Influence is not about visibility

Interview by Beata Socha

WBJ: When we talk about influential women, the first people who usually come to mind are presidents, politicians, CEOs of major companies, and public figures. Does influence really begin with status and visibility?

Magda Petryniak: Not at all. And I think that is one of the most important assumptions we need to challenge.

We talk so much today about visibility: how to become more visible, how to build a personal brand, how to show up on social media, at conferences, in rankings. But visibility is not the same as influence.

When I think about an influential woman, I often come back to Marie Skłodowska-Curie. And I don’t mean only because she won two Nobel Prizes or because of her position in the scientific world.

There is that famous photograph from the first Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1911. You have some of the greatest scientists of the era sitting there: Einstein, Planck, Lorentz, Perrin. And among them, her. The only woman.

Getting into that room was incredibly difficult for her. Getting to the Sorbonne, to international scientific circles, to the Academy of Medicine. She was working in a world that was not particularly welcoming to women. And when I started reading her biographies, her letters, including her correspondence with Einstein, I saw something far more interesting than the image we tend to remember from school, this older woman in a black dress.

I saw a very strong, very determined woman who knew what she wanted. But above all, she had a mission.

She believed in science in the service of humanity. She wasn’t doing science simply for the sake of science. She believed research could improve people’s lives, that it could help medicine, help treat disease. She built the Radium Institutes in Paris and Warsaw. During the First World War, she traveled with mobile X-ray units, the so-called “little Curies.”

She had a goal that was bigger than her own career. And for me, that is where influence begins: I am doing something because I want it to serve a purpose.

So before we ask ourselves where we want to be visible, we should know why we want to be visible in the first place?

Exactly. Because popularity and influence are two completely different things.

I often ask leaders: What is supposed to change because you are here? Not what do you want people to know about you, but what should be different after they have interacted with you?

It could be in your organization, in the boardroom, in your industry, in academia, in business, in your community. What do you actually want to change?

For me, that is the “big idea,” the bigger purpose behind what you do. Marie Curie had one. Malala Yousafzai has one. Obviously, the scale of what we do may be completely different, but the mechanism is the same.

If I know why I am doing something, it is much easier to get through those moments when someone else doesn’t believe in me, or when I stop believing in myself.

In my work on influence, I tend to look at four areas. First, your arena: where does your voice actually need to matter? Then identity: who do I want to be in that space and what do I stand for? The third area is narrative, meaning how I talk about what I believe in and whether my language strengthens or weakens my position. And only after that do I think about visibility.

For me, visibility is the result of consciously building influence. It is not a goal in itself.

How do you know where your “arena” is, where your voice actually matters? 

Being heard is not about being the loudest person in the room, but about being in the right room. It means asking where the decisions are being made about the thing I care about. You cannot be everywhere. And you don’t need to be.

Sometimes we think that if we want to build influence, we need to attend every conference, belong to every organization, post constantly, know everyone. No. You need to know which room your voice needs to matter in.

Maybe that room is your executive board. And then the question is: are you actually sitting at that table? Or are you preparing materials for the people who sit there? Do you speak? Do you say what you stand for?

Maybe your room is an industry association, an academic community, a particular group of decision-makers.

Marie Curie understood very well who the important players were when it came to pursuing her mission. She traveled to the United States, met people with influence and money, and raised funds for her research. Today we would call that fundraising, or even sales. She wasn’t afraid of being the only woman in the room. She knew why she was there. That makes a huge difference.

Let’s assume we know which room we need to be in. How do we make the strongest impact in that room?

The problem is that sometimes we know exactly which room we should be in, and we still don’t speak once we are there. And that is when the second level of work begins: working on ourselves.

You can have a perfect stakeholder map. You can know exactly where you need to be. You can understand your industry. And then you sit down at the table and think: “I don’t really belong here. I’m not good enough yet. Maybe this isn’t the right moment. What will they think if I say something?” It’s incredibly common.

