Influence Without Authority: Making an Impact in Your Organization Regardless of Job Title

Thank you for spending this time after your lunch with me talking about a really fun topic, which is leadership, which is exactly how you all wanted to spend the next 20 or so minutes talking about such a fun topic. I'm excited to be here. I love talking about building influence within your organization, regardless of whether you are an individual contributor or a manager, because this is what really makes a difference in your career.

So, my name is Kelly Vaughn. I am currently director of engineering at a video intelligence company called Spot AI. And I have been in engineering for a very long time. We no longer count the years. But I've been in engineering leadership for about nine or so years as well. I'm also a recovering entrepreneur. I ran two start-ups prior to joining Spot. I ran a development agency and a venture-backed fintech start-up before getting my first quote unquote real job, which is Spot AI. And I'm also a trained therapist. You're probably like, why in the world is somebody in engineering a trained therapist? And it's because I have a tendency to say I'm never going to do something, and then I ended up doing that. And my thing was, I never wanted to actually go into engineering. And so I have three degrees from the University of Georgia, go Dawgs! One of which is a master's in social work. So that is where my clinical therapy experience comes from. And it ended up being really useful in this career. Because as you can probably imagine, a lot of leadership principles have to do with people. And you move from being an individual contributor to being a manager, or you move up into the senior staff type role, you move away from just focusing on doing your work on the day-to-day. And you move more into managing people or the people involved in a project. And that is why this topic is so incredibly important to me.

So we are going to go through four key skills that I would like you to take away from this. My slides are not very text heavy, so you don't have to write down super fast. But I want you to take this really critical piece away. And influence has nothing to do with your job title. It is purely the impact you make on the organization that you're at. And I like to talk about my engineers during this talk because they are some of the best examples of having strong influence in an organization. Because they have zero interest in becoming an engineering manager and yet they make some of the biggest impact on our road map, on our hiring practices, on our company culture, in the way that we operate not just as an engineering team, but as a business as well.

So let's dive into these four key skills. The first one is leaders know how to think about the bigger picture.

When I say the bigger picture, I mean, what are we doing here? Why are we working on this project to begin with? What is the business case for this? The best leaders I know ask a lot of questions to really understand the landscape of what we're doing and why we're doing what we're doing. You know, you really should have an understanding of how your work impacts the organization. And for those of you who are at a larger company, let's use Meta, for example. If your one task is to manage the like button, you might think, well, I'm obviously not having that much of an impact. My scope is so narrow. But it's actually the opposite. Think about how many times that button is clicked in a day. So you really need to connect with what is the work you're doing and what is the business purpose that it brings. And how are customers actually using your work? How are they directly interacting with it? Are they indirectly interacting with it? Are your customers external? Are your customers internally within the company? Really understanding that piece of it is going to make a big difference in the way that your work is perceived within the organization.

So a couple things to think about here. Some critical takeaways. First, try to understand and verbalize the impact of your work. Again, to do this, you need to ask a lot of questions. And I am a firm believer in that there are no dumb questions. I would rather you ask me why you're doing the thing that you're doing, because ideally I am setting you up to have that context ahead of time. But if you're not quite there, I want you to ask me. So I can be as clear as possible for you.

And it becomes really, really useful when you have new people on your team and you're teaching them the landscape, your code base, and you're like, why do we make these decisions in the first place? The more you can connect with this work, asking these questions to senior leadership, asking others on your team who may have built something in the past that you're now supporting, being able to connect the dots is such a powerful skill. We're going through performance review season right now. And if any of you are also doing that, I'm right here with you. It's really fun. These are the topics that are coming up a lot right now. What impact am I actually having? And it's something that I always encourage my engineers to think about as well.

Number two is leaders encourage and amplify others on their team. So this one is all about not necessarily thinking about the impact you're making, but looking for opportunities to celebrate your team and celebrate your teammates and peers on the really great work that they're doing as well. I'll give you an example of this one. We have an engineer who recently started at the company maybe a month ago. And he was doing a really great job on his starter tasks. So I'm like, all right. I'm going to have you work with two of our most experienced engineers to build out the UI for our new authorization. And I should have known from the beginning that if I was giving an engineer who's new to the company, working on authorization, there's a risk of him leaving the company because if you work with authorization, it's a lot of fun. He absolutely nailed it. And what really impressed me about this is one of my other engineers, one who has actually been here for a very long time, he was coaching this engineer, this new one, through how we need to implement all these UI changes to support updated more granular authorization. And he's like, okay, this is a lot of information. I'm new. I'm clearly drinking from the fire hose. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and create a document that outlines every single change I'm making, the permissions that are related to that, and a reason for it. And what he ended up doing is creating a nice audit log of all these changes. And so when we go back to review this, we always know here's how each of these permissions are being applied.

And this engineer was not asked to do this. But this was such a value add to the entire team. And really anybody in engineering at our company who needs to interact with these permissions at all, including our success and support teams, too, they now have this document to understand why things were done the way they did. And so my more senior engineer who's been here for a while, he uses this as an opportunity to shout this out to everybody at the company, saying, I know Chris just started, but he's doing a really, really great job, and here's why. And that is something that really is valued by especially people who are new to the organization who are still trying to find their footing. There are a lot of nerves when you start a new job. You're like, am I making enough of an impact? I need to prove myself. This is a really good way to build up others within your organization, too.

So a couple of things to think through here. First, act as a representative. So that is a good example of something more positive. On the flip side of acting as a representative, another thing you can think about is we were going through some pretty gnarly leadership changes, and things were a little bit shaky from an engineering culture standpoint at my company for a moment. And one of our engineers who is now in engineering management, he took this as an opportunity to bring the engineering team together without me present and say, I want to get your thoughts on how we can make this engineering function better. And then I'm going to present this to Kelly when we can work together on actually implementing these changes. So the reason why this is so valuable is because a lot of people shy away from conflict. Understandably, so conflict is not fun to deal with pretty much ever. But he took this upon himself to give everybody a voice without having to worry about leadership or management being in the room and actually making a really big change in the way that we function as a team and as an entire engineering org. And this work is still like the conversations that happened in that room are changes that we still act on today. So act as that representative and then make sure everyone's contributions are being recognized. Very similar to that more the positive example I gave you earlier.

Third one, leaders understand their personal strengths and they work to improve their weaknesses. The best leaders I know in an organization are very in tune with where their gaps currently lie. We all have room for improvement. None of us are perfect. And we always need to be seeking growth to feel like we're continuing to progress in our careers. And the some of the best engineers that I've worked with are they're very quick to identify like, oh, wow, what you're talking about here. I don't know. I'm very unfamiliar with the space and I really want to learn more. Can you spend time with me on this? And they also know where their strengths are, too. They know what value they really bring.

That might be historical context because you've been at the company for a very long time. That might be because you're really good at breaking down technical concepts into non-technical terms for a broader audience. Your team can really help you define these when you're not really sure what those might be. When you're thinking about these, you need to look at not just your own strengths, but also the strengths of your team. Again, we tend to more quickly latch on to the things we're not good at and we forget what we're actually good at because it comes so naturally to us at this point.

So, if you don't know, ask your team. Ask your peers. Hey, I'm looking for feedback on what are my strengths? What would you say my strengths are? Again, we're doing performance reviews right now, which includes peer reviews. So, we're having these conversations at this moment. But also, if you see an opportunity to say, hey, this is something you're really good at, tell them. Let them know and make them feel appreciated as well. But secondly, and this is probably the most important piece, ask for and act on feedback.

That can be a very scary topic to talk about because nobody likes receiving constructive criticism. I mean, again, we all want to grow, but there's that meme that's floated around for a long time that says something along the lines of, like, I want you to give me feedback, but you have to tell me something nice about me. That is basically what this is here. But what I would like you to see is, you know, all good, like, all feedback has value. Some feedback is delivered better than other feedback. I have an entire section in a course that I run on management fundamentals that talks about giving and receiving feedback, that it needs to be specific, it needs to be timely, something recent. It needs to be backed by examples, and it needs to be about the action and not the person. Feedback is a skill. Feedback is a gift, it's an art, it's something you can learn. Not everybody is going to learn it, but the best thing you can do is get comfortable with receiving feedback and giving really constructive feedback to other people.

Now the flip side of that is if you ask somebody for feedback and it's low quality feedback that you can't do anything with, like, great work, you're doing fine, you can't really action on that, or occasionally it might be so vague or you actually get some constructive criticism that has nothing to do with you, and you're somehow, quote, unquote, getting the blame for this, it's okay to say thank you, appreciate it, and then kind of push it to the side as well. If this is something that you're often struggling with here, especially on giving and receiving feedback, one thing I encourage you to do is read a book called Crucial Conversations. This is one of my absolute favorite books that I love to recommend, because it gets you comfortable with having those difficult conversations, really understanding the other's perspective and to kind of meet in the middle to a degree to figure out how we can actually proceed from here. This kind of, you know, being comfortable with conflict makes giving and receiving feedback a lot easier. The last topic is on emotional intelligence.

I'm sure some of you have likely heard of this term before, but it might be new to some others in here. So emotional intelligence is really about understanding your emotions, your facial expressions, what you're saying, and what others are saying as well, and acting appropriately in the situation. This is not something that always comes naturally to everybody, especially, actually, you see this less often, high EQ in engineering, because we are very analytical, we're very direct with the way that we do our work, and as a result, this sometimes needs to be a very intentional process to really understand emotional intelligence.

