You can name them. The leaders in your life who actually made you better. Not the ones with the biggest titles or the loudest voices. The ones whose presence in a meeting changed how people thought. Whose feedback you carried with you for years. Whose example you find yourself reaching for, sometimes without realizing it.
They were not lucky. They were not special. They were practicing. The qualities that made them influential were not personality traits handed down at birth. They were habits, learnable, repeatable, available to anyone willing to do the work.
Brendon Burchard, the researcher and coach who certified David and me as high performance coaches, identified three of these practices in his work on the leaders who shape others. We use his three as the basis. We extended the framework to five based on what real leadership conditions actually require. Three decades I spent in executive leadership in wealth management, and a decade David spent working with Special Forces, taught us what was missing. All five are below.
What is influential leadership?
Influential leadership is the work of moving people through how you show up, not through what your title says you can demand of them.
It is not authority. Authority is a permission slip from the org chart. Influential leadership is what makes the team do its best work after you leave the room. It is not popularity. Popular leaders avoid the hard conversations. Influential leaders walk into them prepared. And it is not charisma. Charisma fills a room. Influence changes how the people in the room think.
The five practices we walk through show up consistently in the leaders who keep moving people forward year after year. None of them are mysterious. All of them are learnable. The work is in the consistency.
Why this matters right now
Gallup's research, drawn from millions of employees across hundreds of organizations and reaffirmed in the 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, finds that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. The leader is the variable. The same talent, the same budget, the same market conditions produce dramatically different results depending on who is at the head of the team.
Gallup's latest data also finds that global engagement sits at 21 percent. Roughly four in five workers are not fully engaged at work. That is a leadership gap, not a workforce problem. The professionals who learn to run these five practices consistently will lead the teams that produce the outsized results. The ones who do not will keep wondering why their numbers do not move.
The science behind the five practices
Each of these practices rests on decades of research.
Adam Grant's research at Wharton on rethinking shows that the highest-performing teams are not the ones with the most certainty. They are the ones most willing to update their own thinking when evidence arrives. The leader who teaches how to think is building a team that can do that.
Liz Wiseman's research on what she calls Multipliers studied 150 leaders across 35 companies. Multiplier leaders, who challenged and stretched their teams strategically, extracted between 70 and 100 percent of their team's capability. Diminishers extracted only 20 to 50 percent. Same talent, twice the output. The variable was how the leader showed up.
Edgar Schein's decades of work on organizational culture shows that what a leader pays attention to, rewards, and responds to under pressure shapes the culture far more than what the leader announces. Role modeling is not a soft skill. It is the primary mechanism by which culture forms.
Chip and Dan Heath's research, summarized in Switch, found that change efforts fail far more often from lack of clear next moves than from lack of strategic vision. The leader who closes every consequential conversation with action keeps the team moving forward instead of in circles.
Bill George's research at Harvard Business School on authentic leadership shows that leaders who operate from their actual values, in their actual voice, produce teams that take more risks, give more honest feedback, and stay longer.
Five researchers, one conclusion. The five practices, taken together, produce the kind of leadership the research consistently links to better outcomes.
The five practices
1. Teach people how to think, not just what to do. Most leaders default to giving answers and handing down decisions. The team gets the work done but does not get smarter. Influential leaders go upstream. They walk the team through how they reached the conclusion, not just what they concluded.
The practice. When you find yourself about to give an answer, ask a question instead. When the team asks what you would do, ask what they are considering first. When you make a decision, narrate how you reached it, not just what you decided. Over months, the team starts thinking the way you think. That is influence at its highest yield.
This is the practice most experts struggle with. The qualities that got you promoted, your ability to see the answer fast and deliver it cleanly, work against you here. The discipline is to slow down on purpose so the team can speed up over time.
2. Challenge people strategically. Influential leaders ask more of their teams than the team thought it could do. Not to push for pushing's sake. Not to test the team's tolerance for pressure. They challenge because the team has more in it than the team can see. A strategic challenge invites someone into a version of themselves they have not fully met yet.
The practice. Pick someone who has plateaued. Identify the next stretch they have not been given. Articulate why you believe they can meet it. Then offer the challenge directly, in a conversation, not by email. Watch what happens to their work over the next month. Most people rise. The ones who do not need a different conversation, not a smaller challenge.
3. Role model the behavior you expect. People do not believe the message if they do not believe the messenger. The fastest way to lose credibility as a leader is to ask for behaviors you do not demonstrate. The fastest way to build credibility is to demonstrate them before you ask anyone else to.
The practice. Pick one value or behavior you want to see in your team this quarter. Identify how you are currently modeling it, or failing to. Make the change in yourself first. Do not announce it. Just do it. Six weeks in, ask the team what they have noticed about how the work is changing. The shifts they name will tell you whether the modeling landed.
4. Move every consequential conversation into action. A conversation that does not produce action is mostly noise. Influential leaders close every meaningful conversation with movement. A clear next step. A named owner. A date on the calendar. Without these, the conversation lives only in the room where it happened.
The practice. At the end of every consequential conversation, ask three questions. What did we decide? Who owns the next move? When does it happen? The first few times will feel mechanical. After a month, the team starts coming into conversations already prepared to land on action, because they know you will ask. The work moves faster. The team operates with more accountability, not less.
5. Embody the freedom you want your team to operate with. The most influential leaders show up as themselves, fully, and give the team permission to do the same. Most leaders perform. They wear the mask of who they think they should be. The team feels the mask and adjusts. Now everyone is performing, and no one is doing their best work.
When I led teams in wealth management, I told them clearly that I valued kindness over niceness. Niceness is polite and superficial. Kindness can deliver hard feedback because it cares enough about the person to risk the discomfort. Over time, my team started prefacing hard conversations with "I am just being kind here." That phrase became permission. The team got more honest with me, with each other, and with themselves. The work got better because the conversations got more real.
The practice. Identify one place where you are performing instead of being. Drop the performance in one conversation this week. See what your team does with the space.
Common mistakes
Picking your favorite practice and treating it as the whole job. Some leaders are great at challenging and never teach how to think. Some role model beautifully and never push the team. The five practices work together. If you are strong in two, the team feels the absence of the other three.
Treating the practices as something you do, not something you are. These are not techniques to deploy in a meeting. They are how you show up. If they only appear when you are trying to influence, they will not land. The team can feel performance versus practice.
Confusing challenge with criticism. Strategic challenge invites someone to rise. Criticism informs them that they have fallen short. Most leaders mean the first and deliver the second. The words are sometimes identical. The difference is in the belief that comes with the message.
Skipping role modeling because it is the slowest practice. Teaching how to think pays off in weeks. Challenge can pay off in days. Role modeling pays off in months. Most leaders quit on it before the payoff arrives. The ones who do not are the leaders other people remember twenty years later.
Frequently asked questions
Which of the five practices should I start with?
Start with the one your team needs most, not the one most comfortable for you. Watch the team for a week. Notice what they are missing. If they are waiting for your answers, start with teaching how to think. If they are coasting, start with strategic challenge. If they are confused about what matters, start with role modeling. If conversations end without action, start there. If they are performing, start with embodying freedom. The right starting place is wherever the gap is biggest.
How long does it take to see results from these practices?
It depends on the practice. Asking better questions instead of giving answers produces visible shifts within a few weeks. Strategic challenge can produce a step change in performance in a month. Role modeling takes the longest. Most teams need six to twelve weeks to register the shift in your behavior and then begin shifting their own. The slowness of role modeling is one of the reasons most leaders abandon it. The leaders who do not are the ones who build the deepest trust.
Do these practices work with peers and senior colleagues, not just direct reports?
Yes. The five practices are not about positional authority. They are about how you show up in any relationship where you want to move someone forward. Asking questions that help a peer think more clearly is leadership. Challenging a senior colleague to step into a harder version of their argument is leadership. Closing every conversation with action is leadership. The practices scale up and across as well as they scale down.
What if my team is highly experienced and does not need to be taught how to think?
The most experienced teams need this practice more, not less. Experience creates strong habits. Strong habits make it harder to update thinking when conditions change. Teaching how to think is not remedial. It is what keeps a senior team from defending yesterday's strategy when the market has moved. The questions you ask experienced people are different from the ones you ask juniors. The practice is the same.
Can introverted leaders practice these as effectively as extroverts?
Yes, often more effectively. None of the five practices require volume or charisma. They require attention. Introverted leaders tend to listen more, ask better questions, and notice what extroverted leaders miss. The practices favor depth over performance. If anything, the bias against quiet leaders in popular culture has obscured how often introverts are the most influential people in the room.
One more thing
Think back to the leader you named at the start of this article. The one who actually made you better. Whatever they did, it was probably some version of these five practices. They taught you how to think about something you had not known how to think about. They challenged you to step into a version of yourself you had not yet met. They showed you, through their own behavior, what was possible. They closed your conversations with action so the work moved. And they showed up as themselves, which gave you permission to do the same.
You can be that for someone now. You do not need to wait for a bigger title or a different team or a better moment. The practices are available in the next conversation you have.
That is the work.
