Influence and Persuasion at Work – A Combined Consideration

You are already doing it…

All of us are, pretty much all the time, influencing other people. The questions we need to ask really are:

• Are we doing so intentionally?
• Are we doing so well, or badly? And perhaps most importantly for us,
• Are we doing so with positive motivations?

There is no shortage of books, courses, and LinkedIn posts about influence and persuasion. And there are millions of articles like this one that cover all the stuff we’ll explore and build on a bit here including:

• Cialdini’s six principles (reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity) which describe the psychological shortcuts through which people are persuaded.
• Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals (logos, pathos, and ethos) which address the three dimensions any persuasive message must engage: logic, emotion, and credibility.
• The Elaboration Likelihood Model whihc explains why some audiences process arguments carefully (the central route) while others respond to surface cues (the peripheral route).
• Push influence (asserting, persuading, incentivising) and pull influence (bridging, attracting, inspiring) whihc represent fundamentally different strategies, and most people over-rely on push., and
• Nudge theory which adds the insight that changing the environment can be more effective than changing minds.

Synthesised together, these frameworks suggest a practical model: know your audience’s processing mode, build your credibility before you need it, choose push or pull based on the relationship and the stakes, design the environment to support your message, and never confuse influence with manipulation.

We’ll try and touch on this all in more detail in this post. We have to say though, we do find influencing others a bit of dirty topic. It’s a reflection of who we are, but we feel this pretty strongly.

Of course, in the workplace, much of what we’re paid to do is to influence others, so our views don’t really matter.

When we actually do workshops on topics like this though, we’re generally drawn more to delivering “defensive” minded workshops that help people learn to tools and tricks that others may deploy to influence them. We’d rather take this “what to watch out for and how to avoid it” approach, rather than teaching people to use this skills.

Why Influence Matters More Than It Used To

The traditional model of organisational life assumed a reasonably straightforward relationship between authority and action. If you held a senior position, you could direct the behaviour of those beneath you. If you wanted something done, you told someone to do it. This was never quite as simple as it sounded, as anyone who has managed people can attest, but the basic logic held: power flowed downwards, and so did instruction.

That model has not disappeared, but it has been comprehensively complicated. Organisations now routinely require people to work across functional boundaries, where no one has formal authority over anyone else. Project teams are assembled from multiple departments, each with its own priorities and pressures. Matrix structures mean that people have multiple reporting lines and competing demands on their time. And the rise of knowledge work means that the people you most need to influence are often the ones who know more about their domain than you do, which rather undermines the “because I said so” approach.

Cohen and Bradford (2005), in their influential work on influence without authority, identified this as the central challenge of contemporary organisational life: getting things done through people over whom you have no formal control. Their model, built around the idea of reciprocal exchange, which we shall return to, captures something genuinely important about how collaboration actually works when nobody is in charge. But the broader point is this: influence is no longer a skill reserved for senior leaders. It is a core competency for anyone who needs to work with other human beings, which is to say, everyone.

The Raw Materials: What the Theories Actually Say

Before we attempt synthesis, it is worth understanding what each of the major theories contributes. They are not all saying the same thing, and the differences matter.

Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion, first articulated in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984, revised 2007), identify the psychological mechanisms through which people are moved to say yes. He added a 7th (Unity) later, but we’re ignoring that for this article. Cialdini’s principles are:

1. Reciprocity: we feel obligated to return favours, even uninvited ones.
2. Commitment and consistency: once we have taken a position or made a small commitment, we are driven to behave consistently with it.
3. Social proof: when uncertain, we look to what others are doing.
4. Authority: we defer to perceived experts and legitimate authorities.
5. Liking: we are more easily persuaded by people we like, find similar to us, or find attractive.
6. Scarcity: we value things more when they appear scarce or when we might lose access to them. These principles are powerful because they describe genuine features of human psychology. They are not tricks; they are patterns, and they operate whether or not anyone is deliberately employing them.

Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals, articulated over two thousand years ago and still not improved upon in any fundamental sense, identify three dimensions of persuasive communication.

