Informal Leaders Drive Growth. Most Companies Ignore Them

An informal leader is someone who influences colleagues, shapes decisions, and moves teams forward without holding a formal management title. They carry no positional authority, but they carry weight. And in most go-to-market functions, they are doing more to drive alignment and momentum than the org chart would ever suggest.

Understanding who these people are, how they operate, and how to work with them rather than around them is one of the more underrated skills in marketing leadership. Most strategy documents ignore them entirely. That is a significant oversight.

What Does an Informal Leader Actually Do?

The cleanest definition I can offer is this: an informal leader is the person others look to before they look to the person in charge. Not because the manager is absent or incompetent, but because this individual has earned trust through behaviour, consistency, and results over time.

In practice, they do several things that formal managers often cannot. They translate strategy into plain language. They absorb anxiety from the team and convert it into momentum. They call out problems early, without it becoming political. They build bridges between departments that would otherwise communicate through memos and passive-aggression. And they do all of this without being asked, because it is simply how they operate.

I saw this play out clearly during a business turnaround I led some years ago. We were restructuring the agency, cutting departments, repricing services, and trying to rebuild commercial confidence at the same time. The official leadership team was visible and vocal. But the person who actually held the culture together during those months was a mid-level account director who had no direct reports and no seat at the senior table. She knew everyone, was trusted by everyone, and had a quiet way of reframing difficult news without minimising it. When she was calm, the team was calm. When she was concerned, people noticed. Her influence over the organisation’s emotional state during that period was, in practical terms, greater than mine.

That is not a failure of leadership. It is just how organisations actually work.

Why Informal Leadership Matters More During Go-To-Market Execution

Go-to-market strategy looks clean on paper. Target segment, value proposition, channel mix, messaging hierarchy, launch sequence. Tidy. Logical. Defensible in a boardroom. And then it meets the organisation, and the friction begins.

Sales teams interpret the brief differently than marketing intended. Product has caveats that were not in the deck. Customer success is already fielding questions the campaign has not addressed. The timeline that looked reasonable in planning starts to compress under the weight of competing priorities. This is not dysfunction. It is just the reality of cross-functional execution, and it is where most go-to-market plans actually break down. GTM execution has become genuinely harder as organisations grow more complex and buyer behaviour becomes less predictable.

Formal leadership can mandate alignment. Informal leadership actually creates it. There is a difference. When a senior VP sends an all-hands email about the new go-to-market direction, people read it and return to what they were doing. When the person everyone respects in the sales team says “I think this approach makes sense and here is why,” the conversation in the room changes.

If you want to understand how to structure the broader strategic context around this, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks and decisions that sit behind effective execution. The informal leadership question lives inside all of it.

Scaling organisations face this challenge acutely. BCG’s research on scaling agile identifies cultural alignment and distributed decision-making as critical factors in whether growth initiatives succeed or stall. Informal leaders are the mechanism through which that alignment actually happens at the team level, regardless of what the methodology says.

How Do You Identify Informal Leaders in a Marketing Organisation?

The most reliable signal is attention. Watch who people turn to when something goes wrong, when a decision needs to be made quickly, or when there is ambiguity about the right direction. The person who gets the most informal check-ins, the most “what do you think about this?” messages, the most corridor conversations before the meeting starts, that is your informal leader.

Other signals worth tracking:

• They are consistently referenced in other people’s reasoning. “I spoke to [name] and she thought we should…” is a phrase you hear often.
• They are invited into conversations they were not formally included in, because someone thought their perspective was worth having.
• When they push back on something, the room takes it seriously, even if the person pushing back has no authority to block the decision.
• Their tenure does not fully explain their influence. They might be relatively new, but they have built credibility faster than the hierarchy has caught up with.
• They are often the first to know about problems and the last to escalate them, because they resolve things before they become formal issues.

What they are usually not: the loudest person in the room, the most visibly ambitious, or the most politically active. Informal leadership built on volume or self-promotion tends to be shallow and temporary. The durable kind is quieter and more consistent.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard marker during a brainstorm when the agency founder had to step out for a client call. I was new, I had no authority, and the room was full of people who had been there far longer than me. The internal reaction was something close to panic. But I had been watching how the founder ran sessions, I understood the brief, and I had a point of view on the problem. I ran the session. Nobody objected. That moment was not about confidence or performance. It was about having done the work to have something worth contributing. Informal authority follows that pattern almost every time.

The Difference Between Informal Leadership and Office Politics

This distinction matters and it is frequently blurred. Office politics is influence in service of personal outcomes: career advancement, resource acquisition, credit accumulation, rival undermining. Informal leadership is influence in service of the work. The motivation is different, and over time, so are the results.

Political operators tend to be visible when decisions are being made and invisible when accountability arrives. Informal leaders tend to be consistent across both situations. That consistency is what builds the trust that makes informal authority durable.

The confusion between the two is understandable because both involve influence without formal mandate. But the tell is simple: what does this person do when the outcome benefits someone else and not them? Political operators disengage or reframe. Informal leaders stay engaged, because the outcome is the point, not the credit.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, the culture became harder to maintain as layers of management were added and direct communication became less frequent. The people who held the culture together were not always the managers. They were the individuals who stayed consistent in how they treated colleagues, how they talked about the work, and how they behaved when things were difficult. Some of them were eventually promoted. Some were not. But their impact on the organisation’s ability to scale was real and measurable, even if it never showed up in a job title.

