The professionals still treating ethics as a preference are carrying a risk they have not yet priced.
The argument for ethical influence is not new. It has been made consistently across this body of work since Influential Leadership: A leaders Guide to Getting Things Done (Gautrey, Kogan Page, 2014) set out the case in detail. Transparency builds durable commitment, manipulation produces compliance that unravels, and the professional who treats ethics as an inconvenience is building on ground that will not hold.
That argument was correct then. What has changed is not the argument. It is the environment in which the argument operates.
What has actually changed
Three structural shifts have made unethical influence significantly more dangerous than it was a decade ago.
The first is transparency. Organisations are more visible than they have ever been. Decisions that once remained inside meeting rooms now surface through channels that did not exist when most current senior professionals learned their trade. The assumption that what happens internally stays internal is no longer a working assumption. It is a risk position.
The second is verification. The people being influenced now have access to information that allows them to check what they are being told. AI tools, public data, professional networks, and the accumulated institutional memory of platforms like LinkedIn have made it significantly easier to identify inconsistencies between what someone says and what is actually the case. The information asymmetries that once made selective disclosure a viable tactic are narrowing rapidly.
The third is compounding reputation. Professional reputations are more visible, more searchable, and more permanent than at any previous point. A single influence attempt that is discovered to have been conducted dishonestly does not stay contained to the situation in which it occurred. It travels. It is indexed. It is retrievable years later by people who were not present when it happened.
These three shifts do not make manipulation impossible. They make it significantly more expensive and significantly less controllable than it used to be.
The honest concession
Unethical influence works. It has worked in organisations for as long as organisations have existed, and those who deploy it frequently achieve their immediate objectives. This needs to be stated clearly because the alternative, pretending that manipulation simply does not produce results, is not a credible position and undermines the argument that follows.
The problem is not that it fails in the short term. The problem is what it costs over time, and what the current environment has done to those costs.
Discovery is easier. Reputations are more visible. And when manipulation surfaces, the damage is rarely contained to the situation in which it occurred. Relationships fracture in ways that affect every subsequent influence attempt. Credibility, once lost in this way, does not recover quickly. The influence that took years to build can be undone in a single conversation, and that conversation now has a significantly higher probability of happening than it did ten years ago.
What ethical strategic influence actually means
Ethical strategic influence is not influence conducted with good intentions. Intentions are invisible and unverifiable. Ethical strategic influence is influence conducted in ways that hold up to scrutiny, that serve the genuine interests of the organisation and the people within it, and that the professional deploying it would be comfortable defending in full daylight.
That standard is higher than most current practice meets. It requires transparency about interests and objectives, genuine attention to the concerns of those being influenced, and consistency between what is said and what is done. The Five Rules of Ethical Influence sets out what that standard looks like in practice. It also requires the discipline to pursue willing agreement rather than managed compliance, even when managed compliance would be faster.
None of this is easy under the conditions most senior professionals are operating in. The pressure to move quickly, to secure agreement before resistance organises, and to manage what people know until the moment of decision is real and constant.
The chapter on ethics in Influential Leadership, described this pressure in detail and named it honestly: the temptation to take shortcuts is greatest precisely when the stakes are highest.
What that chapter could not fully anticipate was how much the cost of those shortcuts would rise in the decade that followed.
The structural argument
Ethical strategic influence is not the slower or more difficult path to the same destination. Over the time horizon that matters in complex organisations, it is the more efficient path.
Trust accumulated through consistent transparency makes each subsequent influence attempt less costly. Genuine alignment, built through real attention to others’ interests, holds without requiring continuous maintenance. A reputation for conducting influence with integrity becomes a form of influence in itself, reducing resistance before it forms and opening doors that would otherwise require significant effort to move. Strategic Influence: A Structured and Ethical Way to Make a Bigger Impact sets out what that structure looks like.
This compounds. The professional who has built that reputation over years operates in a fundamentally different environment from the one who has not. The work gets easier, not harder. The access improves. The resistance is lower.
That is not idealism. It is an accurate description of how influence accumulates or erodes in complex human systems over time, and it is the description that the current environment has made more consequential than ever.
Colin Gautrey, June 2026
Colin Gautrey has been developing and applying ethical influence, strategic influence, and organisational politics since 2003.