1. Logos is the appeal to logic: the quality of the argument, the evidence, the reasoning.
2. Pathos is the appeal to emotion: the capacity to make the audience feel something, whether that is urgency, hope, fear, or shared purpose.
3. Ethos is the appeal of the speaker’s character: their credibility, their trustworthiness, their perceived authority on the subject.

Aristotle’s insight, which remains as relevant in a boardroom as it was in the Athenian assembly, is that all three appeals are necessary. A logically impeccable argument delivered by someone the audience does not trust will fail. An emotionally compelling plea unsupported by evidence will be dismissed by serious people. And credibility without substance is empty authority. We’ve gotta be all things to all folks, to really influence.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), explains why different persuasion strategies work in different circumstances.

• When people are motivated and able to think carefully about a message, they process it through what Petty and Cacioppo called the central route: they evaluate the strength of the arguments, scrutinise the evidence, and form attitudes based on thoughtful analysis.
• When people lack motivation or ability to process carefully, perhaps because they are busy, distracted, uninterested, or the subject is outside their expertise, they take the peripheral route: they rely on surface cues such as the attractiveness or authority of the speaker, the number of arguments presented (regardless of quality), or the reactions of others.

Central route persuasion tends to produce more durable attitude change; peripheral route persuasion produces change that is more fragile and more susceptible to counter-persuasion. The practical implication is stark: the persuasion strategy that works when your audience is engaged and knowledgeable is fundamentally different from the one that works when they are not. (Think dual process / dual systems theory here)

Nudge theory, as articulated by Thaler and Sunstein (2008), shifts attention from changing minds to changing environments and architectures to change behaviours.

A nudge is simply a modification to the choice architecture, the context in which decisions are made, that predictably alters behaviour without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives.

Making the healthy option the default in a canteen, placing recycling bins more conveniently than rubbish bins, auto-enrolling employees into pension schemes: these are nudges.

They work because human beings are not the rational actors that classical economics imagined; we are cognitive misers who rely on defaults, shortcuts, and environmental cues far more than we care to admit.

For influence in organisations, the lesson is profound: sometimes the most effective way to change behaviour is not to persuade anyone of anything but to redesign the environment so that the desired behaviour becomes the path of least resistance.

Push and pull influence, a distinction drawn from various sources in the leadership and influence literature, identifies two fundamentally different approaches.

• Push influence involves directing energy towards the other person: asserting your position, presenting logical arguments, offering incentives, applying pressure.
• Pull influence involves drawing the other person towards you: listening to understand their perspective, finding common ground, building rapport, creating a compelling vision, and inspiring rather than instructing.

Most people default to push, because push feels like doing something. You make your case, you present your evidence, you argue your point. Pull feels passive by comparison, but it is often more effective, particularly with resistant audiences, because it works with the other person’s psychology rather than against it.

Towards an Integrated Model

The question, then, is how these frameworks fit together. They are not competing theories; they are different lenses on the same phenomenon, and each captures something the others miss. Here is our attempt at integration.

Start with the ELM as the overarching framework, because it answers the most fundamental strategic question: what kind of processing will your audience bring to your message? If they are likely to engage deeply, your primary task is to build strong arguments (logos), supported by genuine credibility (ethos), and you should lean on Cialdini’s more substantive principles: reciprocity (have you built a relationship of genuine exchange?), commitment and consistency (can you connect your proposal to commitments they have already made?), and authority grounded in real expertise. This is the territory of push influence at its best: well-reasoned, evidence-based persuasion directed at people who are paying attention.

If your audience is likely to process peripherally, either because the issue is not central to their concerns, or because they are overwhelmed, or because they lack expertise in your domain, then the terrain shifts. Here, liking, social proof, and the surface markers of authority (presentation quality, endorsements from respected figures, the appearance of consensus) carry disproportionate weight. This is not because your audience is stupid; it is because they are human, and they are using entirely rational cognitive shortcuts to manage the impossible volume of decisions they face every day. Pathos matters more here, because emotion is a peripheral cue that cuts through when logic alone cannot command attention. Pull influence is particularly effective in this mode: if people are not going to scrutinise your argument in detail, the quality of the relationship and the attractiveness of the vision matter more than the rigour of the evidence.

