Expert Power: 14 Ways to Build Influence at Work

Expert power turns what you know into workplace influence. Learn to spot your expertise, build a rare skill from scratch, and help your team find theirs.

Have you noticed that folks who have specific expertise in the workplace often get new opportunities, respect from their peers, and have more influence? This is expert power at play.

It’s also the kind of workplace power anyone can build. You don’t need a title or anyone’s permission. Here’s how to find the expert power you already have, put it to work, build a brand-new pocket of expertise in about 100 focused hours, and grow it in the people you lead.

What Is Expert Power?

Expert power is the influence a person gains from skills or knowledge that others in their group or organization value. People with expert power are trusted for what they know, and that trust lets them shape decisions, direction, and behavior well beyond what their job title suggests.

The term comes from a classic 1959 chapter on social power¹, which named expertise as one of five bases of power (more on the others below). The trust is measurable, too: In one study of how customers judge salespeople², a salesperson’s expertise was a significant driver of customers’ trust in them.

This kind of power is also where the labor market is heading. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. workforce, and employment and wage growth were especially strong in jobs requiring high levels of both math and social skills³.

A few examples of expert power in the wild:

• The social media savvy intern. In a company that treats TikTok as a mystery, the intern who understands its unwritten norms can steer the marketing approach, despite being the most junior person in the room.
• The person who can read people. On a team of technical experts, the colleague who has studied body language cues becomes the one everyone pulls aside before a tense negotiation or a big client pitch.
• The IT specialist with cybersecurity depth. On a team of generalists, the one member trained in security shapes how the company protects its data—and carries more weight than their peers when those calls get made.

How to Use the Expert Power You Already Have

You likely already have at least some expert power in your workplace, whether you know it or not. The work is locating it and making it visible. Start with three ways to find it.

Audit the Skills Your Role Already Demands

Start with the obvious lane: What do you bring that is unusual or highly specialized? It could be technical skills, industry knowledge, or soft skills such as negotiation or emotional intelligence. Then ask the harder question: Are you the best at it on your team?

Action Step: List 10 types of skills and knowledge related to your job description that you are good at.

Mine the Skills Nobody Hired You For

Now it’s time to get creative. What do you know how to do that others in your company don’t? You may be fluent in Dutch or deeply tuned into a niche community. Not every talent translates into expert power at work, but some might surprise you.

There’s research behind casting this wider net. In a study of architecture firms⁴, managers gained power from general knowledge of their professional core, while salaried professionals gained more from rare knowledge of neighboring fields, like an architect who knows a lot about engineering.

Action Step: List 10 skills you have, not necessarily related to your job, that many of your coworkers might lack.

Let Feedback Find Your Blind Spots

Pay attention to what people already come to you for. If colleagues keep seeking your advice on specific topics, that’s expert power in action. Do you constantly receive recognition for your negotiation skills? Are people impressed by how you approach problem-solving? You could also just ask.

Action Step: Ask your boss and three colleagues for positive feedback. You could do this over email or in person. You could say, “I’m trying to get a better sense of what my strengths and expertise are. Can you tell me what you think I’m uniquely good at or what unique expertise I could put to better use?”

Go over your lists and look for overlap, or any item that sticks out to you. Once you land on one or two skills, put them to work.

Position Yourself as the Resource

Once you’ve identified your area of expertise, make it known. Offer assistance, share what you see, and volunteer when your lane comes up.

Say your company just expanded into the Dutch market, and you are of Dutch heritage and fluent in Dutch. You might weave into your next conversation something like, “If you ever need help understanding how this would land with a Dutch consumer, let me know; I’d be happy to help.”

Action Step: Challenge yourself to support your colleagues in your area of expertise three times this week.

Give Your Knowledge Away

My partner used to work at a marketing agency, and one of their coworkers recognized that he had expert power in productivity. So he asked the company if he could give free productivity coaching sessions to any interested colleagues. He essentially gave himself a new (unpaid) position to share his wisdom and solidify his position as someone with expert power in productivity.

Action Step: Pick one format to offer your knowledge: write an article for the company, give free training to your colleagues, or offer free coaching sessions.

Keep the Expertise Current

Expert power fades when the knowledge behind it goes stale. An IT manager who built a reputation on traditional data management has to keep learning as cloud tools and AI reshape the field. Stay current, and broaden as you go.

Action Step: Pick a book or course in your area of expertise and go one level deeper.

How to Build Expert Power From Scratch

If you went through the previous section and felt like there was nothing to grasp onto, worry not. You can build expert power from scratch, and the biggest mistake is the waiting: Plenty of capable people put off starting because they don’t feel like an expert yet. Put in the hours and the feeling catches up.

Pick a Niche Your Company Will Feel

Choose a field, subject, or skill set that sits at the intersection of three things: you’d enjoy learning it, your company or industry would benefit from it, and it’s likely to grow more valuable over time. Learning to build a website will translate better than mastering Fortnite.

Action Step: List five skills you’d love to learn if you had infinite time. Then, list five skills you think would make you more valuable at work. Then, list five skills you feel would make you more valuable for most jobs ten years from now. Pick one that shows up on two lists, or keep brainstorming until one feels like a “yes.”

If you need help, enlist your manager for support and guidance.

Put In the First 100 Hours

Now comes the fun part: You get to learn! Pursue relevant courses, certifications, or workshops.

You may have heard that mastery takes 10,000 hours. For world-class performance, perhaps. But workplace expert power runs on rarity, and rarity is a much shorter climb. Author Seth Godin puts it this way in a post on what he calls the 100-hour asset⁵:

If you invest 100 hours in a rare skill, you’re likely to acquire it. If you could learn to sharpen a tool better than your peers, organize a high-performance database, see the nuances in some sector of cryptography, know how to build a pretty-good WordPress site or really understand the arc of a particular writer’s career, you’d have something of value. Something that anyone who was focused enough to invest 100 hours could have, but few will choose to commit to.

