Influence Without Authority: When Consensus Isn’t The Goal

Part 3 of a series on contextual intelligence in leadership.

I didn’t apply for the ministry role. It came through a deputation while I was still at the PSU, which meant I occupied an unusual position from the start: an outsider embedded inside the system. Close enough to be handed substantive work. Distant enough to not be entangled in the ministry’s internal hierarchies.

Nobody prepared me for this role. There was no onboarding. The department was small. When I arrived, I was expected to manage two dashboards. That was it.

But slowly, the Special Secretary started handing me small pieces of work, liked what came back, and the scope expanded. Dashboard management gave way to initial drafting and conceptual framing of policies. I was reading previous reports, file notes, earlier drafts, reconstructing the institutional logic of decisions that had been made years before I arrived.

Learning the grammar of policy work from the inside, in real time, with no guidebook. The work was fulfilling. The position was lonely. I was insider enough to carry weight, outsider enough to carry none of the community that comes with truly belonging somewhere. But the intellectual challenge was unlike anything I had encountered before, and it taught me a skill that I’ve consciously carried into every role since.

The skill my previous role didn’t prepare me for

In Part 2 of this series, I wrote about the painful lesson of moving from an offshore consulting firm to a PSU: that social capital, not technical output, was the operating currency.

By the time I arrived at the ministry, I had absorbed that lesson. I understood that relationships mattered, that process mattered, that how something was introduced mattered as much as what was introduced.

But the ministry wasn’t a PSU. The stakeholder dynamics were of a different order entirely.

At the PSU, my counterparts were peers. We operated at roughly the same level, within the same organizational boundary. Building social capital there meant investing in lateral relationships: trust, reciprocity, shared understanding among colleagues. Even when I engaged with seniors, it was within the scope of role and relationship boundaries and organization mandates.

At the ministry, the stakeholders were senior bureaucrats, secretaries of other ministries, leaders of public sector enterprises, and think tanks contributing to national policy. We had no reporting relationship. My role sat outside the Ministry’s organizational hierarchy, which meant I had zero formal authority. I had innumerable external stakeholders – many of whom considered it beneath them to deliberate with someone at my level. I was junior, on deputation, and drafting documents that would affect organizations led by people who had been in government service longer than I had been alive.

The PSU lesson, “take everyone along,” was still relevant. But it was dangerously incomplete for this context. At the PSU, consensus was the goal. Get everyone on the same page. Build shared ownership. Move together. At the ministry, consensus would have been a disaster. Because the stakeholders didn’t just have different opinions. They had structurally different interests. And some of those interests, if given proportional weight, would have produced policies that were fundamentally unfair.

The MoU problem

One of the substantive pieces of work I was given was drafting MoU guidelines. MoUs, in the context of public enterprises, are tripartite agreements between the administrative ministry, the PSU, and the Department of Public Enterprises. They define the parameters against which a PSU’s performance will be evaluated.

Traditionally, MoU guidelines gravitated towards financial and operational parameters. Revenue targets. Production improvement percentages. Cost reduction benchmarks. This made intuitive sense for the large Maharatna PSUs, companies in oil, gas, coal, power, and steel that operated at massive scale, generated substantial revenue, and paid hefty dividends to the government. These were the organizations that dominated attention, consumed the most policy bandwidth, and set the implicit standard for what a “successful” PSU looked like.

But the PSU ecosystem is far more diverse than the Maharatnas. There are public enterprises that exist not to generate profit but to build sectoral maturity. To provide social upliftment. To do things the market will not do because the returns are not financial.

For example, ALIMCO manufactures artificial limbs at affordable costs for people with disabilities. The Central Cottage Industries Corporation of India protects and supports artisans and traditional handicrafts. These organizations serve populations that have almost no market power and almost no political voice. Holding them to the same financial and commercial parameters as a power company or an oil refinery would have been, to use a word that captures the absurdity precisely, harakiri. You would be evaluating an organization that makes affordable prosthetics on its revenue growth, and then calling it underperforming.