I, for example, wear my emotions on my face. And what this means is I'll get into a meeting with somebody or a group of people, and somebody will say something that's just flat-out wrong, and I react immediately with my face, and somebody will ultimately probably call me out and be like, oh, Kelly didn't like that. Really uncomfortable, please don't do that. But my point is that is an area of emotional intelligence that I know I need to work on. So first off, recognize your emotions, name them, and act on them accordingly.

What this often looks like is, again, in conflict, we tend to get very heated when we're in the midst of a difficult conversation, whether it is actually like an argument or you're simply really passionate about whatever it is that you're talking about and you really want to proceed with building X and not building Y, whatever it happens to be, and occasionally we get so incredibly heated in one of these conversations that we say something we regret. This is something that is very human. This has nothing to do necessarily with the professional work space. It happens in the work environment, but it also happens in your personal relationships, too. I'm sure it does happen in my own as well. Being able to recognize when you feel like you're getting heated and acting accordingly, saying like, hey, I need a minute, I need a breather, and I'm happy to bring this back up again, or if you see that one of your colleagues is feeling that same way, like their temper is rising a little bit, it's a good opportunity to say, hey, let's take a minute. We can regroup in 30 minutes, we can regroup the next day, and we can then continue this conversation. But it levels the playing field a little bit if one person is heated and the other person is not, to have a very constructive conversation.

The other side of this is really focusing on not just your verbal communication, but nonverbal as well. Again, in my case, I wear my emotions on my face, and that tends to be a big issue in my personal and professional relationships at times. So I know that is an area that I personally need to work on. But you need to think internally. How do you typically react when you're heated? What kind of things do you generally feel really uncomfortable about, and how can you react accordingly? So with that, I'm going to leave you with one more slide. Building influence is a long game. What I mean by this is we are always all on a journey of self-improvement. There are different times in your career where you're going to be deeply, deeply passionate about continuing to grow, and there are other times when you're like, I just want to take a minute and I just want to coast for a while. But there's always room to improve what we're doing on a given day. And so this is not a one-time thing you're going to do a single time in your life, and you're like, OK, great, I am perfect, I am super influential, and I never have to worry about this again. If you have a new manager, you start a new job, you have new people on your team, there are new people at your company that you have to work with, you still need to go through this process again and again and again. And so I strongly encourage you to just take these four tips that I have in this talk here and just think about it. Take some time to really embody them, embrace them, and think about how you can leverage this to become better for yourself, for your personal relationships, and for your professional relationships. And with that, I am very grateful that you all came here. I have a QR code on every single slide, as you saw. Please connect with me on social media, please connect with each other on LinkedIn as well. We're here to also network, so you should absolutely be pulling up your phone and connecting with your neighbor on LinkedIn.

And I am very grateful and looking forward to the Q&A. So thank you so much. You ran a few companies before that, right? And you did not mention that you actually run. Oh, I also run, yes. I am running my second half marathon next week. Next week? Next week! Okay. All right. Well, round of applause for the runners in here by a show of hands, if I could even see them. I know. Of the four people, I can't see anyone. All right. It's all good. Fine. We're both runners, so we all... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not running a half next week.

As we wait for a couple of questions to get through this review process, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to ask a few of my own. Now, I do have quite a few, actually. You talked about the best leaders ask a lot of questions, and you said there are no dumb questions, which I totally agree. Is there a possibility that you could actually ask too many? If you're asking more questions than you're getting work done, sure. That is a sign that maybe, okay, I'm glad... Like, am I just not doing a good job explaining the context to you, and that is why you're asking so many questions, or is there some other reason why you're asking... I'll start asking why... I'm going to start thinking, why are you asking so many questions? Okay. And the questions have come in.

So let's go with this one right here. Do you have any advice for building influence when your position is 100% remote? Fantastic question, and I have a follow-up about that. I am 100% remote. So I know a lot about this. Also, both companies that I ran were 100% remote. You have to be very intentional about building relationships with other people.

And that means setting aside time to meet with them, make sure you understand their work. And I love to see my engineers connect with people outside of the engineering org. Say meet with somebody from customer success and say, hey, what are your biggest pain points right now? How can I help you? Because they're building trust with another part of the organization, and that is exactly how you really need to build that influence. And it's especially important if you are remote, but other people are actually working in the office. Then it becomes even more critical that you're intentionally working towards building these relationships.

Absolutely. And, you know, I feel like I had this conversation yesterday because I do feel there's an element of remote that may not necessarily connect that well. And if there's, I don't want to say conflict, but usually in person you can have these sort of like, I just feel like there's a bit more going on when you're in person than remote. So I've always wondered what that would be like. But thank you very much for that.

