For most of my career, I couldn’t deliver what I was responsible for on my own. The target was mine and the deadline was mine, but the work was parcelled out across specialists who each held a piece of it, none of whom worked for me, all of whom had their own targets and their own deadlines. So the real skill was never just doing the work. It was getting people who had no particular reason to prioritize mine to move it along anyway.
The integrator, and the roles that followed
This is not a new problem, and organizations have been trying to answer it structurally for a long time. In 1967, two Harvard researchers named the function: the integrator, someone whose job was to pull the divided pieces back together. It was never an actual job title, just a description of the work. The real titles came later and kept accumulating: the business partner in HR or IT or finance, DevOps, RevOps. They don’t replace one another, they pile up, a new coordinator added each time the work splinters again.
Where structure runs out
But a role in the seam can only do so much, because the thing that stalls the work isn’t the structure. It’s the people. The specialist whose own boss has them on something else. The colleague whose project is competing with yours for the same budget. The peer who could help and doesn’t see why they should. You can draw the reporting lines however you like. The person still has their own reasons, and no diagram reaches those.
Influence, and its limits
What reaches them is influence. Not authority, you usually don’t have it, and it doesn’t work on people who don’t report to you anyway. Influence is understanding what the other person is dealing with, what they’re measured on, what they need, and finding a version of your ask that works for them too. Sometimes it’s a relationship you built long before you needed anything. Sometimes it’s knowing whose word actually carries weight with them. It is the skill of getting things done through people you can’t direct, and in most organizations it is doing far more of the work than the org chart ever admits.
None of which makes it a sure thing. Influence is a lever, and the lever isn’t always there to pull. Some people you’ll never move, because your winning costs them, and no amount of understanding what they need changes that when what they need is for you to lose. Sometimes you get the yes and it arrives too late to matter. Sometimes the person who could help is buried under everyone else who needs them too, and you’re one more voice in a queue. You get good at this and you still miss. That’s not a flaw in the skill. It’s what working through other people is actually like.
Getting harder, not easier
And it’s getting harder, not easier. Every time the pace of change jumps, work splits into more pieces held by more specialists, and the job of pulling it back together grows with it. Those Harvard researchers saw that in 1967: the more turbulent the environment, the more coordination it demands. AI is the latest turn of that wheel, and a fast one. It’s carving work into new specialisms, redrawing who does what, changing who the competition even is. Companies will continue to add more roles, but it still comes down to getting people to work with you, and there are more of them to corral.
What this puts on leaders
If you lead people, that puts two things on you. The first is to build this skill in the people you’re responsible for. It tends to get treated as something you either have or you don’t, picked up by watching whoever’s good at it, which is how I learned it and a poor way to leave it to chance. Some people take to it quickly, others need longer, and a few will never love it, but almost anyone can get better at it, and right now better matters more than it used to.
The second is harder, because it points back at you. Some of what defeats your people isn’t a skill they’re missing. It’s the way the place is set up. If two teams are chasing the same budget, or the specialist everyone needs answers to someone whose targets have nothing to do with yours, no amount of influencing skill fixes that. That part is yours to look at. You can build the skill all you like, but if the structure is set against it, you’re asking people to paddle harder against a current you could have changed.
And even then, it won’t always work. Influence is a lever, not a guarantee, and some things won’t move however well you handle them. That’s not a reason to treat it as optional. It’s the most important skill there is for getting work done through people you don’t control, and there is more of that work every year. You build it because it’s the difference between often and rarely, not because it’s the difference between always and never.