empathy – Understanding and responding to team dynamics.
Delegation & Decision-Making – Ensuring tasks are distributed efficiently while fostering ownership.
Integrity & Accountability – Building a high-trust environment where commitments are met.

Leadership influence is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Leaders must cultivate resilience, adaptability, and clarity of vision to guide their teams effectively.

Applied Leadership: Using the Right Model at the Right Time

Leadership is contextual. Different challenges demand different leadership styles. The framework introduces a Leadership Model Matrix, categorizing leadership styles based on their approach to outcomes, people, controls, and adaptability. These include:

Charismatic Leadership: Using inspiration and personal vision to rally teams.
Democratic Leadership: Encouraging participation and collaboration.
Servant Leadership: Prioritizing the growth and well-being of others.
Laissez-faire Leadership: Allowing autonomy while providing guidance.
Transactional Leadership: Using structure, rewards, and discipline to drive performance.
Transformational Leadership: Inspiring change and innovation within an organization.
Situational Leadership: Adjusting leadership style based on the needs of the team and circumstances.

Leaders must evaluate, mix, and evolve their leadership models based on organizational maturity, industry changes, and team dynamics.

Decision-Making as a Leadership Imperative

One of the most critical skills in leadership is high-stakes decision-making. Leaders must process data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to navigate uncertainty. A well-curated intelligence feed ensures leaders remain informed about:

Market & Industry Trends
Customer & Organizational Performance
Financial Health & Competitive Positioning
Regulatory & Risk Landscapes

Effective decision-making is not just about having the right data—it’s about framing the right questions, curating insights, and communicating decisions effectively.

The Power of Culture in Leadership

Culture acts as a silent force multiplier in leadership. It sets the operating norms, expectations, and behavioral standards within an organization. Leaders must intentionally shape and adapt culture over time to maintain alignment with business goals.

Key cultural elements include:

Shared values & mission alignment
Behavioral norms & ethical standards
Adaptive cultural evolution in response to market and competitive pressures

When properly nurtured, culture becomes a self-sustaining leadership mechanism, reinforcing the desired behaviors and reducing the need for top-down control.

Leadership as a Continuous Evolution

Great leadership is not static—it evolves as markets shift, teams grow, and organizations mature. Mastering leadership requires:

Clarity of purpose and personal leadership discipline.
The ability to recruit, align, and sustain high-performing teams.
The skill to apply the right leadership models at the right time.
An intelligence-driven approach to decision-making.
Intentional shaping of organizational culture to sustain long-term success.

Ultimately, leadership is about creating durable, positive impact—whether in a startup, multinational corporation, nonprofit, or community initiative. By embracing the principles of influence, strategic adaptability, and continuous learning, leaders can drive meaningful change and shape the future.

Leadership frameworks provide an effective way to engage groups pursuing aligned objectives that span from a team level to institutional levels. These leadership frameworks provide guidance for engaging the group depending on the culture, organization’s purpose, the outcomes sought, the type of people that are engaged in the endeavor, and the group’s relationship with control versus creativity.

Just as belief [in the values and norms] does the heavy lifting for culture, infrastructure can institutionalize culture by structuring to require specific behaviors highlighted in the organizational values. In that, the relationship between culture and infrastructure is circular with impacts flowing in both directions. Cultural infrastructure has three components including governance, communications, and accelerators. These three aspects work together to embed and drive culture forward.

The Influence Model

The influence model is organized to develop your capacity to influence at three levels. At the most fundamental level your developing your capacity to influence yourself. At the next level, you develop your capacity to influence other individuals. Finally, at the last level you develop your capacity to influence large organizations, using leadership frameworks to optimize your influence in a given situation.

Personal Leadership Capacity Development

Developing your capacity to influence starts with influencing yourself. Just like physical exercise, developing your capacity to influence requires practicing to build your influence capacities aiming at growing your agency, strategic focus, curiosity, and confidence.

Elevating Practices

Qualities for Leading Others

Selecting the Right Leadership Framework

Ensuring Leaders are Ever-Ready for Decision Making

One of the most important things that leaders do is make decisions. The more senior the leader, the more likely that day-to-day decisions have existential implications to the organization. To make “good decisions” a leader must be well informed with a continuously fresh understanding of the facets most pertinent to the organization’s success including our performance toward our vision, the changing circumstance around our effort, and the options for making adjustments as needed. This means that we need to understand the foundation of knowledge required to effectively navigate the horizon of a leader’s concerns, curating knowledge refreshes to ensure leaders are up to date, and then delivering those refreshes at the right moment. That cadence of delivery calls for established a rhythm of business model. In essence, the rhythm of business model is a fancy term for establishing a review cadence that has specific goals for delivering:

Leadership strategy that provides vision and operating goals.
Organizational communications that drive awareness and alignment.
Cross-organizational alignment on the goals and clarity between departments and teams.
Establishing focus on priorities and accountability for all teams within the workflow.

Leveraging Culture as an Influencing Tool

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Leadership Development Topics

The Leadership Capstone

Leadership development a long and winding lifetime journey. Its application starts with ourselves, then in engaging others, and finally applying leadership in complex environments. In this capstone episode we tie it all together highlighting the basic demands and approaches at each level, ultimately providing a model for leadership development and application. Regardless of what level at which we are operating, the currency of leadership is influence – to shape the direction.

