Access and visible trust from the leader raise a change champion's real authority, and the formal promotion that would provoke the incumbents being passed over waits until later.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
Six months after a forty-million-dollar funding round, the chief executive of a logistics software startup needed to overhaul pricing, and the vice president of sales who owned it had built the old model. Removing him mid-quarter would have rattled the sales team. So she took the director of revenue operations to every pricing discussion, board prep session, and customer escalation, forwarded her analyses to the leadership team with a one-line endorsement, and told the account executives to bring discount questions to her. Within a quarter the account executives were calling the director first. The new pricing went live in month four. In month seven the chief executive made the director vice president of pricing, with the sales vice president's agreement, and the board approved the change in a single sentence.
Why it works
Visible access makes working through the champion look better, because people who go to them get faster decisions and a direct read on what the leader wants. It makes the change easier, since informal authority skips the costs of a formal promotion: pay re-leveling, a reorganization announcement, review by human resources and legal, grievances from displaced incumbents, and board attention. The leader's signals have to be real and visible, the champion able enough to avoid public mistakes without formal cover, and the organization inclined to read access as status.
The thinking behind it
Jeffrey Pfeffer Jeffrey Pfeffer's Power in Organizations (1981) traces power to structural position, including centrality in networks of dependence and control of information. A champion who attends board prep, drafts for the leader, and takes the discount calls becomes central in that network without any change of title. Pfeffer's view explains why informal authority can carry a change, and why it has to be formalized before people lose track of who decides.
Erving Goffman Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) describes how audiences read social position from performances: who appears in which room, who speaks for whom. A leader who takes the champion to every forum and names them there is staging their authority for the organization to see. The display does the work a promotion announcement would, and it can mislead incumbents unless a plain statement of who decides follows.
When it fits
Works where a change needs someone with authority now, the formal promotion would provoke an incumbent you still need, and you have the standing to make your trust visible. The champion must be able to carry the work without the cover of a title. It does poorly in cultures where only titles count, or when your own attention is spread too thin to signal anything.
How to use it well
Make the access real. Take the champion's calls, name them in the room, route the relevant decisions through them, and forward their work with your endorsement.
- Tell the incumbent directly what the champion is doing and why. They will see it anyway.
- Set yourself a time limit, and decide what will lead you to formalize the role or end it.
- Support the champion closely early on, so their first mistakes are private ones; they have no formal cover.
- Formalize as soon as the political conditions allow: promote the champion, re-level the pay, and announce it.
The arrangement is a bridge, and people need to know who is in charge of what once it has carried the change across.
What it costs and where it backfires
Held too long, the arrangement turns sour. The incumbent you passed over may start working against you, openly or not. The champion carries a leader's work without the pay, title, or accountability, and may burn out, leave, or start acting alone. Employees lose the ability to get a straight answer about who decides what. The line is honesty about the arrangement. Telling people the incumbent still holds authority they have lost, or denying the champion's role when asked, turns informal trust into deception.
When it is used on you
Compare access against titles when an unpromoted person starts attending executive meetings, board prep, and offsites, drafting on the leader's behalf and taking calls that used to come to you. That shows you where the real org chart has moved. Ask the leader directly what the arrangement is and how long it will last, and name the shift openly if it goes unacknowledged.