Why Smart Leaders Still Struggle to Influence Their Peers (And How Lateral Influence Actually Works)

You presented the analysis. The logic was sound, the numbers held up, and nobody in the room disagreed. Three weeks later, nothing has moved. A peer in another function has not acted, your request is sitting in someone's queue, and you are starting to wonder whether the problem is them, the organisation, or something you have missed. If this sounds familiar, you are probably facing a lateral influence problem rather than a competence problem. Many capable senior leaders reach this point because the habits that earned them their seat work well with people they lead and far less well with colleagues they do not.

Why do capable leaders struggle to influence their peers?

Because the habits behind most leadership reputations, such as being right, moving quickly and relying on a well-built argument, depend on either formal authority or a shared view of priorities. Peers usually have neither an obligation to act nor the same priorities. A sound idea then becomes one request among many competing for someone else's attention.

Inside your own team, a clear request carries weight because of the reporting line. Between peers, that weight is absent. The colleague you need has their own targets, their own manager and their own definition of a good quarter. Your urgent item is, from where they sit, an addition to a list that was already full.

Allan Cohen and David Bradford, who were at Babson College and Stanford Graduate School of Business when they wrote it, make this point in a 2005 article in the Journal of Organizational Excellence. They describe a frequent source of failed influence: people in another department are measured on different outcomes, so they decline requests that look obviously important from the requester's side. Their example involves a product manager who could not get a country sales manager to push a new product. The country manager was judged on total sales, and a new, low-priced product meant more effort per sale than a few large sales of existing products. The refusal made sense given how he was measured. It was not stubbornness.

This is the first thing smart leaders tend to miss. What looks like resistance is often a rational response to someone else's incentives, and no amount of better reasoning about your own priorities changes those incentives.

What does lateral influence mean in practice?

Lateral influence is the ability to move people at your own level, or outside your reporting line, to act on an idea without relying on formal authority. It depends on trust, mutual benefit and an accurate picture of what the other person needs. The same skill is often described as influence without authority or lateral leadership.

In practice it appears in ordinary moments. Getting a finance partner to prioritise your forecast request. Securing engineering time for a customer issue. Persuading another executive to support a change that affects both departments. None of these can be ordered, and all of them require someone else to choose to cooperate.

It helps to be clear about what the skill is not. It is not charm, and it is not manipulation. Cohen and Bradford state that no technique works well when the person using it is seen as concerned only with their own benefit. Colleagues notice when a request is framed as organisational good but is really personal, and they become wary. Influence between peers tends to accumulate with leaders who show genuine interest in the other party's concerns and who deal fairly over time.

There is also a practical reason the skill matters. Much of the work that matters in an organisation crosses functions, and a leader who can only act through direct reports can only move the part of the work that sits inside their own line. The rest depends on persuading colleagues who owe them nothing.

Why does a good argument fail to move a peer?

A good argument persuades only when the listener can see a benefit in acting on it. Cohen and Bradford argue that exchange, offering something the other person values in return for what you need, sits underneath every influence tactic, including rational persuasion. A strong case works when it connects to something the peer already cares about, and it stalls when it does not.

Smart leaders often treat clarity as if it were the same thing as persuasion. If the reasoning is clear, they assume agreement should follow. The authors call the resulting mistake "missing by a mile": the person seeking influence is so convinced of the idea's value that they ignore what the other person values. They illustrate it with a soccer enthusiast trying to win over a basketball fan by praising how little scoring the game has and how subtle its tactics are. The argument is sincere and well made, and it is aimed at the wrong audience.

The pattern tends to repeat under pressure. When a peer hesitates, a capable leader often responds with more evidence, a longer deck or a sharper version of the same case. The better response is usually more curiosity. Instead of asking how to make the argument stronger, ask what this person would need to see in order to say yes. The first question keeps the focus on you. The second moves it to them, which is where influence is decided.

What do your peers actually value?

Usually something different from what you would value in their position. Cohen and Bradford call the things people care about "currencies" and group them into five types.

• Inspiration: a sense of larger purpose, a chance to do excellent work, or the feeling of doing the right thing.
• Task: resources, help with a project, useful information, faster responses, or backing for a piece of work.
• Position: recognition, visibility to senior people, reputation, and a sense of being central to what is happening.
• Relationship: being listened to, included and personally supported.
• Personal: gratitude, ownership of something important, affirmation of identity, or freedom from hassle.

The value of any currency sits with the person receiving it. One colleague reads a thank-you note as sincere appreciation, while another reads it as flattery. Currencies also wear out. Praise offered for every favour can start to sound hollow.

Many of these currencies cost you nothing to give and need no one's permission. Recognition, appreciation, respect, help and information all fall into that group. Leaders who believe they have nothing to offer peers because they do not control a budget are often overlooking what they already hold.

Consider a hypothetical case. A chief operating officer needs a peer in finance to deliver a forecast earlier than planned. The finance lead is judged on accuracy and on closing the books cleanly. Pressing the deadline with logic changes little. Asking what an early forecast would cost the finance team, offering operational data that improves its accuracy, and giving the team credit in front of the CEO all speak to what that peer is measured on and cares about.