The Leadership Fundamentals

Leadership fundamentals covers the various aspects of leadership development, the characteristics of effective leadership, and the various leadership frameworks that can be applied to the circumstance at hand.

What is Leadership? We cover the power of leadership and its fundamental currency.

Leading Ourselves: We will cover our most immediate and urgent leadership challenge – leading ourselves.

Leading Others: Once we have mastered ourselves we will move on to the qualities that we need develop for leading others.

Applied Leadership: Finally, we will review the most popular leadership frameworks, and how and when to deploy them.

Leading Ourselves — Establishing Our Purpose

Now that we’ve discussed the foundation of leadership – influence – let’s now dive into how be build our capacity to influence by learning to lead ourselves. In this dispatch we set up our north star – our purpose. We discuss sourcing our purpose, our strategic focus, and anchoring our purpose to our sweet spot.

Leading Ourselves — Manifesting Our Purpose

We have now established our purpose. We’ve put a stake in the ground. But, that is not enough. We need to develop our leadership competencies and the confidence to deliver it. How do I achieve my purpose?

Competency Building: We then review competency building and how to deal with real-world challenges and fulfill that purpose.

Confidence Building: Equally important to competencies we need to believe in our ability to deliver. We address the various aspects of confidence and the journey to grow that confidence.

Leading Ourselves — Elevating Practices (Part 1)

As a leader, it’s not enough for us to have a purpose. We must deliver on it, or we are not really leading. In this dispatch we will address the elevating practices that support us in delivering on our purpose. We discuss the first two practices in this discussion.

Unconditional Commitments: Delivering on our purpose requires clearly defined commitment and an extraordinary commitment to our commitments. To achieve that level of commitment we need to achieve a level of presence in which we are exactly where we mean ourselves to be, with no concerns about our past, future, or being anywhere else.

Intense Presence: Bringing ourselves completely and utterly to the moment.

Leading Ourselves — Elevating Practices (Part 2)

We continue describing the elevating practices presenting the final three.

Extreme Awareness: The next step in developing our commitment is to develop our awareness at multiple levels. This awareness development requires lots of practice.

Tactical Focus: We then revisit focus from a tactical perspective, sorting out how to spend our day-to-day.

Surrendering to our Growth: Finally, we surrender to the changes within us in our journey to leadership.

Leading Ourselves – Accountability

Now that we have clarity of purpose, competencies and elevating practices under our belt we can add the third leg of the stool – accountability. There’s a term we use in my line of work – what gets measured gets managed. In this dispatch we cover setting up an accountability structure for ourselves.

Leading Others – Qualities

We tackle the fundamentals of leading others address:

The qualities we leaders need to first recruit others and then lead them to success.
A deep dive into one of the most critical leadership qualities – decision making.
How to set up a leadership incubator to develop additional organizational leadership.

Leading Others — Decision Making (Part 1)

Decision-making is one of many leadership qualities that is critical, on a daily basis, for enterprise success. While all of the qualities are critical, decision-making will make or break your venture every day. For a leader to make well-formed decisions they must maintain an evergreen understanding of both:

Our performance toward our vision
The changing circumstance around our effort
Options for making adjustments as needed.

Leading Others — Decision Making (Part 1)

we outline the tactics for supporting ongoing decision making. Aspects include:

Capturing, curating and packaging intelligence updates.
Timing the updates for optimized freshness.
Structuring the intelligence presentation for maximum impact.

Leading Others – Creating a Leadership Incubator

New leaders face substantial barriers to entry. Leadership, by itself, requires a substantial skills let alone understanding the organization and efforts required. In this dispatch we review a case study for lowering the barriers to entry for new leaders and building an organization of leaders. We review the barriers to entry and why they are there. Additionally, frame up the case study. We describe the legacy and desired performance. Discuss the drivers and organic leadership evolution. Finally, we will lay out the current state of leadership and infrastructure.

Establishing this structure generated a large cadre of leaders, removed individual failure points, and made the overall experience before, during and after the event better for everyone.

Applying Leadership — Leadership Frameworks (Part 1)

The circumstances in which we lead are not generic. Each set of circumstances requires specific, applied leadership. In this and the follow dispatch we will do a rapid fire review of leadership frameworks, their pros and cons, and their applications. We cover the leadership factors and first four frameworks - Charismatic Leadership, Democratic Leadership, Servant Leadership, and Laissez-faire Leadership - here.

Applying Leadership — Leadership Frameworks (Part 2)

Continuing with the lightning review of the most popular leadership frameworks, we review — Transactional Leadership, Authoritative [Autocratic] Leadership, Hierarchical Leadership, Situational Leadership, and Transformational Leadership — here.

Leveraging Culture — Values & Norms

Culture, for purposes of this discussion, encompasses shared communal values. Values that support organizational success are carefully curated to inspire and demand “success” behaviors.

Culture does a lot of leadership heavy lifting. It is the presence that stands in for active leadership guidance. From the leadership perspective, we want to establish a culture that ensures organizational success.

That establishes the values that make up the heart of the organization.
That aligns the team to the organization’s purpose and objectives.
That ensures effective individual and organization’s performance.
That sets expectations for how we work together and contribute to others.

Leveraging Culture — Infrastructure

Cultural infrastructure has three components including governance, communications, and accelerators. These three aspects work together to embed and drive culture forward.

In this dispatch we will explore a couple of case studies that show how these aspects of cultural infrastructure have impacted culture and served to support cultural changes.

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