How To Establish Authority As A Manager Quickly Without Needing A Job Title
How to establish authority as a manager quickly and effectively without annoying, alienating or upsetting is what we are covering today. Why should you want to increase your authority as a manger? The more authority you have as a manager:
- The quicker others do what you ask
- You experience a lot less pushback and resistance
- The quicker and easier you can persuade and win over others
- Finally, the more you and your team will deliver in a given timeframe
How To Establish Authority As A Manager Quickly Without Needing A Job Title
- Work to build trusting relationships
- Understand first, change second
- Work to publicly remove problems
- Create consistency of direction and expectations
- Borrow credibility from your boss and peers
All these enable you to do a better job, to build more influence, to have a greater impact, to gain more respect, to be promoted more often and to have a higher bank balance as a manager.
If you don’t realise already, the most powerful sources of authority don’t come from your job title. To increase manager authority DON’T throw your weight around. Don’t order, demand, shout or bully. These types of fear based behaviour will lose you authority, respect and goodwill. Avoid using them.
To be very influential as a manager, you need your team and colleagues to give you authority willingly. That is they will do what you ask because they respect you, they like you, and they appreciate you. They give you authority because they want to help you and they don’t want to let you down. You get authority from others when they trust you to use it wisely.
The more you are able to help others be successful, the more they will help you be successful and the more authority they will give you.
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The first important approach for getting authority as a manager is to work to build trusting relationships
Relationships give you a lot more authority than any job title will. Think how likely you are to help a good friend vs a stranger asking for help. Think how quickly you will help a good friend.
A little example – a good friend of mine phoned me to ask for help. I said of course I will help. He laughed and said “You don’t even know what I want help with”. I didn’t. It didn’t matter. He didn’t ask for help often and I trusted him to not ask me to do something bad or illegal. I didn’t even need to think before saying yes. I valued the relationship so saying yes immediately was really easy.
This is the power of relationships. When you work to build good relationships with team members, colleagues and bosses, you are gaining authority as a manager. You can ask them for help, to undertake work for you, to solve a problem for you … and they will say yes without having to think, to consider if they should or if it is in their interests. Good relationships give you serious authority as a manager.
5 Very Effective Actions
Here are 5 very effective actions to build very strong relationships at work:
- Be genuinely interested in others. Being interested shows you care, that you value them, that they are worth spending your precious time with.
- Be easy to get along with – be friendly, kind, considerate, diplomatic, approachable, trustworthy etc.
- Work to be good at your job. The better you are at your job, the more you can help others with theirs and the more you support team success.
- Proactively help others. The more you help others, the more appreciation you get and the more they are willing to help you. Reciprocity is very powerful for building influence and goodwill and therefore your authority as a manager.
- Regularly encourage and praise. Everyone likes genuine praise and to have their efforts recognised and appreciated.
Build good relationships with everyone in your team. Put more effort in with those who have the most influence in the team. When respected influencers like you, others will follow you a lot more willingly, even if they don’t know you well yet.
Work at building trusting relationships – a critical approach for how to build authority as a manager.
The second approach for building authority as a manager is to understand first and change second
Every manager starting with a new team wants to make their mark and prove to everyone they deserve the job. This is human nature. Park the temptation to jump in and start making changes. Make changes without understanding the problems first and you trash your authority with everyone watching.
In my first board director role, I joined a company about to go bust. I knew I had to act quickly to save the business. Yet, I also knew that if I made the wrong decisions and choices, the business was definitely going to fail. I spent the first few weeks speaking to every team member, asking a lot of questions and listening very carefully to what I was being told.
I wanted their views, their ideas, what had already been tried and what they thought would work. It was critical to understand the team and the situation before I acted. I had several team members come up to me and praise me for taking the time to listen and understand before making changes. I gained a lot of authority as a manager in their eyes because I understood first and changed second.
When you understand the underlying problems, you can devise solutions that solve multiple problems at once. If you don’t understand, your solution could easily make things worse. If mess up early, say goodbye to gaining authority as a manager.
