Scopes of Influence

Eventually many of us who enter the workforce will end up at huge companies with thousands of employees. Companies of this scale will have “teams of teams” and navigating this environment can be difficult. This article will describe the scopes of influence that a person has, and how they can use that understanding to create influence. Scopes of influence is important because when you are working, there are different things you will want to achieve, and knowing how to communicate and disperse those ideas are important.

Circles of Concern vs Influence

Taken from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is the idea of your circle of concern vs circle of influence.

The idea is that there are two circles:

• Circle of Concern - The Things you care about
• Circle of Influence - The Things that you care about and you can do something about

From: Link

What is important is to understand how the two relate - the circle of influence is a sub-part of your circle of concern. By being able to understand this fact will empower you to focus on the things that you do have influence over and ignore the “noise” of things you don’t.

How does this relate to Software Engineers? Frankly a ton! Feeling overworked? Is the technology you work with terrible? Feel like your underpaid? All of those are usual concerns of software engineers, but how do you approach such complex problems?

By identifying what your circle of influence is, you will find the tools to achieve your concerns. Take for example wage. That is a popular concern that most people will take to their grave. Everyone wishes they had a higher wage, but they don’t have control over that - their boss, or boss’s boss, or maybe even the CEO. Then you can look at who does have influence over your wage and you see the same list - boss, boss’s, CEOs. How do we get the people who do have control to agree with our concerns? Use what we talked about in “managing up” to improve your relationship and influence the things you do have control over - and slowly your circle of influence will expand.

Scopes

Now that we identified the differences of influence vs concern, we have a mechanism for achieving things outside of our influence. Don’t get it twisted, I don’t think everyone should shoot to maximize your influence for influence sake. If you have influence but don’t have the right values you’ll be steering the ship in the totally wrong direction - leaving the place worse than when you came. Influence is just another tool you can use to express yourself and your ideas.

Team

The first scope of influence is your team - the people you directly work with. The most accessible of the scopes, the team is also the essential scope of them all. This scope is the most accessible because you have day-to-day interaction with all your team, and are all working on related work.

If there is something you want to influence, usually your team is the first place to test this. Agile teams are a great place to testing new or different technologies, processes, or other changes. Successful teams are the ones that are willing to try out new things, but also determine if it is helpful for them or not and pivot accordingly.

Usual topics in this scope:

• Team Norms and Processes
• Code patterns
• Sometimes technologies
• Team Priorities

Some strategies you can use to influence your team:

• Bouncing some of your ideas off a team member
• Suggest trying new things with your team during retrospectives
• Doing something and asking for feedback from a team member

Department

The next scope of influence is your department - this is usually many teams working towards the a similar goal. Some things are not in your team’s control, and you will have to reach farther and influence department decisions.

This one is tricky because now you begin to influencing people that you don’t have a great working relationship and may not be working on the same finer grain goals that you and your team are. The same strategies you used with your team will not work as well. Other teams may not even understand the problem you are trying to change because they don’t see it as issue within their team.

Working with your leads and managers are essential to gain influence at this level. They are also the people who are actively trying influence this section, and by aligning your goals with theirs is a recipe for success.

Usual topics in this scope:

• Technologies/Framework standards
• Architecture standards
• Cross-cutting concerns
• Team to Team coordination

Some strategies you can use to influence the organization:

• Setting up developer forum to give space where developers can collaborate across teams
• Setup working groups with members from across different teams that share the same goal
• Be an example of success, and show the rest of the organization the benefits of the work
• Work with managers and leads and identify “wins” that align with your goals to get their support too

Organization

The largest scope of influence is your organization - this is the entirety of the company you work for. I haven’t gotten that far yet so come back in ten years shrug.