“You don’t need a title to have power. But you do need to know how to use the power you actually have.”
However, That’s the insight most organisations discover only after people have already burned through goodwill, missed deliverables they depended on others to deliver, or managed upward so clumsily that they’ve made themselves politically radioactive. Influencing without authority isn’t a soft skill that some people naturally have. It’s a learnable, practicable set of capabilities — and it’s one of the most high-leverage things a professional can develop, at almost any level of seniority.
Here’s what it actually involves, why it’s harder than it looks, and what a purpose-built influencing without authority training does that nothing else quite replicates.
Why This Skill Is More Critical Than People Admit
In most organisations, the work that matters most happens across boundaries that formal authority doesn’t cross. You need something from a peer in another function. You need a senior leader to prioritise something that isn’t on their radar. You need a team that doesn’t report to you to move faster, care more, or change direction. In each of these situations, positional authority is either irrelevant or actively counterproductive — ordering people who don’t work for you tends to end badly for everyone involved.
This is particularly acute in fast-scaling companies, where the startup culture of “just get it done” collides with the reality of a larger organisation where processes exist for reasons and people have competing priorities. The people who built the company through sheer force of will are suddenly navigating a world where force of will generates resistance rather than results. The people who joined from more structured environments are baffled by how little their title seems to mean. Both groups are operating without a map.
That said, The capabilities that fill this gap — understanding what others actually need, knowing how to read power dynamics accurately, being able to negotiate without either capitulating or bullying, building enough trust that people move for you before you’ve made a formal ask — don’t show up in most leadership curricula. They’re assumed to arrive through osmosis or experience. For some people, they do. For most people, they don’t, and the gap costs organisations in attrition, missed deadlines, and culture erosion.
What a Game-Based Session on This Topic Actually Looks Like
Welcome to Zombie Puram is the game I designed specifically to surface influence and power dynamics. The premise: a zombie apocalypse has hit Bangalore. Players are divided into factions, each with its own goals, its own resources, and its own pieces of information that other factions don’t have. Every player also has personal objectives that may or may not align with their faction’s mission. And there’s a collective goal — survival — that requires cooperation across groups who have every reason not to trust each other.
In the early rounds, when resources are plentiful and the threat is abstract, players tend to be civil and relatively open. Then the rounds progress. Resources become scarce. Information that seemed sharable becomes a bargaining chip. Personal missions create conflicts of interest within factions. The map reveals new threats that require coordination across groups who’ve already had bad experiences with each other. The stakes feel real enough that people stop performing how they think they should behave and start actually doing what they’d do.
In practice, What emerges is a live demonstration of influence in action — or in failure. You can watch in real time who builds trust through reliability and who builds it through charm. Who withholds information strategically and who does it reflexively. Who negotiates toward mutual gain and who treats every interaction as a zero-sum transaction. Who manages up to the game’s power structures effectively and who ignores them until they’re squeezed out of critical alliances.
The Mechanics That Make It Work
Several specific game mechanics are particularly powerful for simulating influence and persuasion dynamics. Hidden information — where different players know different things — creates information asymmetry that maps directly onto real organisational life. The person who figures out what others know and need, and can trade on that, gains real leverage. The person who hoards information finds themselves increasingly isolated as others route around them.
Variable powers work similarly. Different factions have different capabilities within the game system. Learning to work with what you have, rather than resenting what others have, is a direct rehearsal of a skill that’s essential in organisations where resources are never distributed the way you’d design them from scratch. Hidden and public goals create the tension between personal ambition and collective obligation that every professional navigates constantly. Auctions and trading mechanics force explicit negotiation, making visible the dynamics that usually happen implicitly over email threads and corridor conversations.
For example, None of these mechanics are arbitrary. Each one is there because it generates behaviour that shows up in the debrief — patterns worth naming, principles worth deriving, applications worth committing to.
What Shifts After
The behaviour changes I’ve observed after this kind of session are specific and durable in a way that framework-based training rarely produces. Participants stop treating influence as something that either works or doesn’t work and start treating it as something they can understand and improve. They develop clearer maps of the power dynamics in their actual organisations — who the informal influencers are, what people actually care about, where information flows and where it gets blocked.
They also develop more nuanced approaches to the upward-sideways-downward distinction. Managing upward is different from managing peers, which is different from leading people who don’t report to you. Each requires a different read of the situation, different tactics, different timing. A game that puts you in all three situations simultaneously — as Zombie Puram does — gives you a felt sense of those differences that a diagram in a slide deck cannot replicate.
Notably, Participants also get clearer about the assertiveness spectrum. The people who default to accommodation learn what it costs them. The people who default to pressure learn where it generates resistance rather than movement. The goal isn’t to push everyone toward some middle point — it’s to expand the range of moves available to each person, so they can choose rather than default.
The Startup That Made It Concrete
One of the clearest examples I have of this work landing well involved a company that had scaled from a tight founding team to a much larger organisation, and was struggling with the transition. The founding team operated on trust, speed, and implicit understanding. The new hires expected process, clarity, and formal authority. Neither group was wrong. Both were operating from a culture that made sense in the context where it had formed. But together, they were generating friction, attrition, and a lot of hurt feelings.
The solution wasn’t to explain the difference between startup culture and scaled-company culture, or to run a values alignment session. It was to put both groups in a game that required them to navigate exactly the kind of influence, negotiation, and power dynamics that were creating the friction — and then debrief what had actually happened. Survive Then Thrive gave them a shared experience of the problem, not just a shared understanding of it. From there, the conversation about how they wanted to operate together was grounded in something real rather than something abstract.
At PutThePlayerFirst.com, this is what the work is for. Not to teach people a model of influence, though models are useful. To put them in a situation complex enough that their actual patterns surface — and then to help them see those patterns clearly enough that they can choose differently. That’s the gap between knowing and doing. The game is what crosses it.