A young female counselor gestures as she sits in a circle with clients

As a DEI Change Facilitator or DEI Leader, you have to use both formal and informal influence to be effective

Your power is in your relationships

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Definition
Informal Leadership
Informal leadership is basically any type of leadership that is not based upon formal authority.
Formal leaders influence people in an organization through formal authority conferred by the organization through its rules and procedure, Depending on their relationships, formal leaders can also exert informal power. Informal leaders do not have formal organizational authority to lead. Nevertheless, informal leaders do influence members of an organization and can be even more effective than formal leaders.

“Internal networkers, or community builders, are the “seed carriers” of the new culture, who can move freely about the organization to find those who are predisposed to bringing about change, help out in organizational experiments, and aid in the diffusion of new learnings.”

Peter M. Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management

Recommended Reading

*Your library probably has these books.  However, if you click the link and purchase the book we get a very small percent that we put towards lowering the cost of training for non-profit organizations.

Informal leadership: Be the person at work that others look up to by BY Susan Lahey

Informal Leadership Status and Individual Performance: The Roles of Political Skill and Political Will. Brooke A. Shaughnessy1, Darren C. Treadway2, Jacob W. Breland3,
and Pamela L. Perrewé. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 2017, Vol. 24(1) 83– 94

A Grounded Theory Exploration of Informal Leadership Qualities as Perceived by Employees and Managers in Small Organizations. Elizabeth Stincelli, D.M. et al | International Journal of Business Management and Economic Research(IJBMER), Vol 5(1),2014, 1- 8

“The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents” Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro tracked 68 change initiatives in the UK’s National Health Service(a very large, complex and traditional organization) to find out what factors predicted success.  They did discover several predictors of success.  All of them emphasized the importance of social networks – networks of personal relationships.

Informal Authority in the Workplaceby O. Serrat, Knowledge Solutions, 2017

Ted Talk: How to Speak so that People Want to Listen
Books*

Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible, in Goldsmith and F. Hesselbein, Eds. The Leader of the Future 2: Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the New Era, Jossey-Bass, 1996


Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade By Robert Cialdini, PhD, Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (June 5, 2018)

For inspiration:

Radical Transformational Leadership: Strategic Action for Change Agents by Monica Sharma, North Atlantic Books (November 21, 2017)

Categories: DEI Change Facilitation & Leadership, Supplemental Resources
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