Nudge theory sits alongside this model rather than within it. Nudges work regardless of processing route because they operate on the environment rather than on the person. You do not need to persuade someone to choose the default option; you need only to set the default. In organisational terms, this means that sometimes the most effective influence strategy is not to have a better argument or a stronger relationship but to redesign the process, the form, the meeting structure, or the decision architecture so that the outcome you want becomes the natural one. This is influence without persuasion, and it is underused because it does not feel like influence. It feels like administration. But it works.

The Ethical Line: Influence Versus Manipulation

Any serious discussion of influence must contend with the fact that the same techniques can be used to help people make better decisions or to exploit them for your own benefit. The line between influence and manipulation is one of the most important questions in this entire domain, and it is, inconveniently, not always easy to draw.

We think the distinction rests on three criteria, none of which is individually sufficient but which together provide a reasonable test.

• First, transparency: would the other person, if they fully understood what you were doing and why, still consider it legitimate? If the answer is no, you are probably manipulating rather than influencing.
• Second, mutual benefit: does the outcome serve the other person’s interests as well as your own, or are you pursuing your interests at their expense? Cohen and Bradford’s (2005) emphasis on mutual exchange is relevant here; sustainable influence is built on relationships where both parties gain value (win-win Vs. zero-sum game)
• Third, respect for autonomy: are you leaving the other person free to make a genuinely informed choice, or are you engineering the situation to remove that freedom? Nudges, for instance, preserve choice while making one option easier; manipulation removes or distorts choice while pretending it is still present.

We should be honest that these criteria do not resolve every case. Organisational life is full of grey areas where the interests of different parties genuinely conflict, where full transparency is not possible, and where the line between “making a compelling case” and “pressuring someone into agreement” is a matter of degree rather than kind. But acknowledging the grey areas is not the same as abandoning the distinction. You can navigate a foggy landscape more carefully if you admit the fog exists, and the person who claims they are never manipulative is usually the one most worth watching.

Practical Strategies: Matching Approach to Situation

The integrated model suggests that effective influence requires diagnostic thinking before it requires technique. Before you decide how to influence, you need to understand your situation. Here are the questions we think matter most.

What is your audience’s processing mode? Are they likely to engage deeply with your argument, or are they making a quick decision among many? This determines whether you should invest primarily in the quality of your logic (central route) or in the quality of your presentation and relationships (peripheral route). In practice, most organisational audiences are somewhere in between, which means you need both, but the balance matters.

What is your existing credibility? Ethos is not something you can manufacture in the moment; it is something you bring with you. If you have high credibility with this audience, you can rely more heavily on assertion and direct persuasion. If your credibility is low or untested, you need to lead with pull: listening, building rapport, demonstrating understanding of their perspective before you offer your own. The single biggest mistake in influence is leading with your conclusion before you have earned the right to be heard.

What is the relationship? Reciprocity and liking are not things you can activate on demand. They are built over time through genuine exchange and authentic connection. If you have a strong relationship with the person you are trying to influence, you have a reservoir of goodwill and mutual obligation to draw on. If you do not, you need to build one before your influence will land, or find someone who already has that relationship and enlist their support. This is what networking is actually for, not the collecting of business cards at conferences but the cultivation of genuine relationships with people whose support you may one day need and to whom you are willing to offer genuine support in return.

Is push or pull more appropriate? Push influence works well when you have clear authority or expertise, when the issue is urgent, and when the other person is receptive to direct input. Pull influence works better when you are dealing with resistance, when you lack formal authority, when the relationship is fragile, or when the other person needs to feel ownership of the decision. Most people push too much and pull too little, because push feels active and pull feels patient, and patience is not a quality that modern organisational culture tends to reward. But the evidence is consistent: in cross-functional collaboration, in leading without authority, and in most situations involving genuinely difficult stakeholders, pull outperforms push.

