The Hidden Barriers to Building Influence
Dear underrecognized thought leader, changemaking luminary, organization to watch,
Your work is a big deal.
Gamechanging, even.
But if it’s not shaping your industry, if you’re not yet a coveted voice in the rooms decisions are being made in, if your ideas aren’t catching on in the communities you’re looking to serve, then chances are high you’d like your work to be a bigger deal.
The results you’re getting should match the efforts you’re putting in.
Here’s 3 reasons why they aren’t:
1. The Stages of Visibility
First, let’s make sure we have a shared definition of visibility.
Visibility is simply your work and ideas being seen in the right light, by the right people.
It is a prerequisite for influence—even if you’re looking to influence an audience of one.
Visibility also has stages. Five to be exact.
Each stage has it’s own personal set of challenges and opportunities you must encounter, navigate around or neutralize in order to move on to the next stage.
Strategically, that means the outcomes you’re building towards will differ, depending on the stage of visibility you are in.
Tactically, that means what you’re attempting to do—the literal activities that will help you make actual progress—will differ depending on the stage of visibility you are in.
If you are trying to get the attention and recognition your ideas deserve in the rooms with the most impact and influence on our society, if you’re looking to literally shape your industry, sector or field, then you’re looking to make your way to the fifth stage.
At the very least, you are looking to make your way to the third stage.
As it turns out, getting into stages three and five are notoriously difficult transitions to make.
2. The Scopes of Influence
In addition to the challenges present within each stage of visibility, are the challenges that come when transitioning between the stages.
Each stage belongs to a scope of influence—which is simply a designation of who or what you are exercising your influence on.
Influence—in this situation—is the capacity to translate exposure or attention into the specific outcomes you want.
With the first two stages of visibility—where you are gaining traction—you are expanding your capacity to influence individuals. If your work requires you win hearts and minds, then this means changing the behavior and/or beliefs of individuals.
The third and fourth stages of visibility, just around where you begin to manage your momentum, are where you begin to grow your capacity to influence groups of people. This is when the focus becomes changing the behaviors of groups of people.
The fifth and final stage of visibility, where you are literally shifting and shaping social norms, is where your capacity to influence social structures is established.
Transitioning between scopes of influence is almost always tricky, because it requires an overhaul of your goals, approaches, and metrics for success. It can often feel like you’re starting from scratch—despite the fact that you’ve been at things for a while or have made a lot of progress.
And the thing is, everyone deals with this.
Everyone and anyone trying to amplify an idea that would shift the status quo in some way navigates and comes up against the challenges (and opportunities) each stage of visibility presents and each scope of influence provides.
But these aren’t the only barriers.
3. Underrecognition
As it turns out, we as a society have been conditioned to overlook and underappreciate certain types of people and experiences. I call that phenomenon underrecognition. As you can no doubt imagine, this absolutely has consequences for how we navigate through each stage of visibility and scope of influence.
If it has ever felt like your efforts haven’t gotten you or your organization as far as they have your peers, that is likely because of one side of the underrecognition coin: Visibility Biases
Visibility Biases are the cause of underrecognition.
More specifically, they are a subset of cognitive biases—learned brain chemistry or invisible scripts in our heads—that allocate our attention in discriminatory ways.
A great example of a visibility bias is the racial attention deficit. In this study, the researchers were able to empirically demonstrate that white Americans are 33% more likely to overlook their black peers. And that’s even when they’ve been incentivized to pay attention to those peers. Now this study has a lot of caveats—as most studies do.
It was necessarily limited. So it only looked at race—not other spectrums of identity like gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, body size—the list goes on for elements that might have shifted this number
It didn’t really look at the combination or intersectionality of identity. For example, does this number change if the person is an older black woman? The closest it came to discussing this was when they noted no real distinction between white men and white women as far as the deficit was concerned. Their likelihood to overlook these peers did not shift across gender.
It only looked at race as a binary: black and white. It didn’t look at other races or multiracial people.
Even so, this visibility bias demonstrates exactly what’s going on under the hood of underrecognition. If folks are more likely to overlook you because of who you are, that means that the approaches to navigating these stages of visibility—the ones that have become standard—likely won’t work as well for you as they do for those they were built for.
This is where that gap you’ve been sensing comes from. That feeling of “why are they so much further along, when we’re doing the same things?”
Then we have the other side of the underrecognition coin: the costs of underrecognition.
If it feels like your journey through the stages of visibility has been a bit a slog, then this may be because of what I call the Invisibility Tax.
The Invisibility Tax is made up of all the extra bits of time, energy—any resource really—that underrecognized folks and their advocates are told to pay by society for being visible at all and especially for seeking to be as visible as their peers.
It works like any other tax. There are line items—different facets of the tax. And if one applies to you, it’s added to the pile. You pay a toll for every facet that applies to you.
If we’re being honest, it’s extortion.
Goodwill and certain key recognitions held ransom until we pay up.
Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez’s Ambition Penalty is an excellent example of this. Often mislabeled as the “confidence gap” in women and girls, O’Connell Rodriguez defines this penalty as “the social, professional and financial costs women face when asking for more.” Essentially what we do to ambitious women.
As it turns out, this is a reality that extrapolates neatly to most underrecognized folks. When underrecognized people demonstrate the traits lauded in others as demonstrating ambition, they are penalized rather than elevated.
So that’s what’s going on underneath the surface, as you make your bid for greater, behavior changing visibility. You are constantly navigating new challenges and opportunities as you move through the different stages, being asked to leverage new tools and approaches as you traverse the scopes of influence and are held back and penalized almost every step of the way. In the midst of all of this, it’s incredibly easy to find yourself doing the right things…at the wrong times.
But it’s not all bad news.
In our next installment, we’ll start talking solutions:
The actual art and science of amplifying world changing ideas.