By wlc
Published August 27, 2026
How often do you think about influence?
Sometimes, rarely?
The more important question is when do you think about influence?
Most people don’t think about influence until the moment they desperately need it.
A project that needs a green light from someone who barely knows you exist. A leadership team deciding who gets the opportunity and your name doesn’t come up. A crisis that needs a trusted voice, and you realise you haven’t built enough trust with the people who matter.
That’s the moment most people wish they’d started earlier.
Influence is not authority.
Authority is the title on your business card. Influence is what happens when people listen to you because they genuinely want to.
It’s how some people can walk into a room, say relatively little, and completely shift how the conversation goes. While others with bigger titles and louder voices somehow don’t get moving things much.
Mastering influence has less to do with expertise and everything to do with the ability to build genuine trust with people around you. It’s something you earn over time, and unlike a job title, it is hard to take it away from you.
When 132 women executives were asked independently what got them to the top, around 35 of them said the same thing without seeing each other’s answers – Building networks, finding the right mentors, and cultivating sponsors who would advocate for them.
Some spoke about skills or performance. Most spoke about relationships built before they were needed.
Influence has two sides that rarely get talked about separately.
- The first is inner influence, the relationship you have with yourself.
How clearly you can articulate what you stand for. Whether you walk into a difficult conversation knowing your own position, or whether you get swayed by whoever spoke last. Whether you present your ideas with conviction or quietly undersell them, hoping someone else will notice their value.
- The second is outer influence
The web of relationships, trust, and reputation you’ve built with the people around you. The colleague who mentions your name in a meeting you weren’t invited to. The senior leader who thinks of you immediately when something important comes up. The person who’s known you for three years and will vouch for you without hesitation.
Most people focus on one and forget the other. The ones who get it right work on both.
What building influence actually looks like day to day
It’s simple.
Being the person who makes other people feel like the smartest one in the room and meaning it. It’s showing up for people when there’s nothing in it for you, so that when the moment comes where you need something, it doesn’t feel like a transaction. It’s also about being in the right rooms consistently.
“You are responsible for your career. Look out for opportunities. Knock on doors. If those doors are locked, break them open.” Angela Oduor, Executive Director of Ushahidi
That’s influence in action. Deliberately, patiently putting yourself where the right people can find you.
The secret ingredient – Self Mastery
Before you can influence anyone else, you have to have a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for.
The most influential people in any room are the ones who know themselves well enough that other people feel safe trusting them. That kind of self-knowledge doesn’t come from a course or a book. It comes from real conversations with people who know you well enough to be honest and care enough to say the hard thing.
And it’s something that’s built over time, in community, through the kind of relationships that go deeper than professional courtesy.
What happens inside WLC
At Women Leadership Circle, influence is one of the things that shifts most visibly in the women who come through the circle.
When you are with women who are genuinely rooting for each other, it does something that no workshop can replicate. You see what real influence looks like in practice. You build relationships with people who will say your name when it matters. You also get the kind of honest feedback that helps you understand how you’re landing and where there’s more to build.
As one MIT Sloan leadership researcher put it,
“Great leaders aren’t people who seek power. They’re people who take responsibility because they have the capability and the genuine desire to help others ge
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