Which barriers do leaders create for themselves?

Several of the frequent ones come from good intentions rather than poor skill. Leaders write off a resistant peer after a few refusals, ask for too much at once, mix a request for support with a wish for personal recognition, or decide that earning cooperation is not part of the job. Each of these makes the next request harder to grant, and each weakens lateral influence quietly because the leader rarely sees it as a barrier.

Cohen and Bradford catalogue a set of self-created barriers. A few deserve particular attention from senior readers.

• Writing the peer off. After being turned down two or three times, many people conclude that something is wrong with the other person's character, motives or intelligence. The authors note that this judgement gets communicated even when it is never spoken, and the other person closes off.
• Asking for too much. A long list of requests, especially to someone who has already resisted, creates overload and makes people back away.
• Using only your own style. Some peers want a concise written proposal before a meeting, and some want to talk it through first. Leaders who hold to their own preference in the name of being authentic often miss this.
• Resenting the extra effort. The thought that persuading a colleague should not be part of your job is common. The authors suggest treating the effort as building a line of credit you may draw on later.
• Escalating in frustration. The article lists taking an issue up to a shared manager among the negative currencies. It can work in some situations, but it risks retaliation and signals that joint problem-solving has failed.

None of these is a character flaw. They are predictable responses to frustration, and they are easier to correct once they have been named.

How do you build influence with a peer, step by step?

Start with diagnosis before the request. Assume the peer could be an ally, decide what you most need, understand the pressures shaping their priorities, identify what they value, and offer something in that form when you ask. The sequence follows the model Cohen and Bradford describe, adapted here into practical steps.

1. Decide what you need. Choose one or two outcomes and separate the work you need done from any wish for credit or vindication. The authors ask whether being proven right matters more to you than getting the result.
2. Treat the peer as a possible ally. Pause the story about why they are difficult. Look for where your interests overlap before assuming they conflict.
3. Learn their world. Find out how they are measured, what their manager expects and what is under pressure this quarter. Where you can, ask directly and collaboratively. A line such as "Help me understand what this quarter looks like for your team and where this request lands" opens the conversation without putting them on the defensive.
4. Take stock of what you can offer. Information, introductions, recognition, support in a meeting where they are under scrutiny, or help with a task they would like to shed.
5. Match their style. Offer the written summary or the conversation, whichever they prefer, and keep to the level of detail they find useful.
6. Make the request, then keep the relationship going. State what you need plainly, in terms that connect to what they value, and follow through on anything you promised. Overstating what you can deliver damages credibility. The authors also advise building relationships before you need them, because a strained relationship makes even a reasonable request difficult.

The steps can feel slow at first. With a peer you already trust, much of this happens instinctively. It becomes deliberate when the relationship is thin, the request is costly for the other person, or you may not get a second chance.

What if a peer still says no?

Some refusals are information rather than obstruction. The peer may be protecting a priority you have not seen, or valuing something you cannot offer. Cohen and Bradford acknowledge that some currencies do not convert into each other, and that recognising this early lets both sides part on workable terms.

Their example involves a company president focused on maximising shareholder value and a chairman who cared far more about the challenge of technical work. After exploring their positions openly, they accepted that the gap could not be bridged, and the president left on good terms once a successor was found.

Before escalating, ask three questions. Is there another currency this peer values that I have not considered? Can the request be made smaller or staged? What does this refusal tell me about their constraints? If escalation becomes necessary, frame it as joint problem-solving. In one of the article's extended examples, the authors suggest a leader could invite a shared manager into the conversation as a problem-solving consultant rather than as a final judge. That approach keeps both people's standing intact and leaves room for a later exchange.

Does this change at the senior and C-suite level?

The principle holds and the stakes rise. Executive peers command more resources, see more of the organisation and tend to remember how colleagues have dealt with them. Cohen and Bradford note that reputation shapes how someone is treated even without prior direct contact, and that peers may hold as many resources for retaliation as you do. A reputation for one-sided or transactional dealing travels quickly at that level.

Senior leaders can also find it harder to get honest feedback about how they come across to colleagues, and the barriers above are often easier to see from outside than from within. Some leaders therefore examine these patterns with an outside perspective, for example through executive coaching that covers stakeholder influence, where the focus is on how they are experienced by colleagues and which barriers they default to. Lateral influence at this level is rarely a matter of technique alone. It reflects how a leader is experienced across the executive team over time.

What is the first thing to change?

Before your next request to a peer, spend ten minutes writing down how that person is measured, what pressure they are under and what they would value from you. Then shape the request around that picture rather than around the strength of your own case.

Most failed attempts to influence a peer do not fail because the idea was weak. They fail because the idea was presented in terms that mattered to the person making it and not to the person receiving it. Lateral influence, understood this way, is a habit of attention before it is a technique, and it can be practised on the next ordinary request.