There is a pattern I have noticed repeatedly in my work with senior leaders.
Some of the most capable leaders I meet are not necessarily the most influential people in the room.
They are experienced. They know their business. They have built credibility through years of delivery. People rely on them because they know what they are doing.
And yet, when they move into larger, more complex roles, I sometimes see a gap.
Their capability is high. Their credibility is established. But the level of influence they are having does not quite match the value they bring.
That is what led me to think about The Influence Gap™.
I define it simply as the distance between the value a leader has and the value other people experience from them.
It is not a lack of capability. In fact, capability is often not the issue at all.
The interesting part is what happens between capability and impact.
When expertise stops being enough
Early in our careers, expertise is a powerful currency.
You know something others don’t. You solve problems. You become the person people go to. Your knowledge creates your reputation.
It makes sense, then, that when people become senior leaders, they continue to rely on expertise as their primary source of value.
But the leadership context has changed.
At senior levels, knowing more is not necessarily what creates the most value. What matters increasingly is what you can do with what you know.
I often see this in leaders who are exceptionally strong in their function. They understand the subject deeply, so they naturally bring more detail, more context and more analysis into the conversation.
The information may be completely right.
But the room may need something else.
It may need a point of view.
It may need someone to connect the detail to the larger business question.
It may need a decision.
This is where I often see the Influence Gap begin to show up.
A leader can know the subject better than anyone else in the room and still not be experienced as the person shaping the conversation.
I see it in the room
A lot of what I have come to understand about influence comes from observing leaders in real conversations.
A senior leader has a strong point of view but takes too long to get to it.
A functional expert gives an excellent update but does not connect it to the enterprise decision being discussed.
A leader has the answer but spends so much time establishing the context that the significance of the answer gets diluted.
Another leader is clear and confident with their own team but becomes noticeably more cautious in a senior forum.
These are not intelligence problems.
They are not necessarily confidence problems either.
Often, I see a translation issue.
The capability is there. But it is not travelling into the room in the way the leader expects it to.
This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between expertise, communication and influence.
A systematic review of 260 studies on leader communication found that what leaders communicate, and how they communicate through words, voice and non-verbal behaviour, can influence stakeholder perceptions, motivation, behaviour and performance.
What I find useful about this research is that it reinforces something I see in practice: communication is not separate from leadership.
It is one of the ways leadership becomes visible to other people.
The senior leadership shift
There is a transition that happens as leaders become more senior, but it is rarely made explicit.
You move from being valued primarily for what you do to being valued for what you enable.
Your role becomes less about owning every answer and more about helping the organisation arrive at better answers.
Less about knowing every detail and more about knowing which details matter.
Less about being the expert in the room and more about bringing a perspective that helps the room think differently.
This can be an uncomfortable transition, particularly for leaders whose careers have been built on being excellent at what they do.
The very qualities that created their success — expertise, thoroughness, reliability and attention to detail — can become less useful when applied in exactly the same way at the next level.
I don’t see this as a weakness.
I see it as a shift in what the organisation now needs from the leader.
When the title is no longer enough
The issue becomes even more visible in complex and global organisations.
A senior leader may have formal authority over their team but depend on peers, global stakeholders, clients or other functions to get something done.
The organisational chart tells you who reports to whom.
It tells you much less about who actually influences a decision.
This is particularly relevant in Global Capability Centres and multinational organisations, where leaders often have to operate across functions, countries and cultures.
Recent work in Harvard Business Review has also highlighted the increasing importance of influencing people who do not directly report to you, where formal authority is simply not enough.
I see this as a significant change in what senior leadership requires.
Your title can give you access.
It can give you decision rights.
It can give you positional authority.
But it cannot make people trust your judgement, understand your point of view or choose to move with you.
That has to be built.
Influence is about how your leadership lands
This is where executive presence becomes relevant.
I have never been particularly interested in executive presence as simply looking confident, sounding polished or having gravitas.
Those things may be part of it.
But they are not the whole picture.
What interests me more is what happens when a leader enters a room.
Does their presence create clarity?
Can they hold their ground when challenged?
Can they adapt their communication without losing their point of view?
Can they move between detail and the bigger picture?
Can they create enough trust for people to disagree with them?
These are more useful questions to me than whether someone “looks like a leader.”
And they become even more important when leadership crosses cultures.
What creates credibility in one environment may not have the same effect somewhere else. Directness, silence, challenge, disagreement and even the pace of communication can be interpreted differently.
This is why I see cultural agility as part of influence.
Not because leaders need to become different people in different rooms.
But because they need enough range to make their leadership effective in different contexts.
So where does the gap come from?
There isn’t one answer.
For one leader, it may be communication.
For another, it may be that they are still operating primarily from functional expertise when the role now requires enterprise thinking.
For another, it may be visibility.
For someone else, it may be the difficulty of staying centred when challenged by more senior stakeholders.
Sometimes it is a combination.
That is why I don’t believe in giving every leader the same executive presence prescription.
The starting point has to be understanding where the gap actually is.
What is the leader capable of?
How are they currently showing up?
How are they being experienced?
And what does the role now require from them that their previous role did not?
That is where the work becomes useful.
Closing The Influence Gap™
My work with leaders is not about making capable people more polished.
It is about helping them understand what may be getting lost between their capability and their impact.
Sometimes the shift is in how they communicate.
Sometimes it is in how they think about their role.
Sometimes it is about becoming more visible or more deliberate with their point of view.
Sometimes it is about developing greater behavioural range — knowing when to challenge, when to listen, when to hold a position and when to adapt.
This is the thinking behind my work on Anchored Leadership Presence.
For me, being anchored is not about becoming fixed.
It is about having enough clarity about who you are and the value you bring that you can adapt to the room without losing yourself in it
The question I increasingly find myself asking leaders is not whether they are capable.
Usually, they are.
It is whether that capability is translating into the influence and impact their role now requires.
The useful question, then, is not simply whether you have an Influence Gap.
It is where it is showing up — and what is creating it.