Influence is not neutral. Every attempt to shape a decision, whether in a boardroom, a stakeholder meeting, or a quiet conversation in a corridor, carries an ethical dimension that most professionals prefer not to examine too closely.
That preference is understandable. Examining it requires honesty about what you are actually doing when you set out to influence someone, and that honesty is not always comfortable.
Over many years working in this field, five rules have emerged as the most reliable guides to ethical influence. They are not absolute laws. They are principles that, applied consistently, produce something the tactics-first approach rarely achieves: influence that endures.
If you prefer to watch rather than read, the video below covers the same ground. Influence: Are You Taking Too Many Shortcuts? (YouTube).
Rule One: Help people make informed decisions
The person you are seeking to influence is going through a decision-making process. Your job, if you are operating ethically, is to support that process rather than subvert it. Give them the information they would want if the positions were reversed. Do not take shortcuts. Do not steer them toward yes by controlling what they know.
This is not altruism. An informed yes is a durable yes. A yes extracted through selective information has a shelf life, and when it expires, it takes your credibility with it.
Rule Two: Communicate the drawbacks
There is no perfect solution. Every proposal carries a downside, whether it is disruption, cost, risk, or simply the discomfort of change. Name those downsides before someone else does.
The research is clear: people who hear the drawbacks from you are more likely to commit than those who discover them elsewhere. Transparency about the negatives signals confidence in the overall case. It also signals that you are not hiding anything, which is where trust is built or lost.
Rule Three: Put your agenda on the table
People always want to know what is in it for you. They may not ask directly, but the question is present in every influencing conversation. What do you gain from their agreement? Why are you pursuing this?
Leaving that question unanswered does not make it go away. It creates suspicion that fills the space your honesty would have occupied. State your interest openly. The conversation that follows will be more direct, more productive, and more likely to result in genuine agreement.
Rule Four: Aim for willing, not compliant
There is a meaningful difference between someone who does what you want because they have been manoeuvred into it and someone who does it because they genuinely want to, or at minimum are willing to. The first produces compliance. The second produces commitment.
Compliance unravels the moment your back is turned. Commitment does not require your presence to hold. If genuine willingness is not achievable, aim at minimum for informed willingness. Anything short of that is control, not influence, and it will not hold.
Rule Five: Never mislead people into harm
This is the rule that matters most when the pressure is highest. There will be situations where what you need from someone is not straightforwardly in their interest, or where the full picture would complicate your position considerably. The temptation to manage what they know is real.
The rule is simple: never mislead people into situations that will damage them. Not because you will be found out, though you probably will. Because the kind of influence worth building is the kind that leaves the people you work with better served, not worse.
These five rules do not make influence easy. They make it sustainable. The professional who operates within them builds something the tactics-first approach cannot replicate: a reputation for being trustworthy in precisely the situations where trust is hardest to maintain.
That reputation, once established, becomes a form of influence in itself.
To test how consistently you are applying these rules in practice, the 21 questions in this companion piece are worth sitting with. Not many people get far down that list before finding something worth examining.
The implications of this for influencing practice in the current climate are examined in Is This the End for Unethical Influence?
Colin Gautrey, October 2012. Updated April 2026