Action Step: Once you’ve picked your skill, choose your first learning direction, whether a book, a course, or a workshop. Take the first step.

Build the Plan Before the Mood Fades

One hundred hours is very manageable. It’s also a big enough number to scare many people off the path, which is exactly why the skill stays rare.

Action Step: Set up a learning plan for your skill. Do you want to put in two hours a week for the next year? Or would you make it a part-time job and slam 25 hours a week for the next month?

Expect the Dip

Somewhere in those hours you’ll hit what Godin calls “the dip”⁶—the stretch where novelty is gone, progress slows, and quitting starts to look reasonable. This is why picking something you enjoy matters: Natural enjoyment is one of the best motivators to get you through. Recognize the dip is coming, and plan for it.

Action Step: Write out your “why.” Why do you want to learn this skill? What will it give you? Why will it be worth it? When you inevitably hit the dip, pull out your “why” statement to return to your motivation.

How Leaders Grow Expert Power on Their Team

If you lead a team, you’re in a position to multiply expert power. Many people have incredible skills and knowledge but lack the belief in themselves to see it. A leader who names those strengths out loud can change what a person thinks they’re allowed to be good at.

Name the Strengths They Can’t See

First, get clear on the expertise you see in each team member. Where do their talents lie? What are they passionate about? You could help a copywriter identify their knack for storytelling and encourage them to specialize in brand narrative. A project coordinator’s love of data might grow into becoming the team’s analytics person. Or you may notice a programmer’s eye for UI/UX design.

Action Step: Take a few minutes to consider the following questions for each of your team members:

• What is this person uniquely good at?
• What skill set or knowledge base is this person uniquely tapped into?
• If this person led a workshop, which topic would fit best?

Say It in the 1-on-1

The best way for someone to use their expert knowledge is to know they have it. You can be a huge force in that self-knowledge. As a bonus, research on performance feedback suggests a strengths-based approach can boost employee engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction⁷.

Action Step: In your next 1-on-1 with a team member, discuss expert power:

• Share what you see as their strengths and skills
• Ask what they think they have expertise in
• Brainstorm ways to help them go even further

Put Budget Behind It

Make room in your budget to promote learning, or pitch whoever holds the budget to sponsor extended education for your team. In LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report⁸, 94% of employees said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.

Action Step: Decide how much you’d want to invest in each team member’s education, and make the pitch to the budget manager.

Make Sharing the Default

Encourage team members to give presentations, lead workshops, or mentor colleagues in their areas of expertise. The more you build a strengths-based team, the more expert power your team carries. Teaching has a quiet second payoff: The coworkers who trade knowledge are also the ones who end up actually knowing each other.

Action Step: Create a 15-minute weekly slot where a team member gives a talk on a topic they know deeply.

When Expert Power Backfires

Expert power has real limits, and knowing them is part of using it well.

The best-documented limit is that expertise makes it harder to imagine working without it. In a pair of studies⁹, experts predicted how long beginners would need to complete a task and underestimated it badly—worse than people with only moderate experience did. Worse, techniques meant to correct the bias barely helped, and the predictions stayed off even after debiasing. If you’re the team expert, you will likely underestimate how hard your subject is for everyone else, even when you’re actively trying to correct for it. No technique fully removes that blind spot.

Two more boundaries worth knowing:

• Expert power is narrow. The cybersecurity specialist’s word carries weight on data protection, and much less at the marketing table. Borrowing authority outside your lane tends to erode the authority inside it.
• Competence needs warmth beside it. Expertise earns respect; whether people actually bring you in depends on how approachable you are.

Where the Term “Expert Power” Came From

“Expert power” comes from a classic 1959 chapter on the bases of social power¹, in which two social psychologists mapped out where influence over another person actually comes from. The original chapter named five bases of power. A sixth, informational power, joined the list in 1965, an addition the model’s co-creator recounts in a later overview of the framework¹⁰.

Here are the five bases beyond expert power:

Reward power: control of resources that others want. Imagine a supervisor who offers a promotion or a flexible work schedule to an employee who consistently delivers ahead of time.

Coercive power: the opposite of reward power, the ability to punish or impose negative consequences. This manager threatens to demote employees if they don’t improve their performance by a certain deadline.

Legitimate power: the formal power that comes from being elected, appointed as a boss, or given some other type of authority.

Referent power: the power of being admired or respected. It is often linked with charismatic leadership; people are influenced because they like or identify with the person.

Informational power: control over valuable or critical information. Think of a data analyst with unique access to company performance metrics who uses that data to shape strategic decisions.

These types of power are not mutually exclusive, and one person can hold several of them at once.

Frequently Asked Questions About Expert Power

Expert Power Takeaway

You don’t need to wait for a reorg or a promotion to have more influence at work. Here’s where to start this week:

1. Ask four people what you’re uniquely good at. Your boss and three colleagues, over email or in person. Their answers may surprise you.
2. Pick your skill and block the first two hours. Whether it’s one you already have or one you’ll build from scratch, the calendar is where it becomes real.
3. Offer one concrete assist inside your lane. “If you ever need help with this, I’m happy to” is all it takes to start being the resource.
4. Write your “why” before the dip arrives. You’ll want it on the day quitting looks reasonable.
5. Leaders: hand someone the room. Put a 15-minute expertise talk on next week’s team agenda and let a team member run it.

Expert power is one lane of workplace influence. To see how it fits alongside the other five bases and build more than one, read how to get power.