Influence vs. Authority

Recently I took a Project Management course on Coursera just to see what it was all about. Near the end of the course, there was a section on authority versus influence. The instructor noted that having authority means you have the right to command. Having influence, on the other hand, simply means that people will generally listen to you because you're knowledgeable and trustworthy. While these two may at times be derived from expertise, those in positions of power often don't deserve it.

Sometimes people voluntarily submit themselves to strict hierarchies. For the last month, I've been working an industrial construction job that follows incredibly rigid chains of command. There are helpers, journeymen, foremen, general foremen, superintendents, general field superintendents, then the project manager...each one in the above rank commands the swath of people below, though there are separations by craft.

My foreman was complaining that others don't follow the chain of command. They wander off to do what they want to do. I see where he's coming from, and yet I also see why this idea is so outdated. We used to need these hierarchies to maintain order. Maybe in some industries, we will continue to need them. The nature of these industrial workers is crude, unruly, and often uncooperative. Maybe they do need to be told what to do.

There's another problem at hand here: people are totally divorced from their work, because they have no real connection to it. This power plant will get built with or without my crew. Nothing truly depends on me, except in an indirect sense; I can help my fellow workers out, but that doesn't create any lifelong sustenance. It's not my plant. It's not my interest. It's a corporate master's plant.

This isn't it, but it invokes the same feeling: cold indifference. I suppose there's something to be proud of when assembling something, but I have a hard time feeling it.

The rest of the workers are, for the most part, content with making a shitload of money. They either take care of their families (who they are often thousands of miles from) or out on the boat/truck/hovercraft/etc.

I care more about what I actually do in the world, and I think people are waking up to this fact. That's why we have so many independent minds finding alternatives. In this world, influence is the only thing that matters; authority has no real place, except in a secondary sense.

What is this secondary sense? If you can understand what place delegated roles have, it can help in times of crisis where you need to act efficiently. Sometimes, there's no time for discussion, there's only time to take action. You need the person with the highest level of expertise to take the lead and issue commands. Each person has a clearly defined role and expectations. This would be a system that one enters into voluntarily, and for a specific time frame, rather than being the prison that it is now.

For free thinkers, influence is far more important than authority. Gain experience, learn how to learn, teach yourself new things, and build positive social connections - these skills will generate much more success than learning to command others. People will want to actually listen to you than eventually attempt a coup.