Make sure any changes you make will definitely make the situation better. To be sure of this, you have to understand the situation and the team first.
publicly remove problems – The third approach for how to establish
When you remove problems that negatively impact the team – how they work, their output, their motivation, the team culture and the working environment – you are demonstrating:
- You have the confidence, judgement and prioritisation to help the team you look after
- The team are important to you and you care about the team. You are willing to put in personal effort to make their lives better
- You have the skills and expertise to find problems and implement suitable solutions to remove those problems
- Finally, you can persuade bosses, peers and team members to give you permission, the resources, the help or the time needed to remove the problems you find
The more time you spend with team members and the more you listen to what they complain about, the easier it will be for you to find problems they care about.
Start small. What little things can you do to help them. It might be teaching them better software skills. It might be sharing information. What about removing reporting no longer needed? It might be taking out a step in process. It might be getting the resources they need.
Remember, you don’t need to come up with the answers and solutions as a manager. You only need to SELECT a suitable solution and make sure it is implemented. Use your team to create ideas and solutions.
Finally, don’t shy away from making tough decisions in the best interests of the team. Putting the team first and making the tough but necessary decisions is great for gaining manager authority.
The fourth approach to for building authority as a manager is to create consistency of direction and expectations
To be able to keep consistency of direction, you need to have a strong business case for choosing and keeping to a specific direction. Your direction needs to align with the wider business, support your boss’s goals and create real value for the business. The stronger your case, the easier you will find it to keep your team working in a consistent direction.
I have worked for several bosses who chase after the latest shiny idea. You and the team are part the way through implementing the last idea or request and you are expected to drop that and start on the new one. You massively increase your authority as a manager when you can negotiate away these sudden changes of direction. I.e. keep the team consistently moving in the roughly the same direction, so the team doesn’t waste a ton of effort and delivers better results overall. Act as a shock absorber between the team and your bosses in these situations.
You have exactly the same challenge when setting and maintaining expectations for your team. Create consistency of expectations both across the team and over time, so your team knows what to expect and can work to meeting and beating your expectations. Having the discipline and making a conscious effort to keep consistent expectations earns you a lot of manager authority. You create greater levels of psychological safety, autonomy, and ownership with consistent expectations. These in turn usually result in significantly higher overall team performance. Increasing team performance is brilliant for how to earn authority as a manager,
The fifth approach to increase manager authority is to borrow credibility from your boss and peers
When your boss is confident in you, they give you more autonomy, more trust and more leeway. In meetings they will listen to you more carefully, ask for your ideas more often and treat you with more respect and consideration. Everyone else will notice and they will give you more authority as a result. Everyone around takes confidence that your boss is confident in you. Work at keeping your boss publicly confident in you to increase your authority as a manager.
The same happens with your own peers, your boss’s peers, leadership team members, etc. When people with authority show their confidence in you, your own authority as a manager increases.
A great way to start increasing your boss’s confidence in you is to improve the communication of what you are doing to your boss.
- Use your boss’s communication style i.e. flex how often, the method and the content to play to your boss’s preferences
- Proactively overcommunicate so your boss knows exactly what you are doing at all times and why
- Be clear, concise and progress focused with your updates so you respect their time
- Question, understand and respond. Find out exactly what your bosses pressures are, what they are working on and how you can best help them achieve their goals and make them look good.
- Commit to no surprises so your boss never has to worry about being blindsided or unaware of the achievements delivered or challenges you face.
Work to give your boss a very clear picture of what you are doing and why and seek their input, so they feel involved and in control of the results you are your team are producing.
In summary
How to increase your authority as a manager starts with the quality of relationships you build with team members, bosses and peers. The more you are able to help others be successful, the more they will help you be successful.
As a reminder, use these 5 approaches for how to establish authority as a manager, regardless of your job level and title:
- Build trusting relationships
- Understand first, change second
- Work to publicly remove problems
- Create consistency of direction and expectations
- Borrow credibility from your boss and peers
If you are a leader, a board director or senior manager and looking to improve your authority at work or your relationships with peers and bosses, so you can be more effective in your role, click here to explore coaching options with enhance.
If you have any questions on “How To Establish Authority As A Manager Quickly Regardless Of Job Title”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
[For further reading on influencing without authority click here]
Authority as a manager comes from being useful to the team. They need to feel that they are a lot better off having you as their manager, compared to not having a manager or having another manger.
When you have clear practical steps to take, creating authority without needing a job title is a lot less daunting. Put these suggested actions into practice, and you confidence (and authority) will build.
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