The Org Chart Is Lying to You: Stakeholders Management and Increasing Influence
Influence gets discussed as though it were weather, settling over the naturally charismatic and passing everyone else by, leaving the rest of us pitching good ideas to rooms that have already made up their minds. That assumption costs more than it appears, because it keeps capable people waiting on a title that will finally compel attention while excusing the unglamorous work that moves decisions. In our latest C-Suite Coach conversation, we took that apart and found a mechanism underneath.
Angelina Darrisaw, founder and CEO of C-Suite Coach, sat down live with Floyd Williams on stakeholder management and influence. Floyd brings more than 15 years of executive coaching, ICF and ACC credentials, and DEI certification, and he is a former C-Suite executive and a coach in the C-Suite Coach network.
Curiosity Is the Operating System
Everything Floyd described rests on a disposition he treats as mandatory. "Curiosity is the heart of both effective coaching and effective leadership," he said, and he applies it hardest to leaders who have already earned their seat. "It's really very important to be curious no matter how much success you've had." Three decades into his own leadership career, he asks more questions rather than fewer: "The moment you stop learning or stop being curious, that is the moment that you stop growing." He treats clients as the authorities on their own working lives, a discipline that holds inside any organization, where the people around you carry the information your decisions depend on.
Leadership Capital, and the Account You Are Always Drawing On
Floyd's sharpest reframe concerned what influence actually is, and he rejected the idea that it arrives in an instant with charisma or persuasive gifts. "Influence is not manipulation. It is a skill set," he said, declining to file it under soft skills. "I would call it an art and a science."
His model for building it is a bank account. "When we talk about leadership capital, think in terms of a bank account," he explained. "In a bank account, you make deposits and withdrawals." The currencies are specific: credibility, reliability, relationships, follow-through. Every delivered commitment raises the balance, and withdrawals drain it without announcement, so when buy-in matters, "consensus is not there on your ideas." Leaders rarely connect a stalled proposal to six months of missed commitments, though that is usually where it started.
Read the Room, Skip the Org Chart
Emerging leaders often assume they need positional authority first, so Floyd points them past the reporting lines. "We don't look at the organizational chart to see who has the most influence," he said, "because there's really a hidden level of influence, a network of influencers inside organization who don't have very impressive titles." He coaches clients to map three layers: decision makers, influential people whose expert power outruns their rank, and implementers who decide whether a strategy survives. The work then shifts to learning what keeps each of them up at night and depositing against those concerns.
Authority, Humility, and the Risk Dial
Leaders worry that visible humility reads as incompetence, though Floyd holds both at once. Legitimate power belongs in the toolkit for casting vision and meeting hard deadlines, with vulnerability beside it. "A good leader has enough humility and can be vulnerable enough to say to their experts, teach me the type of questions I should be asking, because you're the subject expert." Vulnerability, he added, is not weakness. The dial between them is risk. "When there's high risk, then I might have to use more authority, more legitimate power. When there's less risk, I can give more time." Autonomy is earned through those same currencies, so people on one team hold different amounts of it.
Tell the Story Their Way
Technical credibility opens the door and stops working there. "Competency is not on trial," Floyd said of the leaders he coaches. "That gets you an invitation to the room, but when you get in the room, you've got to be able to communicate and articulate and help people see things through different lenses." The skill is fashioning a relatable story that establishes the why behind the ask, facts steady while the frame moves. "When we talk about legal, they're thinking about risk mitigation, and when you think finance, they think about cost reduction and ROIs."
Influence Without Volume
For anyone who has watched the loudest person win a meeting, Floyd offered a correction. "Influence is not an extroverted personality trait. It's a leadership capability that can be developed over time." He called introversion a superpower here: careful listeners read rooms accurately and become the sounding boards colleagues seek out. He has watched executives sit silent until someone asks their view. "I pull you in because of what you built not yesterday, but over time you built this credibility that people want to know what's on your mind."
Asked about stakeholders driven by fear, Floyd described a patient, Socratic approach: competing interests exist for a reason, and he digs for it rather than labeling anyone stubborn. "When we invite curiosity and we don't get offended and get frustrated, the dialogue can stay open," he said, making consensus findable.
What To Do With This
Floyd closed with a framework he calls ALIGN: assess who the decision makers and true influencers are, learn what matters to them and what would make their work easier, invest in those people and their projects, guide them early (15 minutes over coffee, before the big reveal), and nurture those relationships continuously.
Find the relationship where your account runs thinnest and make one deposit this week. Follow Floyd Williams on LinkedIn for more of this thinking, and explore the C-Suite Coach network if you want a coach who understands your landscape. Leadership skills evolve when you get intentional about the shift, so pick one thing and act.
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