The question I was grappling with in the drafting process was: how do you design guidelines that are rigorous enough to hold large, commercially oriented PSUs accountable, flexible enough to accommodate PSUs with social mandates, and fair enough that the weaker voices in the system aren’t crushed by parameters designed for the strongest? The challenge wasn’t technical. It was definitional: what does performance even mean across fundamentally different mandates?

We decided to exempt certain PSUs from the standard MoU framework and introduced more holistic parameters: alignment with ministerial mandates, contribution to sectoral development, social impact indicators. This was not a minor procedural adjustment. It was a conceptual reframing of what performance means across fundamentally different types of public enterprises.

The strategic sectors problem

A parallel challenge surfaced in defining strategic and non-strategic sectors under the New PSE Policy. The government’s mandate was “minimum government, maximum governance,” which in practice meant identifying sectors where the government had no business operating and disinvesting accordingly.

The problem is that “no business operating” is not a neutral determination. It depends entirely on what you think the purpose of public enterprise is. If the purpose is commercial efficiency, then any sector where private enterprise can do the job better is non-strategic. If the purpose includes building critical infrastructure, ensuring national security, enabling social upliftment, and developing sectoral maturity in areas the market won’t touch, then the definition of “strategic” expands significantly.

And there was a complicating factor. Mature Maharatna PSUs are, in financial terms, golden-egg-laying hens. They pay enormous dividends to the government. A framework that preserved these enterprises while disinvesting from smaller, less commercially viable ones would have served the government’s short-term financial interest. But it would have been intellectually dishonest, because the criteria for “strategic” would have been reverse-engineered from the conclusion rather than derived from principles.

We prepared the guidelines based on what mattered for sectoral maturity, social upliftment, critical infrastructure, and national security, rather than on what benefited the government most financially. The framework had to stand on its own logic, independent of which specific PSUs it would protect or expose.

What the ministry was actually teaching me

Both of these policy challenges had the same underlying structure, and it took me a while to see it clearly.

In any system with multiple stakeholders, attention and influence are not distributed equally. Some stakeholders are powerful: they command resources, have access to decision-makers, and can make their interests heard. Some stakeholders are legitimate: their claims are valid, their needs are real, but they lack the organizational muscle to advocate for themselves. And some stakeholders are urgent: their situations demand immediate attention, but their long-term strategic importance may be unclear.

This maps directly to what Mitchell, Agle, and Wood describe in stakeholder salience theory: the idea that stakeholders capture organizational attention based on three attributes – power, legitimacy, and urgency. In most systems, power dominates. The stakeholders who are powerful, legitimate, and urgent get the most attention. The stakeholders who are legitimate but lack power get overlooked. Not because anyone consciously decides to ignore them, but because the system’s attention naturally flows toward volume and influence.

The Maharatna PSUs had all three attributes. They were powerful (massive revenue, political significance), legitimate (genuine operational complexity requiring robust evaluation), and urgent (high public visibility, large dividend expectations). ALIMCO had legitimacy and urgency (people with disabilities need affordable prosthetics now, not eventually) but almost no power.

The drafter’s job, my job, was to override the natural salience hierarchy. To ensure that legitimacy was not drowned out by power. To build a framework where the weakest voices were structurally protected, not because someone happened to advocate for them this time, but because the design of the framework itself made it impossible to ignore them.

Soft enough to not offend. Steady enough to hold ground.

The intellectual challenge was hard. But the interpersonal challenge was harder. The feedback on my drafts didn’t come directly from the senior bureaucrats who disagreed with them. It came filtered through the Special Secretary, who would relay the concerns from conversations with secretaries of other ministries and then ask me to consider changes.

Sometimes “consider changes” meant genuine deliberation. Sometimes it meant the pressure was real and the expectation was that I would fold.

The Special Secretary, to his credit, was willing to engage in substantive discussion with someone as junior as me. Not every senior official would have. But the heat of those conversations was real. When a Secretary from another ministry pushes back on a parameter that affects their PSU’s evaluation, that pushback carries institutional weight. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a signal about what will and won’t be politically sustainable.