Can you change the environment instead of changing minds? Before you invest effort in persuading someone, ask whether you could achieve the same outcome by redesigning the choice architecture. If you want more people to attend your team meeting, changing the default calendar setting might be more effective than sending a persuasive email. If you want a project to be prioritised, getting it onto the agenda of the right meeting may matter more than the brilliance of your business case. This is influence as design rather than influence as performance, and it is the aspect that most people neglect.

Building Influence Over Time

One of the things that the theoretical literature captures poorly and that experienced practitioners know intuitively is that influence is not primarily a transactional skill. It is a cumulative one. Your capacity to influence in any given moment is largely determined by what you have done in the weeks, months, and years preceding it. This is the domain of what Harvey Coleman calls the PVI model: performance, visibility, and influence are interconnected, and they build on each other over time.

The foundations are unglamorous but essential. Deliver consistently. Expert power and credibility (ethos) are built through a track record of competence. Every time you do what you said you would do, on time and to a good standard, you add a small deposit to your influence account. Every time you overpromise and underdeliver, you make a withdrawal. There are no shortcuts here. People trust track records more than promises, and rightly so.

Be genuinely useful to others. Reciprocity is not a manipulation technique; it is the operating system of human cooperation. The person who builds a reputation for helping others, for sharing knowledge generously, for making introductions without expecting an immediate return, accumulates a form of social capital that is extraordinarily valuable when they need support for their own initiatives. Cohen and Bradford’s (2005) model of influence without authority is built entirely on this principle: influence flows from the accumulation of reciprocal exchanges over time.

Invest in relationships before you need them. The time to build rapport with a stakeholder is not the week before you need their approval for your project. It is months or years earlier, when you have nothing to ask for and can engage with genuine curiosity about their work, their priorities, and their perspective. Liking, one of Cialdini’s six principles, is built through repeated positive interactions, through finding genuine common ground, and through demonstrating that you understand and respect the other person’s world. It cannot be faked at the point of need, and attempts to do so are transparent and counterproductive.

Develop range. Most people have a default influence style, and most default styles are too narrow. If you are naturally analytical, you probably over-rely on logos and push influence: presenting evidence, making rational arguments, expecting the strength of your analysis to carry the day. If you are naturally empathetic, you may over-rely on pathos and pull: building rapport, seeking consensus, avoiding direct assertion even when it is needed. Effective influencers develop the capacity to work across the full range: push when push is needed, pull when pull is needed, logos for the analytically minded, pathos for the emotionally driven, and the judgement to know which situation calls for which approach.

Common Mistakes

Having outlined what we think works, we should be equally clear about what does not. These are the influence mistakes we see most frequently in organisational life, and they are remarkably consistent across sectors, levels, and contexts.

Leading with logic and assuming it is sufficient. This is the engineer’s fallacy, the assumption that a well-reasoned argument will persuade a rational audience. It will, if the audience is processing via the central route and if they trust you and if the emotional context is right. That is a lot of ifs. In our experience, the most common reason good ideas fail to gain traction is not that the logic is weak but that the emotional and relational groundwork has not been done.

Pushing harder when push is not working. When people encounter resistance, the natural instinct is to push more: repeat the argument, present more evidence, escalate the urgency. This almost never works and frequently makes things worse, because the other person experiences the increased pressure as a threat to their autonomy and digs in further. When push is not working, the answer is almost always to switch to pull: stop talking, start listening, try to understand the resistance before trying to overcome it.

Neglecting the relationship. You can have the most compelling argument in the world, and if the person you are presenting it to does not trust you, it will not land. Ethos precedes logos, and liking precedes logic. We have seen technically brilliant proposals fail because the proposer had no relationship with the decision-maker, and technically mediocre proposals succeed because the proposer had invested years in building credibility and goodwill. This is not how things should work in a purely rational world. It is how they work in the actual one.

