Genève: how can managers lead through influence and verify commitment without formal authority?
Genève brings together international organisations, private banks, commodity trading houses and luxury watch brands within a small territory, with highly multicultural teams in which French and English coexist. For SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Manager par influence” programme, this raises a precise question: how can managers distinguish operational commitment from polite assent when they have no formal authority?
What the literature establishes
Gary Yukl and J. Bruce Tracey (1992, Journal of Applied Psychology) examined relationships between influence tactics, target commitment and managerial effectiveness. Rational persuasion, consultation and inspirational appeals were associated with more favourable outcomes than pressure, legitimating tactics or coalition tactics. These findings suggest developing the reasons for action and involving others in shaping a proposal, rather than relying solely on the status of the person making it.
Being able to voice reservations: a complementary mechanism
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identified an association between psychological safety and team learning behaviour. Her study does not directly address influence tactics, but it illuminates an important condition for assessing them: being able to flag a difficulty without fearing interpersonal consequences. Agreement becomes easier to interpret when people can also discuss the conditions required to act on it.
The premature conclusion: consultation would be enough to convince
One might conclude that consulting others and encouraging objections are sufficient to secure commitment. Yet consultation guarantees neither compatible interests nor available resources, and it loses its meaning if the proposal can no longer change. In a hypothetical Genève private bank, a project manager might understand the compliance team's objections without being able to remove a regulatory constraint. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to assume in Genève
These studies are neither experiments specific to the canton nor causal demonstrations guaranteeing the effectiveness of an influence method. In Genève’s multilingual workplaces, agreement expressed in English or French is not, by itself, sufficient evidence of a shared understanding of responsibilities. This precaution is relevant, for example, to coordination across functions in a watchmaking company, across mandates in an international organisation or between operations and risk in commodity trading; these are hypothetical situations, not sector-specific findings from the studies.
A practical check in Genève
To put “Manager par influence” into practice in a Genève team, managers could keep a log of cross-functional requests for two weeks, excluding sensitive information. After each discussion, ask the recipient to restate the agreed action, deadline and any reservation in their working language, then record whether these elements are explicitly confirmed. When deadlines fall due, calculate the proportion of confirmed commitments actually fulfilled and separately examine obstacles flagged in advance. This check does not establish the training’s causal effect, but it helps distinguish verbal agreement from effective coordination. To go further: explore the Influence Management training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Influence Management in Geneva
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