If there’s one lesson every social impact leader needs to internalize, it’s this: the meeting is not where you get buy-in. It’s where buy-in gets confirmed.

I spend quite a bit of time counseling individuals — either one-on-one or in workshops — on how to create sustainable, business-aligned social impact programs. It was the work I built at Verizon and the legacy I left behind after 10 years as the company’s chief corporate social responsibility officer.  

During my many counseling sessions, I’ve observed that some social impact leaders operate under a persistent myth that good ideas sell themselves. Walk into the boardroom with a compelling case for equity, sustainability, or community investment, present it well, and the room will nod along. 

Anyone who has actually tried this knows better. 

By the time an idea is formally presented, the decision-makers in the room should already understand it, have had a chance to react to it privately, and have had their concerns addressed. If you’re using the meeting itself to persuade people for the first time, you’ve already lost significant ground — and possibly the whole initiative.

The truth is that influence inside an organization is built long before anyone steps into a meeting room. It is built by investing in relationships, learning the language of the business, and equipping your team to operate as true partners across all levels of the organization.

Walk the halls 

One of my signature approaches to building influences is what I refer to as “walking the halls.”

Walking the halls means proactively building one-on-one relationships with key decision-makers — not only when you need something from them, but continuously, as a discipline. It might mean stopping by someone’s office, grabbing fifteen minutes on their calendar, or catching them after another meeting to talk through an emerging idea before it’s fully formed. 

These informal conversations do two things extraordinarily well: they surface objections early, when they’re still cheap to address, and they give decision-makers a sense of ownership and input into the final proposal.

The insights gathered from hall walking are not a side benefit of relationship-building; they are the mechanism through which influence is created. 

A finance leader might tell you, informally, that your proposal will get killed unless it’s tied to a specific cost-saving metric. A sales leader might mention that a similar initiative failed two years ago for reasons no one wrote down. 

Armed with that intelligence, you can revise your pitch, pre-address objections, and walk into the formal meeting with something that already has quiet support. The meeting becomes an opportunity to ratify the work that has already been done — not a high-stakes persuasion event with an uncertain outcome.

And critically, walking the halls doesn’t stop once buy-in is secured. Continuing to invest in relationships after a decision is made is what protects an initiative from quietly losing priority, being weakened by budget cuts, or being deprioritized when the next crisis hits. Ongoing relationship maintenance is what turns a one-time win into sustained organizational support.

Speak the language of the business

Social impact leaders often walk into rooms fluent in mission and impact metrics, but far less fluent in how their company actually generates revenue. This is a critical gap. 

If you can’t explain how your organization makes money — its margins, its growth levers, its competitive pressures — you’ll struggle to position social impact as a driver of business value rather than a cost center or a nice-to-have.

The social impact leaders who wield real power are the ones who show up as business leaders first. They can speak candidly about P&L, customer acquisition, brand risk and reputation, and talent retention — and then connect social impact strategy directly to those outcomes. 

This doesn’t require abandoning the mission or diluting its ambitions, but it means translating it into a language the business already understands. When leaders can see how social impact contributes to the outcomes for which they are accountable, the work no longer survives on goodwill.

Build a team that can influence

None of these approaches can scale, however, if the work rests on one leader’s shoulders. 

Social impact functions should be staffed with the same strategic rigor as any other business unit. That means hiring not only for passion or subject-matter expertise, but for capabilities like strategy, financial acumen, program management, marketing, and cross-functional collaboration. 

It also means helping team members understand how the business operates and training them to build relationships across finance, legal, sales, human resources, communications, and other functions, with the goal of creating advocates and allies embedded throughout the organization, not just at the top.

At Verizon, I was notorious for conducting deep quarterly operational reviews with my team in which we examined every aspect of our strategy: what was working, what wasn’t, what we were learning, and how our programs were serving both external and internal clients. 

This preparation, in turn, equipped team members to walk their own halls. It gave them the confidence and business literacy to sit across from a CFO or a regional VP and speak credibly about both impact outcomes and business fundamentals. When an entire team can operate this way, influence no longer depends on a single leader or relationship and becomes woven into the fabric of how the function works.

Power and influence aren’t won in a single pitch. They are built through sustained investment, sharp business fluency, and a team capable of operating as genuine partners across the organization. 

Walk the halls before the meeting. Walk them after. And build a team that can do the same.