Respect gets you a seat at the table. Influence is what determines whether anyone listens once you sit down.

Respected is not the same as influential

Most high-performing leaders have worked hard for the first one. Most have never been taught the second. Here’s the distinction that doesn’t get made often enough: respect and influence are not the same thing.

Respect comes from doing good work, being reliable and showing up with integrity. Most senior leaders have it. You probably have it. Influence is different. It’s the ability to shift thinking. To shape a decision before it gets made. To move people to action even when you have no authority over them. And it requires a completely different set of skills.

Here’s the frustrating part. When you have respect but not influence, everything looks fine from the outside. You’re in the room. You’re performing. People like working with you.

But your ideas get picked up by someone else. Your recommendations get noted and then quietly set aside. Your voice carries weight with your team but not with your peers or the leaders above you. Sounds familiar?

That’s the influence gap. And over time it becomes exhausting, because you start feeling like the game is being played by rules you were never given.

When you close it, though, things will shift, and you will be the one driving the strategy instead of implementing someone else’s. You stop just delivering what you’re asked for and start actually moving things forward.

Great ideas need more than a great script

Having an influence gap is a little like being a brilliant screenwriter who has never been taught to perform. You have the content, the ideas, the substance. But when you step into the room, the audience needs more than a great script. They need presence, timing, connection. That is a different craft. And it has to be learned.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker

The problem wasn’t her ideas

Claire was a Director at a large professional services firm. Sharp, articulate, deeply respected. What she couldn’t understand was why her proposals kept stalling.

She would present carefully constructed recommendations, walk away feeling like she had landed them, and then find weeks later that the decision had gone a different direction or someone else had taken credit for her idea.

When we unpacked it, the issue wasn’t her ideas. It was the sequence. The real decisions had already been shaped in conversations before the formal meeting, with people she had no relationships with. She was treating influence as a presentation skill when it is actually a relationship skill.

We worked on mapping her stakeholder landscape and doing what I call the pre-work: understanding what mattered to the key players before she walked in. Over time, the dynamic shifted, and her ideas were landing. Not because they had improved, but because she had built the relationships that gave them a pathway.

Women aren’t less influential. They’re less practised

A Harvard Business Review study by Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru found that women leaders were rated lower than men on envisioning, the ability to articulate a compelling vision and influence others around it. Not because they lack the capability. But because they are less likely to have been given the opportunity to practise it at senior levels.

Why is this important to mention? Because in our upcoming Inner Edge Leadership Accelerator for women in business, we attempt to close the influence gap.