Do You Have A Voice At The Table?
Being right is not the same as being influential.
Power comes in many forms. That is one of the first things a leader learns, usually the hard way.
Most people grow up with a narrow idea of power. They picture the person with the title, the corner office, the formal authority, the ability to approve budgets, assign work, and make the final decisions.
That kind of power is real, and it matters. But it is only one part of the picture.
Social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven helped make this clearer by distinguishing several bases of power, including legitimate power tied to role, expert power tied to knowledge, referent power tied to trust and admiration, reward power, coercive power, and later informational power.
In practice, leadership works best when you leverage these as a portfolio, and it matters most when you start a new role or enter a new conversation in a new environment.
At that point, your formal appointment may be visible on paper, but your real influence is still under construction. You may have been hired because you know the subject, have solved similar problems elsewhere, or can see risks that others do not.
Even so, your expertise does not automatically translate into voice.
Being right is not enough. People need a reason to trust your judgment, a context for your ideas, and some sense of who you are before your knowledge can carry weight.
Michael Watkins makes this point sharply in his work on leadership transitions: in modern organisations, authority is rarely granted in full simply because you hold a job title. It has to be built through relationships.
This is why power should be understood in different forms.
Positional Power
Positional power is the obvious one. It comes from the role.
If you are the department head, project sponsor, or newly appointed executive, people know that you can set priorities, call meetings, assign work, and sometimes overrule.
However, positional power is often the weakest form of influence over time or when used alone. People may comply because they have to, while quietly withholding their energy, ideas, or commitment.
The Centre for Creative Leadership argues that leaders are more effective when they emphasise relationship power and information power, not only the power of position. That rings true in most workplaces. People rarely give their best simply because a title told them to.
Knowledge-Based Power
Then there is knowledge-based power, often called expert power.
This comes from knowing something useful, understanding the system, reading the numbers correctly, seeing the second-order effects, or having experience that others do not.
But expert power has a hidden weakness. It depends on recognition. If others do not yet see you as credible, your expertise sits in the room like unused electricity.
It exists, but it is not powering anything. That is why many technically strong people become frustrated in new roles. They assume good ideas should win on merit. Sometimes they do. Often they do not. Organisations are social systems, not debating societies.
This is also why, when you are new, you often do not yet have a voice at the table.
Not because you lack intelligence. Not because the room is irrational. Usually, it is because voice is partly a form of social credit.
People often ask themselves, unconsciously: “Does this person understand our context? Have they earned the right to challenge our assumptions? Are they committed to this team, or are they just demonstrating how smart they are? Will backing this person cost me political capital? “
Those questions are not always fair, but they are real.
Harvard Business Review has noted that office politics are not optional features of organisations; they are part of how influence, access, and alignment actually work. Trying to stand above that reality usually leaves good people unheard.
So What Should A Leader Do In A New Role?
1. First, use less authority and build more legitimacy.
In the early days, it is tempting to lean hard on the title. You can force pace. You can assert direction. You can make it clear that you are in charge. Sometimes that is necessary, especially in a crisis. But overusing positional power too early can damage the very influence you need later.
A better move is to use your job title to create structure whilst simultaneously employing humility to gather intelligence. Meet people. Ask what is working, what is not, and where the friction sits. Take time to understand who the real influencers are and what history you are stepping into.
2. Second, translate expertise into usefulness.
Knowledge-based power does not become influential because you say, “I know.” It becomes influential when people feel helped by your knowledge.
That means diagnosing before prescribing. It means framing ideas in the language of the business, not in the jargon of your discipline. It means showing that you understand both the technical problem and the human cost of getting it wrong.
A finance leader, for example, who only talks about financial ratios may be correct but may well be ignored. On the other hand, a finance leader who explains how a particular cash-flow decision will affect hiring, delivery, and customer trust is far more likely to be heard. Expert power becomes stronger when it is accompanied by relevance.