Here's another question. How can you, what would happen to that question? Oh, here it is. Oh, let's go to this one. As a junior dev, how can I calm more senior devs down? That's interesting. In meetings. Thank you. Always remember this is like one of the most therapy things I will say in this room. You can control your own actions. You cannot control the actions of others. You can only control the reactions to other people's actions. So if you're experiencing an environment that is very conflict ridden, that has a lot of engineers arguing or talking over each other, and you're like, why am I here? What is happening? Recognize what you can change and also recognize what can't be changed. Remember when you're in an environment where you feel like you can't get people to calm down for some reason, it's okay to ask for help and escalate something. We often fear HR in the sense that they're only looking out for the company. Well, this is a perfect example of why it's useful because you're like, hey, I just want to make sure we're working productively as a team. And I think this is an area of improvement. Escalate it, if not HR, to your boss's boss or your boss. You need to talk about it and don't try to fix everything yourself.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's like people management.

I like this one. How do you handle colleagues that meet all forms of feedback in a hostile manner? That's a good question. I think we all know people like that. We all know people who are just very, they're always uncomfortable receiving feedback and it does not matter what you say. Understand, same thing, you cannot change somebody's reaction to what you say. The best thing you can do is if you do need to give them feedback and you know they're not going to like it, do what you can to set the stage. And that means, in my course I teach on management fundamentals, I have a slide in there that all it says is, hey, can we talk, which every single time people are like, oh, we all don't like that kind of vibe. Look for that.

Try to set the stage and say, hey, I want to give you some feedback on X topic, is this a good time to talk? And if it's not a good time to talk, maybe they're just having a really bad day, say, all right, if not now, then I'm going to schedule some time for tomorrow. But the more you can kind of set the stage and create a safe environment to be able to give that feedback, the better that feedback will be received. Understanding that no matter what kind of feedback, like if it's any kind of constructive feedback, people are just not going to, some people don't want to hear it at all. You know, at least you said your piece in a very thoughtful way and it's up to them to decide what to do with that feedback.

Hmm. I like this one as well. How can you dive into this type of leadership without being quote unquote, manager tracked? Oh, man. Everything I talked about today, you don't have to be a manager for. Again, like all the people that I'm managing right now, I actually, I have 10 engineers reporting to me right now. No manager in between at this moment. And again, like my team makes some of the biggest impact on the organization. And they have zero interest in going manager track. And they embody these principles. Like when I created this slide deck some time ago, like I thought about what is it about my engineers that really makes them stand out. And it's these four key skills that I pointed out here. So yeah, absolutely. You do not have to be manager tracked to be embodying these kinds of leadership principles. Thank you for that question.

How can I propose a breather if the issue that triggered a heated argument is urgent? Yeah. I mean, let's take an example.

You're dealing with a sub-zero outage right now. And now this is absolutely an issue. Is this the time to actually be talking about the reasons why something happened? Or is this the time to be thinking about how do we get to a resolution? And then how can we have a post-mortem after this? It's again, it's a timing thing. And you're not always going to be in a fortunate time where you can be giving the feedback you want to be giving. But there's a level of just reading the room and making sure this is the right time to have this conversation. Make sure you write down your feedback so you don't forget it if you do need to table it for a minute. But that's what I would recommend.

Here's another one. Can you be a good leader and be friends with people you're leading? Yeah. Good one. You can be friendly with them. There's a difference between being friendly and being friends with them. And the reason why I say it that way is because at the end of the day, you're responsible for their success and you're still are going to have to have some difficult discussions with them at times. So if you start to find that your relationships are your ability to manage somebody is being impacted because you're worried about upsetting them because you don't want your friends to feel like to feel bad. You need to take a step back. Become a little too close of a friendship when it comes to the work environment.

This is going to be the last question. I will make it a lightning answer if possible because it just got a bunch of likes. How to build team spirit if common activities is not an option due to time differences? Can you repeat that? How do you build team spirit in common activities if if common activities, pardon me, is not an option due to time differences? My team of the 10 engineers, five are in the States, four in Europe and one is in India. So speaking of time differences, I deal with that every day. It's not easy, just to be honest. It is not easy to find that common ground for you to all get together. I really advocate for getting time at least once a year to get my team together face to face so we can spend time together. Otherwise, occasionally I'll just I'll kind of like split the celebrations to have like European time celebration versus the American time celebration. And, you know, you could attend either one if you want, but know that the time zone might be a little tricky. It's there's an honestly no you can't you can't bend time. I haven't figured that one out yet. So we all do the best we can. Cool. Thank you very much for that.