Debra Shumar

Influence Is Not a Position. It Is a Mindset

By Debra Shumar

Author of Mindset Architects: Breaking Down Organizational Walls to Drive Workplace Performance | Founder, 3P Partners | Founder, Broadview

If you had told me years ago that at 70 I would be an author, the founder of a consulting company, and the creator of an enterprise software platform, I am not sure I would have believed you. Not because I doubted my ability, but because I could not yet see how the pieces of my life would connect.

For 30 years, I worked across automotive, steel, manufacturing, and industrial products. My roles in quality, warranty, and operations took me from plant floors to executive offices. I experienced success, made mistakes, solved problems, and encountered others that resisted easy answers. At the time, these experiences felt like separate chapters. Only later did I understand that each one was teaching me something about people, leadership, curiosity, and influence.

We often think time narrows our possibilities. I have come to believe that time can do the opposite. It gives us the experience to recognize what we are capable of building and the perspective to understand why it matters.

The Rooms That Teach Us

For much of my career, I worked in industries where women were rarely the majority in the room. Some rooms were conference rooms; others were plant-floor meetings, executive discussions, or customer reviews. