This week we explored how leaders influence others, where power actually comes from, and what motivates people to engage. Influence is not simply about authority or telling people what to do. It involves understanding your followers, choosing the right tactics, and recognizing that you are being influenced just as much as you are influencing others. Power can be positional or personal, and motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic depending on the individual and the context.
Main Post (Due Thursday)
Imagine the following situation:
A nonprofit organization has just hired a new executive director. The staff is talented but burned out after two years of leadership instability. Morale is low, two key employees have quietly started job searching, and the board is pressing for immediate results. The new director has no formal authority yet over budget decisions and inherits a team that is skeptical of anyone in the role.
The director must figure out how to:
- Build trust and influence without relying on legitimate power
- Identify what is actually motivating or demotivating the team
- Choose the right influence tactics for a fragile, high-stakes moment
- Begin designing relationships that move people from the out-group to genuine partners
- Identify a real leader, in any industry, who stepped into a broken or skeptical environment and had to earn influence from scratch.
In your post, address the following:
- Briefly describe the situation the leader walked into and what made it difficult.
- Which of the 11 influence tactics from the chapter did this leader appear to use? Identify at least two and explain how you observed them in action.
- What sources of power was this leader drawing on? Be specific and explain why those sources mattered in that context.
- Based on what you know about the situation, what do you think was motivating or demotivating the followers? Use at least two sources of motivation from the chapter to support your analysis.
- Do you think this leader effectively designed their relationships using Kouzes and Posner’s practices? Which practice was most evident and which was most absent?
- Support your discussion with course concepts and sufficient sources including the textbook and peer-reviewed articles in APA format both in-text and at the bottom of your main post.
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