Treating influence as a one-off event rather than a process. Significant decisions are rarely made in a single meeting. They evolve through a series of conversations, drafts, consultations, and informal exchanges. The person who treats influence as something that happens in the pitch meeting is missing the point. The real influence work happens before the meeting: the pre-meetings, the corridor conversations, the careful sequencing of who hears what and when, the gradual building of consensus through individual conversations. By the time you are in the room making your formal case, the outcome should already be largely determined. If it is not, you have started too late.

Ignoring the choice architecture. Most people, when they want to change behaviour, reach for persuasion. They make the case for change, explain the benefits, and then wonder why nothing happens. The nudge theory insight is that people are not ignoring your argument; they are simply following the path of least resistance, and that path has not changed. If you want different behaviour, change the defaults, the process, the structure, or the environment. It is less satisfying than a brilliant speech, but it is considerably more reliable.

The Limitations of All of This

We have tried to present an integrated model of influence, but we should be honest about its limitations, because there are several.

First, the evidence base is uneven. Cialdini’s principles are well-supported by experimental evidence, but most of that evidence comes from laboratory settings with American undergraduate participants, which is not a population that represents the full range of human decision-making. The ELM has strong empirical support but is better at describing what happens than at predicting, in advance, which processing route a given audience will take. Nudge theory has impressive field evidence for specific interventions but has been criticised for oversimplifying complex behavioural dynamics and for sometimes producing effects that fade over time. Aristotle’s rhetoric is a normative framework, not an empirical theory, and its usefulness depends on the skill of the person applying it. None of these frameworks is wrong, but none of them is as precise or as universally applicable as their more enthusiastic advocates sometimes suggest.

Second, influence is deeply contextual, and no model can capture the full richness of that context. Cultural factors matter enormously: what counts as persuasive in one culture may be ineffective or offensive in another. Organisational culture matters: the influence strategies that work in a consensus-driven Scandinavian firm are different from those that work in a hierarchical East Asian conglomerate. Power dynamics matter: influence operates very differently depending on whether you are influencing up, down, or across the hierarchy. Any practical application of the model we have described requires sensitivity to these contextual factors, and that sensitivity cannot be reduced to a formula.

Third, there is a selection bias in the influence literature that is worth noting. Most of the research and most of the popular writing focuses on how to be more influential. Rather less attention is paid to how to resist influence, how to recognise when you are being manipulated, or how to create organisational cultures in which influence is exercised transparently and accountably. (As we said at the start – this is the approach we actually prefer to take.) This is a significant gap, because influence skills without ethical grounding and institutional accountability are not a force for good; they are just a more sophisticated form of power politics.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion
• The Rhetorical Triangle
• Nudge Theory
• The PVI Model
• Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

The People Shift View

We have spent a good deal exploring influence and persuasion and training different aspects of it within organisation.

Our core message in all of this comes back to all those warnings about the ethics of influence and when it becomes manipulation. Just try and do the right thing. We know it sounds a bit sanctimonious, but it’s what we think. 

Also – all these models are great in theory, but the practice is hard. They’re effortful and take a lot of focus, planning and energy to do well (think about all the time invested in generating those social media algorithms). It’s often hard to do this in the moment in a dynamic situation. 

When we actually try and train people in subjects like this, we often come back to helping people try and create “win-win” situations, to see things from the others’ perspective, to have the courage to be open and vulnerable and to have consideration of others views. 

We are also increasingly convinced that the most important influence skill is not any form of persuasion at all. It is listening. Genuinely understanding another person’s perspective, their priorities, their concerns, their constraints, does two things simultaneously: it gives you the information you need to frame your message effectively, and it demonstrates the respect that is the foundation of any sustainable influence relationship. The person who listens before they speak, who seeks to understand before they seek to be understood, is not being passive. They are doing the most sophisticated influence work there is.

Finally, we want to be clear that influence, like all forms of power, carries responsibility. The same skills that enable you to build productive collaborations, champion good ideas, and lead without authority can be used to manipulate, deceive, and exploit. The frameworks in this article are tools. Whether they make your organisation better or worse depends entirely on the character and intentions of the person wielding them. 

PS – It would be great if more orgs trained their people and their leaders to watch out for efforts to influence and to learn to name them and defend against them effectively.