Postcards from the Field: Leading Through Influence
Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.
Last weekend, I facilitated a workshop at a national gathering of leaders from across the healthcare sector. The session focused on collaboration and a leadership challenge that has become increasingly common across the organizations I work with. More leaders are being asked to accomplish difficult things with people they cannot simply direct. Their ability to make progress increasingly depends on influence.
We started the afternoon with an experiment. I asked everyone to stand and explained that I was going to give them a series of forced choices. Each choice presented two perfectly reasonable leadership instincts. Their job was to decide which one felt more natural and physically move to that side of the room. There were no right answers, and no standing in the middle.
The first few choices made it clear that people had opinions.
Would you rather leave a meeting with a clear decision, or leave with everyone feeling heard? When disagreement surfaces, would you rather address it while everyone is together, or give people time to reflect before continuing? Would you rather move forward and learn as you go, or spend a little more time getting it right at the beginning?
People chose quickly. Then I started asking why.
That was when the room really came alive. Leaders offered hilariously spicy defenses of their positions. People shouted good-natured rebuttals across the room. Friends looked genuinely appalled to discover where the other person was standing. Each new question created another round of movement, laughter, and spirited disagreement.
What made the exercise so much fun was that both sides kept making sense.
The people who wanted to leave meetings with a decision weren't dismissing the importance of listening. They had experienced the frustration of meetings that produced thoughtful conversation but little movement. The people who prioritized making sure everyone felt heard weren't opposed to decisions. They understood how quickly a decision can unravel when the people responsible for carrying it forward never really bought in.
The same pattern repeated across the other choices. Thoughtful, experienced leaders looked at the same collaboration challenge and brought different instincts about what the situation required.
That experience stayed with me because those differences become increasingly consequential in the environments where most leaders now work.
Two pressures have changed the conditions of leadership considerably over the last several years. The first is perpetual change. Priorities shift more frequently. Technology changes how work gets done. Strategies evolve. Teams reorganize. Leaders are often coordinating work while the conditions surrounding that work are still changing.
The second pressure comes from the complexity we have intentionally built into our organizations. More work now happens across functions. Expertise is distributed across teams. Matrixed structures are common. Important initiatives involve more stakeholders, partners, and specialized roles. These choices allow organizations to tackle problems that would be difficult for any single person or function to solve alone, but they also create more interdependence.
Put those two pressures together and the leadership challenge becomes easier to see. More leaders are being asked to accomplish difficult things with people who may have different priorities, expertise, incentives, and instincts about how the work should proceed. Just as importantly, many of those people do not report to the leader trying to create movement.
I see this dynamic increasingly often in my executive coaching work. Leaders may come into a conversation wrestling with strategy, organizational change, conflict, or a difficult cross-functional initiative. As we work through the challenge, the problem frequently leads back to influence: they need to create movement with people whose cooperation matters, but whose behavior they cannot simply direct.
Formal authority still matters, but it reaches only so far in organizations built around this much interdependence. Leaders still have to create alignment, navigate disagreement, make decisions, and move work forward when authority alone cannot produce the outcome they need. Much of that work happens through collaboration.
This raises a practical question that became an important part of our workshop: what should a leader do when collaboration starts feeling unusually hard?
One of the ideas that seemed to resonate most with the leaders in the room was treating these moments diagnostically. Collaboration can become difficult for many reasons, and responding too quickly can cause us to work on the wrong problem. We explored three common sources of collaboration friction and a practical move leaders can try in response to each one.
The first is ambiguity. Collaboration gets harder when people are operating from different assumptions about the work. They may agree broadly on the goal while holding different ideas about what success looks like, who owns a decision, which priorities take precedence, or what happens next. Because those assumptions often remain unstated, the resulting friction can easily look like resistance, poor execution, or a lack of accountability. In the workshop, I encouraged leaders to respond by clarifying expectations. One simple question can expose a surprising amount of hidden disagreement: “What does success look like here?” Before adding another process or meeting, make sure the people involved are actually working toward the same outcome.
The second is curiosity. Collaboration also gets harder when people see the same situation differently and begin trying to persuade one another before they understand why. This is especially common across functions, where two leaders may be responding rationally to very different incentives, information, or risks. In the workshop, the practice was to seek understanding before agreement. When you feel yourself preparing the rebuttal, try asking: “What am I missing?” You do not have to give up your own point of view. The goal is to understand enough of theirs to see the problem more completely and identify where productive movement might be possible.
The third is momentum. Some collaborations become difficult because the conversation stops producing movement. Meetings repeat, issues get revisited, side questions multiply, and people can spend considerable time searching for certainty or consensus before acting. In the workshop, I encouraged leaders to protect momentum by leaving every collaboration with one clear next step. Before the meeting ends, ask: “What are we doing next, who owns it, and when will we reconnect?” The next step does not need to resolve the entire issue. It needs to keep useful work from drifting between conversations.
These categories are not mutually exclusive, and diagnosing the problem does not require getting the label exactly right. The value comes from slowing down long enough to understand why collaboration feels difficult before deciding what to do about it. More communication may not resolve an ambiguity problem if no one clarifies the expectation. More clarity may not resolve a disagreement if neither person understands the other's concerns. And another thoughtful conversation will not help much if the group never decides what happens next.
I thought about that as I reflected on the forced-choice exercise afterward. The room was so energized because smart, capable people could look at the same leadership situation and arrive at genuinely different conclusions about what good collaboration required. Those differences did not disappear when everyone returned to their seats. They followed people back into cross-functional projects, leadership teams, partnerships, and all the other places where modern work requires people to create progress together.
As organizations become more interconnected and the pace of change continues to accelerate, more leadership will depend on our ability to create movement without relying solely on authority. That makes collaboration a more consequential leadership capability than it may have been in the pa
