Leading Without Authority

Managing a Group When You’re Not the Boss

April 1, 2025

Today’s working world is filled with cross functional teams, matrix organization and self-managed working teams. These constructs can all lead to a real trouble spot for both leaders and individual contributors: leading without “official” authority.

It occurs when you’re put in charge of facilitating the team or managing the cross-functional effort, but you’re not really the “manager”. Managing one of these teams can be a great career opportunity, but it can also come with pitfalls.

You may have been assigned to lead the initiative, but without the formal authority or manager title, how should you approach getting everyone on the same page, having them all work together and keeping everyone’s contributions on track to meet the project objectives?

Leading without authority is the foundational skill set you need to succeed in these situations. These skills include influencing and guiding others, holding peers accountable and inspiring the team. Without a manager’s title, you will be relying on your ability to demonstrate initiative, create a collaborative environment, and exert your player-coach leadership.

Common Scenarios

These situations arise often in the workplace. They are easy to recognize because there’s typically a group of contributors from different departments who are coming together to provide their specific expertise to a project.

Cross-Functional Projects: Coordinating efforts across departments, such as marketing, sales, and operations for a specific deadline or deliverable.
Task Forces or Committees: Leading a group focused on analyzing and making recommendations to address a specific challenge or opportunity for your company.
Temporary Projects: Filling in for a colleague or stepping into a leadership role temporarily during an assignment.
Initiatives Based on Expertise: Providing technical knowledge or unique experience to guide a team.

In each of these situations, the leader will need to be skilled in influence, collaboration, and communication rather than relying on formal authority.

One example of such a situation came from Emily, a former mentee. Emily was a new hire in her company’s marketing department, and she was assigned to coordinate a cross-functional team for an important Governance Committee review. The team was required to present their request for an increase in marketing budget for a new campaign. Emily’s job was to consolidate inputs from finance, operations, and product development into a polished presentation, and she had to assemble all the materials in time for the team’s prep meeting 2 days prior to the Governance Review.

Emily ran into several challenges: a few of team members were slow or non-responsive to submitting their inputs for the presentation, some colleagues did not let her know they would be out of the office for the prep meeting, and some of the team meetings lacked engagement. As the deadline approached, Emily felt the weight of responsibility for the big review meeting. She was growing frustrated because the rest of the team did not seem to care as much as she did, and she had no formal authority over her peers.

What could Emily do to ensure that the team was ready for the Governance meeting, and that they successfully secured the funding for the new campaign?

The Set-up: Understand Team Members’ Perspectives

One of the first steps to leading a working group is getting to know each of your team members. Each member brings his or her own goals, motivations, and perspectives. Investing the time upfront will help you build rapport and trust with your team members. Here are some tips to make it easier for you to get to know your group members:

Questioning: When you meet 1:1, ask them open-ended questions to find out about priorities and perspectives. What are their goals for this project? What concerns or issues do they have? What do they think is going well and what could be improved?
Listening: Be active in showing interest in their input. Ensure your understanding by repeating back key points and taking their feedback to heart.
Identifying: Look for common themes and shared values in their input. Common threads across inputs and perspectives can form a strong foundation for the team.

Understanding your team members’ priorities and feedback and finding a common thread will help you find ways to integrate the work of individuals into a unified team effort.

The Project: Align Around Common Goals

Your next step is to ensure that the team is working toward a shared objective. You’ve done your due diligence in getting to know the team members, and you’ve found unifying themes that will bring everyone together. You also have the goal of the assigned project to rally around. When managing a group without formal authority, you’ll have to continually reinforce these goals to maintain this alignment. Here are a few ways to keep these goals top-of-mind:

Clarify the Objective – continually: The team mission may have been communicated to each member at the start, but reinforcing the objective routinely helps keep it in the forefront. Make sure to use both specific measures (‘we want to increase our investment by $x’) and other relatable terms (‘we want to make it easier for our customers to find our product’).
Involve the Team: If you’re breaking down the overall team objective into smaller steps, work with the team to help define them. People are more likely to take ownership of goals that they have a hand in setting.
Maintain Flexibility: If the team encounters a new opportunity, or an unforeseen obstacle, use it as an opportunity to have the team work together to adjust interim and overall objectives. You can facilitate a discussion to refine objectives together.