The skill I had to develop, often in real time during these deliberations, was a specific kind of calibration. I needed to be soft enough to not offend people who outranked me by decades. And steady enough to hold ground on principles that I believed the policy required. Concede on framing. Concede on language. Concede on emphasis. But do not concede on the structural logic that protects the weakest stakeholders in the system.

This is different from consensus-building. Consensus-building, the skill the PSU had taught me, aims for alignment. Everyone moves to a shared position. At the ministry, full alignment was neither possible nor desirable. The stakeholders had structurally opposed interests. The oil ministry wanted parameters that favoured commercial PSUs. Social sector ministries wanted parameters that recognized non-commercial contributions. The finance ministry wanted parameters that maximized dividend income. A framework that genuinely aligned all of these would have been internally contradictory.

The goal was not consensus. The goal was fairness perceived as legitimate by parties who didn’t get everything they wanted.

That’s a fundamentally different objective, and it requires a fundamentally different skill set.

The honest broker problem

Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory, which is the foundational work in this space, argues that organizations create value by balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders rather than optimizing for shareholders alone. The ministry work was a more demanding version of this same principle. I wasn’t balancing stakeholders to create value for a single firm. I was balancing stakeholders to create fair policy for an entire ecosystem.

But Freeman’s framework, in its original formulation, is relatively silent on the question of how you hold this balance when the stakeholders are radically unequal in power. It assumes a degree of organizational authority: the firm can choose to balance. At the ministry, I had no formal authority. I was a junior deputation officer drafting documents that senior bureaucrats would approve or reject. My only leverage was the logic of the draft itself.

This is where the honest broker concept becomes useful. Roger Pielke, writing about science policy, describes the honest broker as someone who expands the range of options available to decision-makers without advocating for a specific outcome. The honest broker’s credibility depends on being perceived as not captured by any faction. The moment you appear to favour one stakeholder’s interest, your ability to hold the system together collapses.

At the ministry, my outsider status, the thing that made the position lonely, was also what made it functional. I wasn’t a career bureaucrat with allegiances to navigate. I had no institutional incentive to tilt the framework in any direction. That independence was the source of whatever credibility I had in the room. And it had to be actively maintained. One draft that appeared to be biased would have ended my usefulness.

What this means beyond policy

The reason I’m writing about ministry work in a series about leadership is that this dynamic, the need to hold ground among competing interests while maintaining perceived neutrality, shows up everywhere in senior leadership roles. It just doesn’t look like policy drafting.

When you’re designing a compensation philosophy, you’re balancing the interests of business leaders who want flexibility, finance teams who want predictability, employees who want equity, and board members who want market competitiveness. A framework that fully satisfies any one of these parties will be unfair to the others.

When you’re building a talent review process, you’re mediating between managers who want to protect their high performers, business unit heads who want to hoard talent, and the organization’s need for mobility and development.

A process that defers to the loudest voice will systematically disadvantage the people and functions with the least power.

When you’re redesigning an organization’s structure, you’re navigating the interests of leaders who stand to gain scope, leaders who stand to lose it, teams that will be disrupted, and the strategic logic that requires the disruption.

In each case, the leader’s credibility depends on the same thing my credibility at the ministry depended on: being perceived as not captured. The moment the organization believes you are optimizing for one stakeholder’s interest, whether it’s the CEO’s preference, the finance team’s constraints, or your own team’s convenience, your ability to hold the system together degrades.

The ministry didn’t teach me leadership. But it taught me the most advanced version of a skill that every senior leader needs and very few have formal training in: how to design systems that are fair to the weakest stakeholder when every incentive in the room is pulling toward the strongest. If you cannot design for the least powerful stakeholder, you are not designing a system. You are reinforcing an existing power structure.

Think about the last framework you designed or the last policy you shaped in your organization. Whose interests were naturally amplified by the loudest voices in the room? And whose interests were structurally at risk of being overlooked, not because anyone intended to overlook them, but because the system’s attention flows toward power? The answer to that second question is where the real design challenge lives.