In KPMG’s Women's Leadership Survey, 75 percent of female executives said they had experienced impostor syndrome. Eighty-five percent said it affected their willingness to speak up. Eighty-one percent said it made them put even more pressure on themselves.

I know this from my own experience too. Years ago, I went through a competency assessment at work together with a group of male colleagues. I got my results back and in category after category I was scoring very highly, around 90 to 95.

The person giving me feedback asked how I felt about it, and I said it wasn’t enough. She asked what would be enough. I said, “One hundred.” And she told me, “Your male colleagues are scoring 50 or 60 and every single one of them described their performance as excellent.”

Of course, that is one anecdote. But it illustrates something very real. If I believe that every day, in every area, I need to perform at 100 percent, eventually I will remove myself from the arena.

Does experience solve that? You might assume that once you achieve enough, eventually you feel that you have earned the right to speak.

Unfortunately, no. And I have a story that taught me that very clearly. A few years ago, I was invited to Dubai to speak at a major international medical congress. I was supposed to give a motivational keynote.

By then I had years of experience on stage. I had led Harvard Business Review Polska, organized MBA congresses, spoken at economic forums, and worked in the media. I was absolutely not someone walking onto a stage for the first time.

And the evening before the speech, I had a panic attack. For the first time in my life, I felt my voice completely disappear. My mind went blank. And then the spiral started.

I thought: I’m not Simon Sinek. How am I going to captivate this audience? My English isn’t good enough. These are leading scientists, doctors, representatives of health ministries from all over the world. What am I going to tell them? How am I supposed to impress them?

I went to Florence Berteletti, who at the time was Deputy Director at the World Heart Federation and the person who had invited me, and I asked her to change the program. I told her I couldn’t do it. I said, “I am not going to be the Simon Sinek of this stage.” She said something that completely changed the way I think about speaking.

She said, “Magda, I don’t want Simon Sinek. I want you. You are not there to impress these people. You are there to inspire them to believe that change is possible. You created that change. You spent years working to change the law in Poland and introduce a smoking ban. Show them that they can do it too.” That conversation changed everything for me.

So the problem wasn’t that you lacked expertise. It was that you believed you had to prove your worth.

Exactly. My old belief was that a great speaker walks onto a stage and everyone thinks: “Wow, this person is amazing.” Today I know I’m not there to impress people. I’m there so that maybe one person starts to think, “I can change something too. I have tools. I know where to start.”

That is an enormous difference. And this is why the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter so much. You can have a story that says, “I’m the person who doesn’t belong here.” But you can reframe that story.

After she was attacked, Malala could have remained in the story of being a victim of a regime. Instead, she built a story about fighting for girls’ right to education. That doesn’t mean pretending difficult things didn’t happen. It means asking, “What meaning do I give this experience, and what do I do with it now?”

Which brings us to communication. If our job is not to impress people but to create change, how should we speak?

First of all, I think we spend far too much time communicating what we have done and not enough time explaining why it matters.

A lot of business communication is essentially a status update. We tell people about a meeting, a project, a new solution, a decision. Fine. But what follows from that? Why should anyone care? What becomes possible because of it? What do I see that perhaps other people don’t see yet?

That is why I like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. It is very simple, but it changes the conversation. Instead of just explaining a strategy or a new tool, tell people why you believe the change is necessary and what it is going to make possible for them.

Because that “why” creates a connection. It gives someone else a chance to think: “I understand why this matters to you. Actually, it matters to me too.”

But there is another important point here. Communication and influence are not just about being able to speak beautifully. They depend just as much on whether we know how to listen. I have to say, personally, that has probably been one of the hardest skills for me to learn, because I love talking.

For years, I have worked with Mike Bosworth’s model of trust, and one thing it taught me very strongly is that knowledge alone is not enough.

In business, we love building our position around competence. We want to show that we know the subject, understand the tools, have the data, and have the expertise. I work with consulting and technology firms where there are genuinely some of the smartest people in the room.

But being the smartest person in the room does not mean anyone is going to follow you. Trust also comes from character. Do you keep your word? Are you honest? Are you transparent? How do you treat other people?

