Influence — the animated, exploratory working style.
Influence is the working style of people who think by talking and are drawn to possibility. They generate options quickly, work out what they believe in the act of saying it, and treat early-stage ideas as material to be played with rather than proposals to be defended.
- Animated
- exploratory
- people-first
Around a quarter of people lead with Influence. It is the style most likely to be misread as either brilliant or unserious depending entirely on whether the listener understands that the first three versions of an idea were drafts.
What you actually see.
They arrive at the point by talking their way there
so the first two minutes are working, not preamble, even though it sounds like preamble.
They generate five options where two were asked for
and are not attached to any of them, which the room rarely realises.
They are noticeably better in a room than on a document
because writing removes the reactions they were using to steer.
They will commit enthusiastically and slightly early
meaning yes is genuine but occasionally optimistic about capacity.
They notice how people are taking things
often before the person taking it badly has said anything.
They lose energy when a project moves into execution
not from laziness but because the interesting part — the shape of it — is now settled.
Give them
- To be brought in while things are still forming
- Room to think out loud without it being costed
- Reactions — silence is genuinely disorienting
- Recognition that is specific rather than formal
- Variety, or at least a change of problem
- Someone to hold the thread they will drop
Costs them
- Being handed a finished plan to execute
- Long stretches of solo, repetitive work
- Written-only decision processes
- Having a half-thought treated as a proposal
- Meetings where nobody reacts
- Being managed by ticket
The same point, landed and missed.
Misses
You need to stop overcommitting. You said yes to three things last month you did not deliver, and it is becoming a pattern. I need you to be more realistic about your capacity going forward.
Lands
Something I have noticed, and I think it comes from a good place. When someone brings you a problem you can see a way through, you say yes in the moment — and three of those in a month is more than the month holds. It costs you, because the two you did brilliantly get remembered alongside the one that slipped. Try this: when you feel the yes coming, say “I want to, let me check what it displaces and come back tomorrow.” You will still do most of them.
Why — The first version is accurate and will land as a character judgement, because for an Influence colleague the relationship is part of how they hear anything. The second names the same behaviour, attributes it to the trait it comes from, shows the cost, and hands them one specific sentence to use. It also, importantly, does not ask them to become someone who says no easily.
Four situations, four adjustments.
In a meeting
React. An Influence colleague steers by the response in the room, and a silent audience reads to them as a hostile one. Even a “say more” keeps the thing moving.
Respond out loud, early.
Over email or chat
Expect enthusiasm and follow up on specifics. Written agreement from an Influence colleague is real and may not include the constraints they would have mentioned in person.
Confirm the what-by-when separately.
When giving them work
Give them the problem before the plan. Handing over a finished specification wastes exactly the part of them worth having.
Ask “how would you approach this?” first.
When disagreeing
Disagree with the idea and be visibly warm about the person while you do it. They will take the substance easily and the tone hard.
Say “I like where this is going, and…”
What stress does to this style.
Under pressure, Influence gets louder, faster and more scattered. The option generation that is useful at the start of a problem keeps running when the problem needs closing, and a stressed Influence colleague can produce three new directions in a meeting convened to pick one.
It is often mistaken for avoidance, and occasionally it is. More often it is the same mechanism working overtime: when something feels stuck, their instinct is that the way out is another angle, and they will keep supplying angles until someone stops them.
The intervention that works is narrowing, not slowing. Ask them to pick their best two and argue for one. That uses what they are doing rather than fighting it, and an Influence colleague will usually land somewhere sensible within a minute of being asked to choose.
What it doesn’t see about itself.
Their drafts get read as decisions
The cost of thinking out loud is that other people write it down. Labelling the mode — “half-thought, do not cost it yet” — removes most of this.
They overcommit in the moment and pay for it later
The enthusiasm is genuine at the time of saying yes. So is the difficulty three weeks later.
They can talk past a quieter colleague without noticing
Not from disregard — from the assumption that anyone with something to say will say it.
They mistake momentum for progress
A room that feels energised and a project that has advanced are different things, and they are more attuned to the first.
Detail work quietly slips
The interesting phase ends before the necessary one does, and the gap is usually where the follow-through was supposed to be.
Same style, different person.
Beatriz Lima
Influence · moderate intensity
Explores out loud, then lands. Give her the last five minutes of a meeting and she will summarise her own position accurately.
Marcus Oyelaran
Influence · high intensity
Will still be generating options when the meeting ends. Needs an explicit “pick one” or the discussion simply widens.
Both read as Influence. Beatriz converges on her own if you leave room; Marcus does not, and waiting for him to is the most common way a decision meeting with him runs out of time.
How Influence meets the other three.
Influence & Dominance
Fast, loud, and two versions of the plan
Both commit early, on different information — one from conviction, one from possibility
Write it down. The gap is usually visible in a single sentence.
Influence & Steadiness
Warm, agreeable, and nothing gets decided
Neither will force the moment, so the moment never arrives
Appoint a decider before the meeting, not during it.
Influence & Conscientiousness
“They are all talk” and “they kill every idea”
Thinking out loud collides with a habit of evaluating what is said
Label the mode: “this is a half-thought, do not cost it yet.”
What people ask about Influence.
Not quite, though they overlap. Extraversion is a Big Five trait measuring where someone draws energy from and how much external stimulation they seek. Influence is a working style derived from high extraversion combined with high agreeableness — the energy is outward and it is oriented toward people rather than toward the task. A high-extraversion, low-agreeableness colleague reads as Dominance rather than Influence, despite being equally sociable.
The other three styles
Reading about a style is the easy half.
The hard half is remembering it at four o'clock on a Thursday, mid-way through a difficult message. That's the part we built.
All four stylesTell us what you’re working on.