The influence you have is no longer enough
The progress review finishes early.
Everyone‘s aligned and upbeat. But as people stand, Daniel scans the action list and feels his chest tighten with frustration. Three items need his personal follow-up as CEO. Two decisions are “blocked”. One work stream is waiting on his steer.
It’s a familiar story: If he stays close, things move. If he steps back, they stall.
In another city, Sophie opens a final email before her Founder dinner.
Thank you again for the conversation. We’re genuinely interested in where this is heading. Let’s reconnect in a quarter or two.
She sighs, feels her stomach drop. No pushback but no decision. Interest without urgency, again. And she wonders, why did nothing I said make action feel necessary?
As founder or CEO, your charisma and influencing skills have taken you and your business a long way. You’ve raised capital, signed deals, won over powerful allies.
But that level of influence cannot carry your boldest vision. You can’t drive that alone.
Instead, your next big leap requires your team, your market and your investors to fully believe in the future you’re pointing to, and drive the vision without you pushing.
Most CEOs fail to scale their influence
So why do even successful and charismatic founders and CEOs like Daniel and Sophie struggle to mobilise their internal and external stakeholders?
It starts with the way influence has been taught:
“Clarify your message, then explain it clearly and persuasively, and people will act.”
This approach (message → delivery → response) doesn’t scale as the stakes rise and you need people to take personal risks – with their time, reputation, and future – in your vision.
As a result, highly competent leaders look around at their team in frustration, wondering where the ownership is to go the extra mile and drive the vision.
They look at key partners, investors or customers, wondering why they’re still holding back and hedging instead of throwing their full weight behind the plan.
These are the clearest signs that influence is insufficient. Do they sound familiar?
To compensate for that lack of influence, leaders respond with the familiar toolkit of control: staying close, driving harder, pushing more and carrying it themselves.
These efforts make some difference, but none have enough leverage to scale.
No wonder most CEOs are so exhausted.
How influence actually scales
If “clarify, explain and persuade” isn’t the formula for influence at scale, then what is?
Influence at scale relies on the insight that people only commit when it becomes rational for them to reorganise their behaviour and take personal risk in service of it.
There are three main components.
Beliefs
For people to act differently, they must believe certain things (about the present and the future) that make that action rational and desirable.
What behaviours are rewarded and punished right now?
Where is this really going, and does committing now make sense?
Reality
For those beliefs to stick, they must reflect a reality that requires beliefs to change. You achieve that in two ways.
1. System shifts
By making observable changes in how the system actually works today, you change what’s rewarded or punished, what no longer works, and what makes sense.
However, these shifts are often not made.
For example, many CEOs ask their teams to take ownership, but then stay close to execution. They attend reviews, unblock issues and step in when things stall. It feels responsible. But decisions slow until they intervene. The business learns ownership isn’t really necessary. Wait long enough, and the CEO will step in and carry it.
Similarly, many CEOs also ask their team to focus – without creating that reality. Instead, they keep multiple initiatives alive, change direction mid-cycle, or add new priorities on a whim. Teams hedge. Priorities blur. And nobody truly believes that focus matters. The rational response is to keep options open and commitment light.
In each case, people aren’t confused or resistant. They’re responding intelligently to the reality they’re in.
2. Skin in the game
By making moves that demonstrate your commitment to your stated vision, you change beliefs about the future because you send a powerful signal that you’re not going back.
When Apple removed CD-ROM slots, Ethernet ports or audio jacks from their devices, they weren’t just talking about a vision, saying “we believe the future is wireless.” They actually changed present reality in a way that made that future unavoidable.
At the same time, many of Apple’s competitors were talking about the same “wireless future” while continuing to ship machines that allowed customers to ignore it! They protected the present while merely describing the future. The market responded rationally: interest, but no urgency.
The difference wasn’t communication skill. It was the reality people found themselves already living inside.
Signal integrity
Communication still matters. For beliefs to form, reality has to be transmitted cleanly, without noise from fear, frustration or accommodation, so it’s felt by others.
This involves your words, tone, emotion, and how you handle pushback. More importantly, it reflects whether your leadership behaviours match the message you proclaim.
Here are three common failure modes:
1. Frustration leakage
When pressure rises, impatience, irritation, or sharpness bleeds into tone and timing. People don’t hear conviction. They hear volatility. The rational response is to wait it out or reduce exposure.
2. Reassurance reflex
Faced with pushback or silence, leaders explain more, soften edges, or offer optionality. The future is verbally reinforced while practically weakened, and what people take away is: this isn’t final yet.
3. People-pleasing accommodation
Wanting alignment, the leader absorbs discomfort rather than letting it surface. Tension is smoothed over instead of held. Others learn that resistance carries no cost.
Signal integrity is important, because when reality clearly changes and commitment is visible, belief follows without persuasion.
When influence scales
A month later, Sophie sends a different email.
Short. Final. The project starts on a fixed date. The cap table closes by year end. After that, there’s no way in. She doesn’t explain, reassure, or chase replies.
The effect is immediate. Some conversations evaporate. A few people disappear. Others come back fast with concrete questions and signed commitments. The vague interest is gone. What’s left is smaller but decisive.
Sophie feels that shift. She’s no longer carrying the future alone, trying to persuade others it’s real. It’s now in motion. People can feel it without her saying a word.
Daniel makes his move in the next review.
A senior leader presents strong numbers while sidestepping a key strategic commitment. Normally, Daniel would intervene, smooth it over, keep things moving. This time, he doesn’t.
He lets the pause hang. Then he names the miss and enforces a consequence he’s been avoiding. The room stiffens. No argument. No spin. A line has been crossed.
Over the next few weeks, something changes. Meetings shorten. Decisions stop drifting back to him. People stop scanning his face for cues. Execution picks up speed without his involvement. Daniel realises he’s done less, not more. And for the first time in a long while, the business is moving without leaning on him.
Your influence reckoning
If your team, investors or market aren’t moving fast enough, there are only two paths.
You can keep compensating for limited influence by staying close, pushing harder, and carrying the weight yourself. It will cost you more and more, until your ambition outgrows what you can sustain.
Or you can scale your influence by changing reality and cleaning up your signal so belief and momentum travel without you.
The difficulty isn’t knowing what to do, but actually breaking comfortable habits and leading from a different place.
Reality-changing moves remove the safety nets that protected your previous reality. You commit resources, put reputation on the line and remove optionality. That’s why they’re so effective and why so few leaders reliably make them boldly enough.
Cleaning the signal means changing deep-seated leadership behaviours that once made you effective but are now sending mixed messages and diluting your influence.
For example: solving problems yourself creates passivity in others; your flexibility creates doubt about the future you’re promoting; your charismatic explanations get people nodding but not committing.
These kind of limiting patterns persist because they protect you, preserving relevance, control, and the feeling of being needed.
Letting them go involves a step out of the comfortable and into the unknown. Most leaders avoid that, find their influence has stalled, and spiral into overwork.
That’s your influence reckoning.
This is identity-level work. It doesn’t happen gradually, and it rarely happens alone.
And it’s what I do, helping successful founders and CEOs commit to defining moves that scale their influence where it’s currently breaking down – inside the business, in the market, or both.
If you’re ready to stop exhausting yourself and start changing your reality, let's speak. Alternatively, come to The Crucible of Influence, where we do this exact work together.