How Marketing Leaders Should Work With Informal Leaders

The first thing to understand is that you cannot manufacture this relationship through process. You cannot create a formal programme called “Informal Leader Engagement” and expect it to work. The moment you institutionalise it, you have changed what it is.

What you can do is create the conditions in which informal leadership is visible, valued, and aligned with where the organisation is trying to go.

In practical terms, that means a few things:

Involve them early in strategy development, not just execution. When informal leaders understand the reasoning behind a direction, not just the direction itself, they become natural advocates rather than reluctant implementers. They are also more likely to surface the objections and complications that formal consultation processes tend to miss.

Give them room to operate without making it a formal role. If you promote every strong informal leader into a management position, you often lose what made them valuable. Not everyone who influences well also manages well. Some people are more effective without direct reports. Recognise that and protect it.

Pay attention to what they are saying informally. If an informal leader is expressing doubt about a campaign direction in corridor conversations, that is intelligence worth having before the campaign launches. The formal feedback mechanisms will not always surface it in time.

Do not mistake their influence for a threat. Some managers feel uncomfortable when they realise a team member has more informal authority than their job title suggests. That discomfort is understandable but counterproductive. The right response is to align, not to suppress.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models points to the importance of distributed decision-making capability in organisations that want to grow without losing execution quality. Informal leaders are a significant part of how that distribution actually functions in practice.

Can Informal Leadership Be Developed Deliberately?

Yes, but not through a training programme. The behaviours that create informal authority are learnable, but they are built through repetition and genuine commitment, not through a workshop on “influencing without authority.”

The behaviours that matter most:

Consistency between what you say and what you do. This is the foundation of all trust-based influence. If you advocate for a position in a meeting and then behave differently outside it, the credibility erodes quickly. People notice the gap.

Genuine interest in other people’s problems. Informal leaders tend to be genuinely curious about how other parts of the organisation work, what pressures colleagues are under, and what would make their jobs easier. This is not networking. It is the kind of functional empathy that makes cross-functional work actually function.

Willingness to take a position when it is uncomfortable. The easiest thing in most organisations is to stay neutral, to wait and see, to avoid committing to a view before the outcome is clear. Informal leaders tend to be willing to say what they think before it is safe to do so. Not recklessly, but with enough conviction to be useful.

Knowing when to defer. Counterintuitively, one of the most important informal leadership skills is the ability to recognise when someone else has better judgment on a specific question and to say so clearly. This builds credibility faster than always having an opinion.

The compounding effect of these behaviours over time is significant. Someone who operates this way for two or three years in an organisation builds a depth of trust that is very difficult to replicate through positional authority alone. When strategy needs to move quickly, as it often does in go-to-market contexts, that trust is the asset that makes the difference. Market penetration strategies depend on fast internal alignment as much as they depend on external execution, and informal leaders are often the ones who make that alignment happen at speed.

Where Informal Leadership Goes Wrong

It is worth being clear about the failure modes, because informal leadership without discipline can create real problems.

The most common failure is when informal influence becomes a shadow hierarchy that actively competes with formal decision-making. This happens when informal leaders feel unrecognised or undervalued, and start using their influence to route around the official structure rather than support it. The result is an organisation that has two sets of decisions: the ones that get made formally, and the ones that actually stick. That split is damaging and difficult to repair.

A related failure is when informal leadership concentrates in a single individual who becomes a bottleneck. If every cross-functional conversation has to go through one person because they are the only one trusted by all parties, the organisation has created a dependency it cannot afford. Informal leadership needs to be distributed enough that it does not create single points of failure.

There is also the risk of informal leaders becoming advocates for the status quo in ways that resist necessary change. Their influence is built on existing relationships and existing trust. When the organisation needs to shift direction significantly, that embedded credibility can become a brake rather than an accelerant. The best informal leaders recognise this and make a conscious choice to use their influence to support change rather than buffer against it. The ones who do not tend to find their informal authority diminishing as the organisation moves on without them.

Healthcare and regulated industries face a version of this challenge at scale, where go-to-market execution struggles are often rooted in internal alignment failures as much as external market complexity. Informal leadership dynamics inside the organisation frequently determine whether the formal strategy survives contact with reality.

Informal Leadership and the Go-To-Market Function Specifically

Marketing sits at an interesting intersection in most organisations. It is responsible for outputs that depend on inputs from product, sales, customer success, and sometimes finance and legal. It has influence over brand, messaging, and channel decisions. But it rarely has direct authority over the people whose cooperation it needs most.

That structural reality makes informal leadership not a nice-to-have for marketing leaders, but a core operational skill. The CMO who can only move the organisation through formal authority will move it slowly and with significant friction. The one who has built genuine credibility across functions, who is trusted by the sales leadership, respected by product, and taken seriously by the CFO, will move it at a different pace entirely.

This applies at every level of the marketing function, not just the top. The campaign manager who has built a strong working relationship with the data team will get better analysis faster. The content strategist who is trusted by the sales team will produce assets that actually get used. The brand manager who understands the commercial pressures facing the business will write briefs that get approved rather than revised three times.

None of this requires a job title. All of it requires the kind of consistent, credible behaviour that informal authority is built on. For product launches specifically, BCG’s thinking on launch strategy highlights how internal alignment and cross-functional trust are as critical as the external market strategy. The informal leadership question is embedded in that alignment challenge whether it is named or not.

If you are working through the broader strategic questions around how growth functions get structured and executed, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is worth spending time in. The informal leadership question keeps surfacing across almost every aspect of how growth actually gets delivered.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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