When the building is on fire, you don’t build consensus. You tell people exactly what to do and expect them to do it immediately, without question. For urgent matters, using your authority is wonderfully efficient. The problem is that the more often you give commands, the less people want to comply. Using your positional authority gradually erodes your influence. On the other hand, the more often you lead through influence, the faster people will comply with a command. When you have earned their trust, telling them to evacuate the building immediately is less likely to be questioned.

Leadership isn’t an either-or, authority vs influence. There is a range of ways to accomplish any goal. Good leaders employ the appropriate methods based on the stakeholders and the time frame. There are many layers to this, but I simplify them into what I call the Four Cs of leadership: Command, Currency, Credibility & Culture. The ability to use all four and knowing when to use each is what takes a leader from good to great.

The Four Cs framework

My Four Cs framework synthesizes concepts from two well-established bodies of research: Robert Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion, and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. I’ve simplified and reorganized the concepts to address how fast they are to implement and how long they will endure.

Command

This refers to your positional authority. When people report to you, you have the ability to give them commands. When something is urgent, a command is the fastest and most efficient way to get things done. Sometimes, the explanation for why a thing needs to be done is either above their clearance level or will simply not be understood by them. Picture a child kicking the back of your chair on an airplane. Do you want the parent to build consensus on the idea that kicking the chair is a bad idea, or do you want the parent to tell them to stop. In a work environment, sometimes “Trust me, this needs to get done” is the only method available. As noted above, giving a command is efficient, but should be done sparingly.

Currency

Currency implies a trade of some sort. If you know what a person wants, you can simply offer it to them in return for what it is that you want. We see this very often in politics: “If you approve this bill, I will approve yours.”  In business there is often give and take and quid pro quo is effective. This is Cialdini’s principle of reciprocity in its most basic form.

As a next step, you might build the amount of currency you have by helping people or providing them what they need, no strings attached. You are building a reserve of currency. When you have a need down the road, people are more likely to help. They’re also more forgiving if you make a misstep later on. This is less transactional but it makes people want to help you.

Credibility

Credibility takes longer to build and is based on your track record. The first way to build credibility is through expertise. Being the expert and answering questions as they come up will raise you up in people’s estimation. The second way is through consistency. Delivering quality solutions on time and following through on your commitments builds trust. The third is confidence. It’s one thing to know an answer, and it’s another to deliver it in a way that people believe. If you know a thing for a fact, make a declarative statement. If you want to keep their trust, never state something you think as a fact. Show confidence in appropriate levels.

Culture

When a group of people have a shared vision, trust each other and encourage people to share their ideas, you have a culture that will breed success. This takes the longest to build, but is also the most enduring of the four C’s. Shared vision requires being very clear about the overall goals as well as the more nuanced criteria for success that we talked about in the last two articles. It is built on the credibility we just talked about, which is made up of expertise and consistency and confidence.

Finally, good culture requires people to be willing to share their ideas, challenge existing assumptions and take risks. This is what Kouzes and Posner call Enabling Others to Act and Challenging the Process. Amy Edmondson’s research backs this up directly: teams with higher psychological safety were more likely to engage in learning behavior, and that learning was linked directly to team performance.

When people aren’t comfortable sharing ideas and challenging assumptions, the team moves with blinders on. You may get where you’re headed faster, but nobody’s ensuring you’re headed the right way. The ability to try new things and make calculated risks is how innovation happens. When people are penalized for mistakes, they are less likely to take risks and improve solutions.

Leading a project

It is common for project managers to have responsibility for the successful completion of a project, without the positional authority to make people do things. That can feel like an unreasonable challenge, especially when something is urgent. Over the longer course of the project, not having positional authority might be considered a benefit. It forces the use of Currency, Credibility and Culture, each of which takes incrementally more time, but are also more enduring. It goes to show that the best leaders are not necessarily the ones with the most reports, they are the ones who understand all the levers of leadership and when to use each one.

That’s why I developed the four Cs They are my way of organizing decades of persuasion and leadership research into a single, practical spectrum: Command, Currency, Credibility, Culture. A range of solutions effective for shorter-term and longer-term needs.

Next steps

If this strikes a chord with you, I suggest exploring the Leadership Accelerator program. It digs into all four Cs of leadership and more. If you’re at a corporation and think your team could use this kind of leadership development, click here to learn more. And if you’re interested in this for yourself, for the first time I am offering the Leadership Accelerator coaching program as an open cohort, making it accessible to individuals. Click here for details.