You had the right idea. You did the work.
And the person who makes the call barely knows you exist.
Now what?
—
If you’re an introvert, most advice on leadership influence sounds exhausting.
Work the room. Sell harder. Be louder.
It’s a performance you can’t keep up.
My guest this week, Ryan Latta, has a different answer. It starts with a map.
Ryan is a consultant who builds exceptional software and product teams, and a self-described “practiced introvert.”
He can give a conference talk without a flicker of nerves. The hard part comes afterward, when everyone wants to talk. Then it’s a dark room for a few hours to recover.
Ryan’s wife doesn’t quite buy the introvert part. “You’re not like that at work.”
Ryan’s answer: “Yep. That’s the job.”
—
When Ryan needs to change someone’s mind, it’s rarely the person sitting nearby.
It’s someone a few levels up, or a few departments away. Someone he has no direct line to.
So Ryan uses rapport mapping, a technique he learned from Esther Derby.
You start at the center and map your relationships, marking which are strong or strained. Then you do the same for the people around you.
Look at the finished map and a path starts to appear. Someone you know has a strong relationship with someone else, who can introduce you to the next person. Eventually, you have a way to reach the decision-maker through someone they already trust, rather than making a cold request.
Here’s what the map keeps showing.
Influence doesn’t always follow the org chart.
Every leader Ryan has worked with has someone they trust who isn’t at their level. The person they turn to and ask, “What do you think about that?”
On a team, the person everyone follows often isn’t the tech lead or architect. Win that person over, and the rest tend to come along.
—
Notice what this method asks of you.
Observation. Analysis. One-on-one conversations, one at a time.
You don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room. You do have to pay attention to how people relate to each other.
Ryan once took on a team transformation that other consultants had already written off. “They’re never gonna change.”
But mapping the relationships showed him why the last attempt had failed. The director believed they were part of the team. The team didn’t want the director in the room at all.
So Ryan uninvited the director from the kickoff. When the director showed up anyway, Ryan asked them to leave.
Awkward? Very.
But the project worked because Ryan understood what was really going on instead of trying to push change from the top.
—
Ryan is also blunt about something else: doing the work isn’t enough.
You have to be intentional about showing what you’ve done.
That doesn’t mean perception management. Ryan has no patience for the facade, and most of us can spot one anyway.
His weekly reports to the CTO of a household-name company were plain black-and-white Google Slides. No company template. Each project risk got a row of bomb emojis to show how serious it was.
The CTO came up afterward.
“I love your presentations. I actually feel like I know what the problems are.”
—
For the parts that don’t come naturally, Ryan builds a system.
Staying in touch is the big one. Even best friends don’t get a call. For a consultant, that can quietly kill a business.
Ryan keeps notes on every conversation, and those notes feed an AI consulting partner. Each morning he types “It’s a new day,” and it suggests who to check in with.
It’s a way of making sure something important doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Then there’s the discomfort itself.
Ryan treats it like a budget. Anything meaningful will cost you an awkward conversation or two, so plan for the spend. Don’t stack three of them in one day.
After a four-hour workshop, Ryan books nothing else. No meetings. Just quiet.
And when you’re running low, say so.
Ryan once opened a meeting full of VPs and executives this way:
“I am dealing with a migraine today, so I’m not gonna be at my best.”
Another consultant pulled Ryan aside afterward. Never tell them anything like that.
Ryan disagreed.
“It’s not weakness. It’s being responsible.”
Ryan has never seen it backfire. People see someone they can trust to be straight with them.
—
Ryan and I turned the relationship-mapping method into a free AI skill. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini.
It asks about your own style, then walks through each stakeholder: who they work with, which relationships are strong or strained, and what shared history you can build on.
Then it lays out a path.
I tried it over a weekend on a real situation at work, and it surfaced things I hadn’t seen.
Ryan’s advice is to push back on it. Ask why it chose one relationship over another. Ask it to test your own plan. Sometimes the questions
Connect with Ryan:
Ryan’s website and digital garden: ryanlatta.com
Ryan on LinkedIn
Download the free influence-campaign AI Skill, built with Ryan