Then there is emotional connection. Does the other person feel seen by you? Do you listen? Do you understand what they are afraid of?

Being fully present and giving another person space is often the doorway to creating very significant change.

That must be especially important now, when companies seem to be going through one transformation after another, and at the moment, above all, technological and AI transformation.

Absolutely. Very often the leader is already five steps ahead. She knows where the company needs to go. She can see the benefits. She knows the strategy. So she stands up in front of everyone and explains that AI will increase efficiency, processes will change and the company will benefit. 

But the people listening may be in a completely different place. They may be thinking, “Will I still have a job next year? Am I going to be able to do this? Does anyone even understand what I am afraid of?”

It is not enough to tell them that transformation makes business sense. You need to meet people where they are first. Listen. Build trust. Only then can you take them somewhere else.

Influence does not happen when I deliver a beautiful vision. Influence happens when people start to follow my vision. 

What mistakes do we make that undermine the influence we have built? For instance, in terms of language.

We soften what we are about to say before we have even said it. We apologize for interrupting, suggest that our question might be stupid, and ask permission to contribute when we already have every right to be part of the conversation.

I catch myself doing it too. I even changed something very simple in my emails. When I replied late, I used to begin with an apology. Now I am much more likely to say, “Thank you for your patience.” It sounds like a tiny shift, but it changes the position I am speaking from.

I am not arguing that we should suddenly become aggressive or absolute in the way we communicate. It is about being more conscious of the language we use. There is a difference between tentatively suggesting that perhaps something might be a good idea and saying, “I recommend this approach, and here is why.”

The same goes for questions. Instead of apologizing before asking one, say, “I want to understand why we made this decision.” You are still curious. You are still open. But you are not diminishing yourself before the conversation has even begun. Language matters because it tells other people something about how seriously we take our own contribution.

We come back to visibility. How do you build it without falling into the trap of creating a personal brand simply for the sake of having one?

I do look at personal branding a little differently. For me, a strong brand is built around an idea, not simply around visibility.

When we look at rankings of the world’s most influential women, we mostly see presidents, politicians, CEOs of the biggest organizations. And of course I am delighted that women occupy those positions.

But those rankings also have a dangerous side. You can look at them and think, “So influence is for people who have power. It isn’t for me.” I completely disagree with that. 

I was in my twenties when I spent several years working for an NGO on changing Polish law and introducing a smoking ban. I had no formal position of power. I wasn’t a politician. But we knew why we were doing it. We knew which doors we needed to knock on.

We reached the Ministry of Health, then bodies connected with the World Health Organization and the Michael Bloomberg Foundation. We learned how to reach the right people and how not to give up.

Anyone can build influence if they have an idea that matters, if they know how to find the right arena, if they can communicate that idea in a way that brings other people in, if they can build trust and if they have the determination to keep going.

Will that skill become even more important in the age of AI?

I am convinced it will. When I look at reports on the future of work, including the World Economic Forum’s research, I can see very clearly that the skills we need are shifting. Knowledge still matters, of course. But access to knowledge will increasingly become less of a differentiator. One of the key skills is the ability to influence people: to persuade others to follow an idea, a vision, a change.

Technology can give us access to an enormous amount of information, but it doesn’t create meaning. And without meaning, there are no relationships or trust, which are the foundations of any business or personal cooperation.

So when I think about building influence, I come back to those same questions: Where does my voice need to be heard? What do I stand for? How do I talk about it? And where do I genuinely need to be visible in order to make change happen?

For someone just starting out, that can be a map. And if you are already building influence, it can become more like a GPS, something that helps you check whether you are still moving in the right direction.

And if someone reading this were to do just one thing tomorrow, what should it be?

I would ask myself one very simple question: What is supposed to change because I am in this room? Not: How am I going to come across? Am I good enough? What will they think of me? What is supposed to change?

Because once I know the answer to that question, I stop putting all the attention on myself. I start putting it on the issue, on the people, on the change. And then it becomes much easier to speak.