Soft Power and How to Wield It

Soft power. The workplace skill you never knew you needed. We often think of power in the workplace in terms of the organizational hierarchy and decision-making flow. Who gets to tell people what to do? Who calls the shots? Clarity in those roles are critically important, but lots of time they just don’t reflect what effectiveness really looks like on the ground on a day-to-day basis. Organizations are made up of people, and in many circumstances the ability of an organization to get things done relies just as heavily on its informal management flows as what we think of as traditional manager → team relationships. I think of this more informal way of managing as soft power, and if you look you can probably see it being used in all kinds of places across your organization.

Everyone needs soft power

I believe that everyone needs or uses soft power at some point. Leading a cross-functional project? You’re probably deep in soft politics. Managing up? You’re probably using soft power to do so. New to a team? Soft power is probably one of the fastest ways to build a name for yourself as you try to gain credibility with your peers and leaders.

Soft power is defined as “the ability to attract and co-opt, rather than coerce”. No one wants to be coerced at the office. In many cases, however, our roles are defined, orders come from the top down, and it’s easy to understand how the pieces come together to deliver value. Hard power is useful when the objective is crystal clear and there is an established process to follow. It’s important to have that structure. Hard power is part of an organization’s skeletal system, a backbone meant to reinforce accountability and consistency of purpose. But think about most of what happens in teams every day. The flesh on the bones is made up of so much push-and-pull. So many micro-decisions, negotiations, process and even morale are made up of informal interactions, requests, and even favors. Chances are that to be really effective, you need to wield some soft power to make sure that the critical moments — the ones where you are held accountable to someone with hard power — can be delivered smoothly.

I recently had a crash course in soft power when I was put in charge of a cross-functional workstream charged with delivering a particular outcome. The workstream members all reported to different teams and different organizational leaders. Technically, I had exactly zero hard power to exert over any of the members, but they all had specific deliverables critical to the success of our mission. Everyone knows how hard it is so to be responsible for something without having control over the critical levers of budget and human resources (in fact there are many reasons not to organize your projects like this, but for short term things strike teams or tiger teams sometimes are the best option).

I want to address one thing that comes to mind when talking about soft power: where’s the line between soft power and politicking? Is wielding soft power the same as “playing the game?” On the surface, it can seem that way, and I have a feeling it might be why some people are reluctant to employ it, either consciously or subconsciously. Soft power also requires a slightly more sophisticated level of EQ (emotional intelligence), and that can require practice for those most comfortable just working in established frameworks and/or “being told what to do.” But if you’ve ever felt frustrated because you feel like you’re “doing everything right” but just not getting through, I’d consider taking a second look at your problem through the lens of soft power. The distinction I would draw between soft power and office politics is in the use of a clear, objective framework for viewing your actions. Instead of just reacting to asks because you like someone, or asking them to do the same, the recommendations below can be applied to anyone that you interact with in the workplace. If you keep them in mind when working with others to get something done, I bet you’ll end up much less frustrated and probably more successful at achieving your overall goal.

So how can you identify the need for soft power and how do you get good at using it? Here’s what I’d recommend.

How to wield soft power effectively

Be Nice

This is also a good rule for life, of course. But trust me, I know that in the heat of the moment, when pressure is high and deadlines are on the line it can be easy to forget your manners, or think basic politeness and decency is superfluous. But let me tell you a truism: no one likes working with jerks. If you develop a reputation for being a jerk, people will avoid working with you, and you can forget about them going out of their way to help you when you’re in a pinch. Certainly, most people don’t set out to be jerks. But ask yourself: are you investing in your professional relationships? Or are you just getting by, responding to requests because you have to, showing up but not really engaging. I don’t mean that you have to be BFFs with all your colleagues. But be the person that people want to engage with on work challenges. Even if you don’t have the answer, one of the best things you can do is try to brainstorm solutions with someone who has come to you for help. If you invest in relationships you will build capital that will pay dividends down the road when you are the one asking for help.

Make other people’s jobs easier.

I was going to call this section “aligning incentives.” But it just doesn’t cut straight enough to the heart of the matter. People are way more likely to help you when solving your problem will make their lives easier. Some people might be willing to help you out of the goodness of their heart (see earlier point about the dividends that come with being nice), but in a workplace setting you likely won’t get very far if what you’re asking someone to do will take time away from what they are getting measured and evaluated on. It’s just not worth it for them when performance review time comes and their boss says “you weren’t able to deliver on our project because you were doing X for some other team?”

Accomplishing this can certainly be tricky. It helps if the overall priorities for the organization are clear and your project aligns with that macro objective (if it doesn’t, you should probably evaluate whether that project is really worth investing in, anyway). In my example as a workstream lead I had two things going for me in this regard. First, the organizational leaders had blessed this project by saying that people who worked on it would be contributing to an overall priority for the org. Second, I was able to show that investing in this workstream would pay dividends down the line when we were able to establish replicable processes that would replace tedious manual work many of the participants were used to doing. That doesn’t mean that resource conflicts didn’t come up — many times people got pulled off my project to work on priority things that were directly within their reporting line — but overall there was buy-in to invest time in the cross-functional project.

Make it okay

At the end of the day, if someone’s boss isn’t on board with supporting her team member helping you out, you’re pretty much dead in the water. So I highly recommend you work to get the people in charge of the people you need — their functional hard power — aligned to your cause. In fact, the two maxims to “be nice” and “make other people’s jobs easier” apply just as well to management as it does to individual contributors. If you can show that your project will reflect well on the manager and that it’s worth their while to invest in a relationship with you, they are much more likely to bless their employees’ engagement in your initiative.

In closing, soft power in a vacuum can feel like sucking up or a waste of time. But when wielded within a framework grounded in decency and the basics of incentives, it can provide a pathway to getting things done more effectively. If you find yourself hitting a wall when needing to get buy-in and effort from others, think about if there is a way to invest in relationships and align incentives to get things moving again.