So the honest answer to “how do I get people to move when I can’t tell them to?” is that you were always going to have to do this work. Not having a title just removes the thing that was hiding it.
Three things that get confused
Keeping these apart makes the rest straightforward.
Authority is people doing what you say because of your position. Influence is people being willing to move because they can see value, meaning or a reason. Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about.
Authority can generate borrowed trust, which is real and useful: a title or a recognised qualification makes people more likely to listen and to assume competence before they have any evidence. But borrowed trust is an advance, not a balance. What people experience of you decides whether you stay trusted once you’re in the room. Without a title you simply start from a lower advance, and everything after that point works the same way for everybody.
What replaces the instruction
Four things do most of the work, and none of them requires a position.
The first is clarity about what you’re asking and why. When people can’t see your reasoning they infer one, and the version they invent is rarely as generous as yours. Stating the reason in advance is how you make your motive visible before your behaviour is judged.
The second is delivery on the small things. Someone with no authority is judged almost entirely on their record, and the record is built from unglamorous items: the update that arrived when you said it would, the risk flagged a week early rather than at the deadline, the thing you said you couldn’t do instead of quietly failing to do it.
The third is arguing from their side. The usual question is why they should do this, which argues from your position. The better one is why they would want to, which requires actually knowing what this person is trying to achieve or avoid. It isn’t a technique for getting a yes. It’s what makes the ask legible to somebody who owes you nothing.
The fourth is being the same person twice. Without positional power, consistency is most of what you have. People extend confidence to those they can predict, and predictability is built by repetition rather than by anything you say about yourself.
A test worth using even when you do have authority
There’s a discipline that comes out of the prison service, where positional authority exists in its strongest form and turns out to be almost useless for the things that matter. The question is simple: if I weren’t in charge here, how would I get this to happen?
Answer it honestly and you end up with the kind of influence that doesn’t depend on the role, which is the only kind that survives a restructure, a move, or the day somebody decides the consequence isn’t worth caring about. Forced compliance lasts as long as the force does. Willing agreement holds.
The practical takeaway
Stop treating the absence of authority as the obstacle. The people who earn trust without it aren’t compensating for something missing; they’re doing openly what everyone else should be doing anyway. Work out what this particular person needs to rely on, then give them repeated experience of it. A title only ever bought you time to get started.
The authority / influence / trust distinction and the “lead as if you had no authority” discipline are Trust Leader’s own, drawn from Scott Hunter’s time in the prison service. The wider point that positional power produces compliance rather than confidence is well established in the leadership literature.