Part of our guide to influencing without authority.
How influence won the US its independence
Two hundred and fifty years ago, thirteen colonies declared independence from Britain. What is less often noted is that the declaration alone did not win them their independence, which took nine more years of hard fighting, and a diplomat in Paris.
Franklin in Paris
Benjamin Franklin was sent to France in December 1776 to secure French support for the American cause, and at seventy years old he would not return home for another nine years. The prevailing British view was that Franklin was a scientist and pamphleteer out of his depth in a European court, and the prevailing French view, at least at first, was that America was a lost cause not worth backing.
What Franklin did next is arguably the most consequential example of influence without power in modern history. He did not lecture the French court on the moral case for independence, and he did not present slides on the strategic value of an American alliance. He put on a fur cap, played up his image as a homespun frontier philosopher, and started going to parties.
For nine years he hosted salons, wrote charming letters, befriended French aristocrats, and listened more than he spoke. He waited for the right moment to make an ask, and when it came, in the aftermath of the American victory at Saratoga, he was ready.
France signed a treaty of alliance in 1778, and French money, French troops and French naval power then decisively tipped the war.
Influence without power starts long before the ask
The point worth making is this. The revolution succeeded on the battlefield, but it did not begin there. It began at the dinner tables of Paris, over the slow work of one old man building relationships he might one day need.
There is a version of leadership development that treats influence as something you deploy in a meeting, a technique to be used at a specific moment for a specific outcome. Franklin’s example points at something else, because his most valuable work happened in the years when he wasn’t asking for anything at all.
If you are trying to influence a stakeholder, a peer, or a colleague you’ll need on your side one day, the useful question isn’t what you should say when the meeting starts. It’s what you’re doing in the weeks and months before the meeting begins.
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