How to immediately increase your influence at work

It’s easy to assume that influence at work comes with the job title. But the truth is, people start listening to you—and aligning with you—long before you get that formal authority. The real shift happens in the quiet ways you show up, not in the loud moments you try to prove yourself.

I’ve seen this play out across early-stage teams in Southeast Asia and Saudi Arabia, especially with founders and team leads navigating fast growth and fuzzy roles. Influence isn’t charisma. It’s pattern-breaking clarity. And if you want to be the person people listen to when the room is confused, these three shifts can flip that switch fast.

1. Show You Notice What Others Miss

When I was running my first team, I used to think influence meant being loud in meetings. I’d prep points. I’d quote metrics. I thought that would earn respect. But the person everyone remembered? It was the quiet engineer who said, “Hey, just so you know—this customer flow breaks when you use a phone with Arabic set as default.” Nobody asked him to check that. Nobody even brought it up. But the fact that he spotted it? That made everyone pay attention to him from then on.

Here’s what I learned: the fastest way to increase your influence at work is to notice one thing nobody else is seeing. A friction in the customer journey. A morale dip no one’s naming. A recurring glitch that keeps getting patched instead of fixed. It doesn’t have to be world-changing. It just has to be real. And once you say it out loud—with clarity and care—it creates instant gravity around you.

Mini-practice: Each week, ask yourself, “What’s one thing in this team or product that we’re all working around—but not addressing?” Name it. And if you can, offer a fix.

2. Start Framing Tradeoffs Instead of Taking Sides

In growing teams, people often pick sides without realizing it. Engineering vs. sales. Founder vs. ops. Speed vs. quality.

When you’re the one person who says, “Here’s the tradeoff we’re navigating—not just who’s right,” you instantly change your role in the conversation. You go from participant to pattern-setter. I saw this in a startup in KL where the sales lead kept clashing with the tech team over launch timelines. The ops manager stepped in—not to mediate, but to reframe: “We’re trying to preserve urgency without burning trust. So what can ship now, and what gets booked in for week three?”

That one sentence shifted the energy in the room. Suddenly, people were collaborating—not defending. Influence isn’t about winning arguments. It’s about moving the conversation to higher ground.

Mini-practice: When tension rises, pause and ask: “What’s the real tradeoff here?” Say it out loud. Then ask: “What would it take to protect both sides of that tension, even 70%?”

3. Become the Keeper of Follow-Through

This is the least sexy part of influence—but maybe the most powerful. Most people don’t need another good idea at work. They need someone who makes the idea happen. Who nudges the update. Who remembers what was promised last week. Who gently brings it back into focus.

We had a new hire in a Riyadh accelerator program who did this like a pro. After each team sync, she’d quietly message teammates: “You mentioned you needed the partner deck by Wednesday—want me to remind you Tuesday morning?” Or: “I added the client concern you flagged into the next sprint board—let me know if it needs rewording.”

She wasn’t senior. But she became indispensable within a month. Influence isn’t always loud or public. It’s being the person people trust not to let things slide. That kind of consistency builds quiet power.

Mini-practice: Try this for 2 weeks—after every meeting, pick 1 action you didn’t directly own but can lightly support. A reminder, a summary, a nudge. Do it without needing credit.

The people we instinctively trust at work—the ones whose opinions carry weight, even when they’re not the loudest—tend to do three things consistently:

1. They see what others skim past.
2. They speak to the real problem, not the surface debate.
3. They create continuity when others drift.

These aren’t personality traits. They’re behaviors. Habits. Small, repeatable shifts that reshape how your coworkers perceive you. You don’t need to be extroverted. You don’t need a new title. You just need to build a different signal.

Founders often tell me they want more buy-in, more respect, or more initiative from their teams. But the fastest way to create that is to model it first. Influence spreads when people experience clarity, care, and consistency from you—not just opinion.

You don’t need a new role or a new strategy deck. You need to shift what people associate you with. Do they think of you as the person who sees the unspoken blocker? The person who frames the real problem? The person who follows through without needing to be chased? That’s influence. And the best part? It scales—because others start mirroring it back.

If you're working in a startup or fast-growing org, and you're feeling invisible or sidelined, you don't need to wait to be picked. Influence isn't about volume. It's about value that lands. When your input shifts the team forward, people remember. When you name what others avoid, people pay attention. When you're the keeper of follow-through, people lean in.

I've watched junior product analysts in Singapore outshine PMs by quietly becoming the most trusted pair of eyes in the room. I've seen fresh hires in KSA win founder trust in six weeks by consistently making others' work easier to act on. None of it was dramatic. All of it was decisive. So if you want to increase your influence at work—start with one overlooked tension. Frame it. Track it. Show up again. It won’t take long for the room to shift around you.