7 tips for leading without authority

1. Create a shared vision

Rob Rogers is a data scientist and the CEO of Oii.ai, an AI company that automates supply chain design. He is also the chief scientific advisor at BeeKeeperAI, a healthcare AI collaboration platform he co-founded. Rogers has built his career, he says, by being a poster child for leading without authority.

“This is my whole career,” he says. “It starts with creating a shared ownership of vision. In practice, for me, that is all about storytelling. The story you tell creates an end goal and a team all at once.”

By creating a story that captures the dream of where his vision will lead, Rogers is able to bring people to his cause, get people to willingly — enthusiastically — do what he needs them to do, and accomplish amazing things.

He offers an example from his previous role as chief data scientist at Intel: He was trying to help the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) process the 8 million reports of online child exploitation it gets each year. His role gave him no authority. So, he created a story — children in peril — that brought technologists, project managers, and people with the authority he needed to his cause.

His story ultimately convinced Diane Bryant, who at the time was head of Intel’s data center group. “Once she was recruited, she gave us the assets we needed,” he says. “We got a million dollars and permission to take significant amount of the time of an army of volunteers.”

Before Rogers started telling this story to bring people to his cause, the NCMEC had a 60-day backlog on reports of child exploitation — a long time for a child in danger. His team built an AI solution to automate the processing pipeline. “Two weeks after we deployed it,” he says, “They were processing every single thing within 24 hours.”