I saw a post on LinkedIn not long ago. The Chief of Staff title, the author wrote, does not give you authority. What you have, they said, is influence.

The comment thread was full of people nodding.

I sat with it for a moment. Then I thought: surely they can see the clue that is in the title - it says “Chief.”

The authority/influence distinction is one of those framings that sounds precise, and as though it is clarifying what the role is. What it is actually doing is separating and ranking the two things - placing authority above influence.

That ranking is wrong. And accepting it is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself smaller in a role that already has a structural tendency to compress you.

What people mean when they say authority.

When someone says a Chief of Staff has influence but not authority, they usually have a specific picture of authority in mind. The CEO walks into a room. They say: this happens today. It happens. That is authority.

Under this model, authority is positional, unilateral, and self-executing. You have it because of where you sit on the org chart, and it works because the hierarchy enforces it.

The problem with this model is that it describes almost no one. Politicians do not have it. Governments do not have it. A CEO in a well-run organisation with a strong leadership team does not have it either - not really, not for anything that matters. Outside a handful of presidential offices, almost no one in public life can simply decree something and watch it happen. Everything material, in any complex system, gets done through other people's willingness to move.

The picture of authority as a switch you flip is a fantasy. It is also, when you look carefully, a description of a badly run organisation - one where compliance replaces judgment, and hierarchy substitutes for trust.

What influence actually is.

Influence, properly understood, is not asking nicely. It is not lobbying, or persuading, or gently nudging someone toward a decision you have already made for them.

Influence is trust and respect doing their work in the room. It is the reason someone says yes to a request they would otherwise have pushed back on. It is the reason a piece of advice is taken seriously rather than nodded at and ignored. It is the reason a message lands rather than dissolving into the ether the moment you leave.

Someone who used to work with me told me this in a debrief, years after we had worked together. They said they would see me coming across the office with a mischievous smile, and they would know I was about to ask them to do something they did not want to do. And then, every time, they would find themselves saying yes, quite happily, without quite knowing how it had happened. They called it magic.

It was not magic, as much as that is a skill I wish I had. It was trust. They knew that if I was asking, I had thought about it. They knew I had picked them because they were the right person, not the most convenient one. They knew the request was necessary, even when I was unable to share with them exactly why. And they knew that saying yes would not blow up in their face later.

That is influence. It is also, without any qualification, authority - exercised through the mechanisms that make authority real in complex organisations. Not through hierarchy. Through trust.

Authority and influence are not mutually exclusive.

Here is what the framing of separating authority and influence gets wrong. It treats authority and influence as two different things. 

But authority is not a thing that exists independently of how it is exercised. A CEO who has positional authority and no trust, no credibility, and no ability to move people has nothing functional. A Chief of Staff who has genuine credibility, deep institutional knowledge, and the trust the CEO, the senior leadership team and the wider organisation has something very real - and what they have is authority, expressed through the mechanisms available to them in their role.

The distinction the framing is really pointing at is not authority versus influence. It is formal authority versus operational authority. Positional power versus earned power. And while those are real distinctions, the second version is not lesser, it is actually more powerful. In many environments, it is more durable, more transferable, and more practically effective than the first.

A leader who can only move things because of where they sit on a chart is fragile. Remove the title, and the authority disappears with it. A Chief of Staff who has built genuine operational authority - through trust, through consistency, through the willingness to carry difficult truth into difficult rooms - has something that travels with them.

The title has “Chief” for a reason.

The Chief of Staff is a leadership role. Not adjacent to leadership. Not in support of leadership. A leadership role, with the authority that comes with it - conferred by the leader, exercised through influence, and held together by trust.

The likeability point is worth making here because it is often confused with the influence question. There are people who do not like me and would not choose to spend their leisure time in my company. They still do what I ask and respect what I say. Likeability is performative. The kind of influence that constitutes real authority is structural - it is load-bearing. It has to be capable of carrying a difficult message, an unpopular decision, a piece of bad news that someone needs to hear and does not want to.

If you cannot walk into a room, close the door, and tell a leader they are wrong - without softening it, without phrasing it as a question, without laundering it through someone else - then whatever you have is not yet authority, whatever the title says. It is the willingness to carry difficult truth that makes the role real.

That willingness is built the same way trust is built. One consistency at a time. You say you will do something, it gets done. You hold something in confidence, it stays there. You give your judgment when asked, and you turn out, more often than not, to have been right.

So when someone tells you that what you have is influence, not authority - hear what they are actually saying. They have a model of authority that almost no one meets, including most of the people above you. They are describing a fantasy of power that does not exist in functional organisations.

What you have is authority. It is conferred. It is exercised through influence. It is held together by trust. And it is exactly as real as you are willing to use it.

The clue, after all, is in the title.