Whether you're an individual contributor or a leader, through proper influence you can get people to voluntarily comply, concede, or change. Who doesn't want that?
Even as a junior engineer, I remember influencing my chief architect and brought Terraform into my organisation 7 years ago by simply pointing out a common pain point all engineers were having and how much longer things took without managing our infrastructure in code.
Being able to influence without authority is a very underrated skill to have, and I believe this is what helped me get promoted to a senior engineer even more than my technical skills 👍
This is an excellent write-up, Irina. Although the size of the companies I've been working with is probably the size of a team at Google and Uber, I was lucky enough to put these approaches into practice many times.
Leading by example never let me down.
Whether it was some small daily chore like logging the hours worked or giving a daily standup in Slack, when people saw leads do it, they followed—such a simple and powerful concept.
I love that you've emphasized the situations where having the influence is beneficial. Especially on the individual contributor side, it's easy to feel like you can't change your situation. Not true! Great article, Irina. 👏🏼
Thank you for writing this, Irina.
Even as a junior engineer, I remember influencing my chief architect and brought Terraform into my organisation 7 years ago by simply pointing out a common pain point all engineers were having and how much longer things took without managing our infrastructure in code.
Being able to influence without authority is a very underrated skill to have, and I believe this is what helped me get promoted to a senior engineer even more than my technical skills 👍
This is an excellent write-up, Irina. Although the size of the companies I've been working with is probably the size of a team at Google and Uber, I was lucky enough to put these approaches into practice many times.
Leading by example never let me down.
Whether it was some small daily chore like logging the hours worked or giving a daily standup in Slack, when people saw leads do it, they followed—such a simple and powerful concept.
I love that you've emphasized the situations where having the influence is beneficial. Especially on the individual contributor side, it's easy to feel like you can't change your situation. Not true! Great article, Irina. 👏🏼