The Right Altitude Field Guide to Influence

You were right. You were prepared. The decision still went the other way. You did the analysis. You had the better answer. You said it in the meeting, and nobody picked it up. 20 minutes later, someone else said the same thing and the room loved it. Or you keep delivering results nobody can argue with, and the decisions about your career keep happening in rooms you're never invited to. The feedback is always some version of "be more strategic" or "you need more executive presence." None of it is wrong. None of it tells you what to do. What that feedback is describing is influence: the ability to move people when you can't simply tell them what to do. Influence is the difference between having a point and having it land. The test is simple: influence survives transparency. It's a set of behaviors you can name, observe, and build. This field guide maps influence across the 7 dimensions of the Influence Framework: Self-Management. How you show up on your worst day, not just your best. Executive Presence. The gap between what you intend to send and what people receive. Results. The proof layer. But results need a translation layer, in the language your boss's boss would use, or they never travel. Communication. Lead with the point, match the altitude of the room, and listen for the question under the question. Credibility. Your reputation operating at a distance, and the shift from credibility built on expertise to credibility built on judgment. Relationships. Influence moves through relationships, not org charts. Invest when you need the least, and learn the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. Visibility. The discipline of being known for the right things. The Friday update takes 5 minutes and changes the relationship within a month. Start with the 7-question diagnostic to find your lowest score, then go straight to that dimension. Each one gets the full treatment: the pattern that holds leaders back, how it connects to the other 6, coaching questions that surface your gap, 48-hour experiments to run this week, and a 90-day build to close it for good. Your highest and lowest scores together name your influence shape. Section Three shows you the seams where 2 dimensions meet and influence tears, the 5 traps that keep leaders stuck (Perfection, Authenticity, Merit, Relationship, and Timing), and a 30-minute quarterly Influence Audit to track what's moving. The stories are drawn from coaching conversations with leaders who were doing excellent work and couldn't figure out why nothing moved: the VP of supply chain whose results weren't enough, the engineering VP who delivered brilliant analysis to her slides instead of the room, the senior analyst whose recommendation arrived on slide 11. This is for the leader who is good at the work and tired of waiting for the organization to notice. It isn't a curriculum. It's a reference. Read the map. Find the gap. Close it. Part of The Right Altitude Field Guide series: short, practical guides by executive coach Don Eash, MCC, ACTC.