The first couple posts in this series were about surviving the shock of management. The one-on-ones. The feedback. The “oh god I have so many vacation requests to approve.”
But once you get through that? The game changes. You realize pretty quickly that you can’t get anything meaningful done by just managing the folks who report to you.
Your team doesn’t own all the code paths. Product has their own priorities. Design has their own calendar. Your boss has opinions. Two different executive stakeholders both want to own your team’s roadmap for the next quarter with conflicting demands. Suddenly everything’s on fire, the streams are crossing, you can’t control any of it, and the idea of letting it all burn to the ground while you go flip burgers at Wendy’s seems pretty damn tempting.
Welcome to the part of management nobody warned you about: learning how to influence without authority.
And here’s the truth: every Engineering Manager job interview you’ll ever do will come back to this. It’s one of those “tell me about a time…” questions that separates the rookies from the people who can actually move an org forward.
Why Your Title Doesn’t Mean Shit
This was a tough lesson for me to learn early on in my career: having “manager” in your title doesn’t magically grant you superpowers. People outside your team don’t care about your reporting line. They care about their goals, their deadlines, their pain. If you come in swinging your title around, at best you’ll actually get nothing accomplished. At worst you’ll start to make enemies.
I can tell you from stark, painful personal experience how hard that is to recover from.
Tools I Wish I’d Figured Out Earlier
The first tool is relationships. People help people they like and trust, and there’s no shortcut for that. If you only show up when you need something, you won’t get far. You start building this on Management Day #1 (or today!). If you haven’t been working on building trust with your cross-functional partners and positioning yourself as a voice of reason and clarity in the room before shit hits the fan (and it will), you’re going to be in a tough spot.
The second is framing. Your idea has to live in other people’s worlds, not just yours. Don’t pitch a logging standard; pitch cutting support tickets in half. Don’t talk about “technical debt”; talk about freeing up capacity for roadmap features. Selling an idea or persuading someone to see your point of view is a hell of a lot more effective when you can position it as something that aligns with their best interests. “Help me help you” will get you a lot farther than “do it my way” ever could.
Third, you need to tell the story. Humans don’t rally around bullet points and Jira tickets, they rally around a clear why. Nothing will erode your authority faster than coming across like you don’t know what you’re talking about, so make the fuck sure that you do. Paint a picture that people want to be part of. Keep the receipts. Show your work. Present the data supporting your point of view. Make it crystal-clear why the thing is the right thing. And honestly? If you can’t conclusively bring this to the table then maybe what you want to do isn’t the right idea after all. There’s no shame in realizing that.
And finally, repetition matters more than you think. You’ll feel like a broken record long before anyone else has actually absorbed your message. If it’s important, keep saying it until people start repeating it back to you. If you’re starting to feel sick of saying the same thing over and over again that just might mean you’re on the right track.
How I Fucked This Up: A Sob Story
I hate to shatter the perfect angelic image I’ve so carefully cultivated, but I learned all this the hard way.
Years ago, in a different life and a different industry, I ran all internal and external communications for a megachurch. Church website, print materials, event promotion, radio ads, press releases, the whole noodle. I was young, headstrong, and thought that because I was the DRI for these things, I had the final say in how everything operated and everyone would automatically follow my lead. Shut up, stop laughing.
This all fell apart in spectacular fashion the very first time the music director and the missionary pastor both wanted prime real estate on the church website at the same time. It crumbled further when six different staff members had opinions about a font choice I had used for a Christmas Eve service program. It turned into a smoldering crater when I figured I could just make decisions in a vacuum because I was ✨Responsible✨ only to find angry mobs lined up outside my office demanding their individual pounds of flesh.
In the end, I failed not because I lacked the skills to produce the work. I failed because I hadn’t cultivated a single one of the tools mentioned above. I hadn’t built relationships, I didn’t take the time to learn or assess other people’s wants or needs, I had no idea how to reframe competing options around the organization’s overall goals, and I assumed saying things once was enough. Remember how I said earlier that making enemies is hard to recover from? The only thing I did right in this situation was quit before they could fire me.
How to Practice Without Burning Yourself Out
You don’t learn influence by reading about it, you learn it by trying. But trying doesn’t mean pushing every single idea uphill until you’re exhausted. Pick your spots. Start with something small where the stakes are low and you can afford to stumble, like a process tweak or a quality-of-life improvement for your team. Treat each attempt like a rep at the gym: you’re building muscle, not chasing a personal best every time. And when something doesn’t land, don’t take it as a referendum on your leadership. Take the feedback, adjust, and go again. Influence is a long game, and the only way to get better at it is to practice in ways that won’t leave you bitter or burned out.
Why Every Interviewer Will Ask You About This
If you’ve ever prepped for a management interview, you know the question is coming: “Tell me about a time you influenced without authority.” It shows up in every loop because it is the quickest way to gauge whether you can operate beyond the walls of your own team. Influence without authority is really about scope. As an engineering manager, your job is not just to make your team successful, it is to move initiatives forward across teams, disciplines, and sometimes even the entire organization.
At some point, you’ll need to convince Product to adjust priorities, persuade Design to tweak scope, get another engineering team to adopt standards, or rally leadership around a technical investment that doesn’t have obvious short-term ROI. None of these come with direct authority. What you bring to the table is credibility, clarity, and the ability to create alignment where there was none.
This is exactly why interviewers care. Your ability to influence across boundaries is a proxy for whether you can manage scope at the next level. Scope is messy. It lives in the Venn Diagram overlap between teams. Your engineering team’s performance and impact might be dialled in, but if you can only operate at that level you’ll eventually hit a ceiling. A manager who can influence across functions is someone an interviewer can imagine leading bigger programs, other managers, and shaping the organization itself.
Don’t Screw This Up
Influence without authority is uncomfortable because it forces you to play the long game. It takes time and energy to build trust in the people around you. You won’t get it right every time, and it’ll feel slower and messier than you want. But every conversation, every nudge, and every relationship you invest in builds leverage for the moments that matter. With practice, influence without authority is what takes you from being just a manager who keeps the trains running to a leader who can move the whole organization forward.
You don’t get influence by asking nicely. You get it by showing up, doing the work over and over, until no one can ignore you.