Having a clear set of goals and documenting how you’re progressing will help unify the team and keep everyone focused on the same outcome. Discussing progress towards objectives during team meetings and ensuring every team member has access to how the team is performing are good ways to maintain team alignment.

The Leader: Understanding Influence

Once you have established a strong foundation with the team members and everyone is focused on the teams’ objectives, your work to guide the team towards its goals begins. You will need to rely on your emotional intelligence, in addition to your technical skills.

It’s essential to convey that your role is about advancing the team’s success, and that you are there to ensure that the team achieves its objective. Your influence over the team will grow based on how you communicate and how you act. One way to do this is through a consistent stream of communications and integrating the teams’ goals into your communications. Another useful approach is to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions and achievements of individual team members. When someone meets a milestone or comes up with an innovative solution, make sure the rest of the team is aware. Connect the accomplishment to the overall team goals. In this way, you’ll be establishing yourself as a motivational leader by sharing success across the team.

You can use other leadership techniques to build your role within the team. Consistently demonstrating a proactive and solution-oriented mindset will inspire others to do the same. Don’t complain about things that are not going your way – use them as opportunities to learn and generate solutions.

You should also carefully use your own expertise to help bring out the best in your team members. Sometimes you’ll encounter a problem that you believe you may be able to resolve on your own. While you may be able to offer solutions, you may also benefit from inviting your team members to offer their own expertise. You can foster collaboration by being open-minded and asking how your colleagues would approach the problem.

Using your influence, rather than formal authority, will help the team see your role as a skillful integrator for the team with an eye toward helping the team achieve success.

The Obstacles: Overcoming Challenges

Managing complex group dynamics, dealing with the pressure of delivering on important projects and honing your own leadership skills will certainly come with obstacles. It’s likely that you’ll encounter some speed bumps along the way – resistance, lack of engagement, team changes or conflicting priorities.

Resistance: If someone questions your leadership or direction, it’s important to view this resistance from their perspective. Consider why the team member is resisting. Is it because they have a different idea for a solution? Do they not agree with the team’s goals? Are they frustrated by something else? If you understand the root cause of the resistance, you will be better able to address it and refocus on the team’s goals.
Lack of Engagement: If your team members are quiet during meetings, are missing deadlines, are not showing up, or are not responding to your requests and follow-up messages, you could be experiencing low engagement. This is a good time to reiterate any successes the team has already achieved. You could also find one or two team members who remain engaged and recruit them to help you reconnect and re-engage team members.
Conflicting Priorities: Your team members likely have other projects and deliverables outside of your project. It’s a good idea to acknowledge these other demands and work with each team member to understand their priorities. Adding clarity around how your team’s project fits into the overall company goals or how it impacts customers will provide context to help them manage their other work.
Team Disagreements: If conflicts arise within the team, use your influence to help resolve them diplomatically. Give both parties the opportunity to articulate their position on the issue, and work through it by focusing on the overall goals of the team.

Call to Action: Leading with Influence

Good leadership comes from inspiring others to work together toward a common goal. Remaining grounded in overall company or customer objectives, and consistently keeping the team focused on a higher-order mission will help you lead and influence effectively, even when you don’t have a formal title or reporting structure.

Embrace the challenge and follow these 5 steps to build trust and enhance collaboration with your working group. They will come to understand and value your role as a leader and a guide to the team’s success:

Know your team and understand their motivations, challenges, and goals.
Define your objectives, including interim steps and important milestones.
Foster collaboration by encouraging open dialogue and new ideas, and by celebrating the teams’ wins.
Build credibility and trust through consistent, transparent communications, timely and knowledgeable responses and reinforcing the team’s goals.
Resolve issues as they arise by bringing people together and staying focused on the team’s outcomes.

Applying these steps when you’re asked to lead a team without a title or formal authority will set you on the right path to achieve the team’s objectives and help you build a reputation as an inspiring and collaborative leader.