Published September 17, 2026 · Altvina Insights · 4 min read

When Influence Has to Go Sideways, Something Upstream Is Broken

HBR's August 25 piece on gaining influence without formal power gets the tactics right. Our disagreement is with the frame: in a firm of five to twenty people, sideways influence usually signals a missing decision owner rather than skill.

The meeting ends, nobody pushes back, and then someone stops you in the hallway to tell you what they actually think. Run a small firm for any length of time and you have had that conversation, probably more than once this quarter.

Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast ran an episode on August 25 called How People Without Formal Power Gain Influence. It describes what capable people do when their title does not carry the decision: read the mood of a room, build rapport before they make an ask, and move an idea through whoever is most likely to carry it rather than announcing it to whoever formally owns it.

We do not argue with any of that. The tactics are real and they work.

Our disagreement is with the frame. Inside a twelve-person services firm, that behavior is not a sign of skill. Something upstream has gone quiet, and the sideways route is the workaround.

The tactics are not in dispute

Inside a large organization, influence without authority is normal. There are layers between the person with the idea and the person who signs. Reporting lines cross. You can genuinely not know who decides, and finding out can take weeks. In that setting, reading the room and testing an idea early is not politics. That reading is most of the job.

The episode describes something true. What we care about is what happens when those same moves show up in a firm where the decision-maker sits fifteen feet away and answers messages within the hour.

Why the frame does not travel down to twelve people

The tactics were built to cross distance. A small firm has no distance to cross. Everyone already talks to everyone. If an idea still takes a detour, the detour is telling you something, and it is worth knowing what.

Across the firms we see, three readings are usually available, and they look identical from the outside.

Sometimes it really is skill

Some people will always test an idea on one colleague before they say it out loud. Call that timing, and a good instinct. A pattern that shows up often: the most careful person on a small team is also the one who never raises anything cold, because they have watched cold ideas die in rooms before. Nothing is broken here.

Sometimes the route exists to avoid one person

Sometimes the sideways path exists because the direct path went badly once. The idea goes to the person who will not sigh. That says something about the receiver rather than the sender, and in a founder-led firm the receiver is often the founder. Uncomfortable, but usually fixable, and usually not a process problem.

Nobody actually knows who decides

The third reading is the one we meet most often, and the one most easily mistaken for the other two. The topic comes up every few weeks. It has never had a named owner. So people do the only sensible thing available to them: they go looking for where the decision lives, one conversation at a time. What looks like influence is really a search.

A team can spend months being tactful about something a single sentence of authority would have settled.

Where we come down

Within a firm of five to twenty people, recurring indirect influence is more often a decision-rights problem than a communication skill. Our judgment, and an experienced operator could read it the other way. The tell is repetition. A one-off hallway conversation is just people being human. The same subject arriving sideways for the fourth time is structural.

We lean that way because of what workarounds generally mean. People build them around things that are missing. When the missing thing is a decision owner, the workaround looks like talent, which is why it survives so long without anyone questioning it. Everyone involved is behaving well, which is exactly what makes it hard to spot.

Where we could be wrong

Show us a sideways route that produces decisions which actually stick and we would drop the argument. In some firms the hallway is the decision channel, it works, and nothing gets reopened a month later. Leave that alone.

The second thing that would move us is simpler. Ask the person going sideways who owns the call, then ask yourself the same question, separately. Two matching answers mean you are looking at style, and style is not a problem to solve. Two different names, or a sentence neither of you can finish, means the episode's frame has stopped describing your firm.

The one thing worth checking

Think back over the last couple of months and look for a topic, not a person, where the real opinion only ever reaches you secondhand. Pricing an awkward client. Whether a delivery process is actually being followed. Who is carrying too much.

Put the topic on paper. Then write, in one sentence, who decides it. If you cannot finish that sentence, you have found the thing.

No amount of better communication will supply an owner that was never named.

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