Influence Without AuthorityNo authority, no budget, a peer with a full plate: how do you get the work done anyway?
Twenty-four items — eight horizontal-leadership situations, one multi-select and 15 behavioural statements — measure whether you read a stakeholder system, choose an influence move the evidence supports, negotiate without burning trust and land with each audience. Four banded competencies and a growth plan come back.
The textbook influence move is often the wrong one
The eight situations are the daily reality of matrixed work. You need real effort from a peer in another team who owes you nothing and has a full plate, with nothing formal to offer. You are negotiating support knowing your alternative is strong and theirs is weak, and you will work with them again. A very senior person could block you in principle but has shown no interest and delegated everything to a junior manager. The multi-select asks which tactics the evidence actually rates as effective. The options include going through their manager, framing it as a quick favour and explaining why it matters to the organisation.
Options are weighted against public research on influence without authority and currencies of exchange, on the meta-analytic effectiveness of influence tactics, on stakeholder salience, on brokerage across network gaps, on interest-based negotiation and on audience-tailored communication. Each weight carries a written rationale. The bank is original AssessAll work; no stakeholder-management consultancy's grid or vocabulary is named. The 15 behavioural statements ask what you actually do when you need something from someone you do not control, and reverse-keyed items catch the respondent who agrees with every collaborative sentiment.
The report bands Stakeholder Influence, Negotiation & Value, Systems Thinking and Stakeholder Communication beneath a 0–100 score, each with a coaching interpretation for the cross-functional ask you are about to make. A narrative generated from your own responses says which influence habit works for you and which quietly spends trust. The growth plan is built from the lowest competencies and proposes specific moves — a currency map for your three hardest stakeholders, a reciprocity-first opening, a rule for using leverage you will not need again — and the item review explains every weight.
What you walk away with
Stakeholder Influence, Negotiation & Value, Systems Thinking and Stakeholder Communication each land in Emerging, Developing, Strong or Exceptional beneath your 0–100 score. The bars show whether you read the system well but ask badly, or ask well of the wrong people.
Each band carries a coaching paragraph about what it does in practice: how Developing on Stakeholder Influence approaches a peer who owes nothing, what Strong on Negotiation & Value does with a strong alternative when the relationship has to survive the deal.
Built from your lowest competencies, the plan proposes concrete practices — mapping what your hardest stakeholders currently need, offering before asking, deciding how much attention a disengaged senior blocker actually warrants — applied to the people you are dealing with this quarter.
The item review shows your choice, the evidence-favoured option and the rationale for each weight across all 24 items. Where you went through their manager, the explanation shows what the tactic research says about upward appeals, and what they cost the relationship.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
Band edges at 40, 60 and 80. Each band carries its own coaching interpretation for that competency.
Every competency this test declares, scored from the items tagged to it — so the shape is yours, not a template.
Built for
- Project, programme and product managers who deliver through teams they do not manage
- Functional specialists — finance, HR, legal, security — who need the business to act on their advice
- Managers in matrixed or dotted-line structures where authority is shared or unclear
- Hiring managers screening for roles where results depend on peers rather than reports
Most of what you need is owned by someone you cannot instruct. Measure how you get it.
Twenty-four items in about 28 minutes, then four banded competencies, a narrative and a growth plan the moment you finish.
₹999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
The defining skill of matrixed work: getting things done through people you do not control. It measures how you read a stakeholder system, choose an influence move the evidence supports, create value in negotiation without burning trust and communicate so each audience acts. Four competencies — Stakeholder Influence, Negotiation & Value, Systems Thinking and Stakeholder Communication — are measured through eight situations, a multi-select and 15 behavioural statements. It suits project and product managers, functional specialists and anyone in a dotted-line role.
Each option is weighted against published research on influence-tactic effectiveness, stakeholder salience, exchange and negotiation, with a written rationale per weight. Experience helps only if it taught the right lessons; the situations are built so that common moves — escalating through managers, appealing to the organisation's goals, using every ounce of leverage — are often the weaker options. Reverse-keyed behavioural statements make a uniformly collaborative self-report read as inconsistent.
About 22 to 30 minutes within a 28-minute window. You receive a 0–100 score with its band, four banded competencies with coaching interpretations, a radar, a narrative generated from your own responses, a strengths-and-development summary, a growth plan built from your lowest competencies and a full item review with the evidence behind each weight. The report is complete on delivery and there is nothing further to unlock.
Hiring managers use the bands to structure interviews for roles that deliver through peers. PMOs and functional leaders use it to baseline a team before a stakeholder-management programme. This battery is the broader, mid-level measure of horizontal influence; the Stakeholder Management & Influence assessment goes deeper with more dilemmas, a pass mark and a stretch band pitched at executive and board-level influence. Individually, retake after six months to compare.
Yes. The situations are structure-neutral — a busy peer, a disengaged senior, a negotiation you will have again — and the research base is international. Managers and specialists in India, the UK, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and North America sit identical items and receive the same report. The assessment is priced in INR and USD, and the price on this page is the full price.
Each battery takes one management capability — delegation, coaching, conflict, influence, decision-making, change — and measures it through situational judgement scored against published evidence, with a competency profile, coaching interpretations and a prioritised growth plan. For the level-by-level readiness verdicts, see Leadership & Management Premium.
See the leadership catalogue →Methodology: Original AssessAll scenarios and items operationalising public, well-established influence and negotiation constructs: influence without authority and currencies of exchange / reciprocity (Cohen & Bradford); Yukl's influence tactics and the Higgins/Judge/Ferris meta-analysis of tactic effectiveness; Mitchell, Agle & Wood stakeholder salience; Burt structural-holes brokerage; interest-based / principled negotiation and BATNA (Fisher & Ury); and audience-tailored stakeholder communication. Situational-judgement scoring is literature-keyed with a documented per-option rationale citing the evidence for each weight. Generic public constructs only; no trademarked instrument names or vendor-coined vocabulary, and no items copied or paraphrased from any branded assessment. Flagship items are tagged for optional human SME validation.