3. Third, build relational power on purpose.
People often underestimate relational power because it looks soft. It is not soft. It is one of the strongest forms of durable influence.
People are more open to being challenged by someone who has listened to them, understood their pressures, and treated them with respect.
The Centre for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) work on influence without authority emphasises credibility, networks, and partnerships because influence is rarely a solo act.
In a new role, some of your best work is lateral. Your peers, informal influencers, long-tenured experts, and trusted operators can either amplify your voice or quietly neutralise it.
4. Fourth, understand that voice is shaped by psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson’s work has made this point especially well. Psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding tension. It is about creating a climate where candour, dissent, and learning are possible.
In unsafe cultures, people withhold concerns, especially if they are new, junior, or outside the dominant group. That means your knowledge may be correct, but remain unused because the environment makes speaking up costly.
The reverse is also true, though.
Leaders who invite candour, show humility, and respond constructively make it easier for expertise to surface, including their own when they are new.
A Real World Example
Imagine you join a company as a new operations director. In your second week, you spot a serious flaw in the production schedule, and you are right. The current way will create delays and overtime. But if you walk into the executive meeting and announce that the existing approach is broken, you may still lose the room.
Why?
Because nobody knows yet whether you understand the hidden constraints, are aware of the political trade-offs, or know about the scars left by previous failed fixes.
Your knowledge may be solid, but your legitimacy in the team is still thin.
Now imagine taking a different approach. You spend two weeks talking to plant supervisors and the finance and logistics teams. You learn what each group fears.
Then you return with the same conclusion, but now your message sounds different: “I think we have a scheduling issue, and I also understand why the current design evolved. Here are the trade-offs people have been managing. Here is a better option, and here is what each team would need to make it work.”
The technical insight is the same. The influence is not. That is expert power reinforced by relational and informational power.
It is important to note, however, that not all power should be used equally. Coercive power and hard positional tactics have a place, but a narrow one. In urgent safety matters, ethical breaches, or severe performance failure, leaders may need to be direct and firm.
But be careful not to become overly reliant on fear, or people start telling you what is safe, not what is true. That is deadly in change efforts. Change depends on accurate information, local insight, and honest challenge. If people stop speaking, leaders start guessing. And guessing from the top is usually expensive.
Some Final Thoughts
So, when you start a new role or a new conversation, ask yourself: “Which form of power do I actually have right now? Which form do I think I have, but have not yet earned? Which form does this moment require?”
Sometimes the answer is legitimate power. Sometimes it is expertise. Often, it is relational trust. In many cases, it is a blend.
That blend is the real lesson.
Great leaders do not reject power, nor do they worship any one form of it. They learn to use power with judgment. They know when to speak from authority and when to step back and listen.
They know that expertise matters, but they also understand that when they do not yet have a voice at the table, the answer is not usually to speak louder. Rather, it is to build the conditions that make the room ready to hear them.
Until next time, remember that power is not just the ability to make people move.
It is also the ability to make good things happen through people. That takes more than a title. It takes timing, trust, credibility, context, and the maturity to know which shape of power the moment calls for.
Dion Le Roux
References
American Psychological Association. Why psychological safety matters in a changing workplace. 2024.
Centre for Creative Leadership. How Leaders Can Build Psychological Safety at Work. 2024.
Centre for Creative Leadership. How to Influence People: 4 Skills for Influencing Others. 2024.
Centre for Creative Leadership. Influencing: Learn How to Use the Skill of Persuasion. 2017.
Centre for Creative Leadership. The Role of Power in Effective Leadership. 2019.
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Authority.
Harvard Business Review. Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace. 2019.
Harvard Business Review. Negotiating Success in a New Leadership Role. 2006.
Harvard Business Review. What Is Psychological Safety? 2023.
Harvard Business Review. You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics. 2021.
Microsoft Source. How Microsoft is using empathy to lead innovation. 2019.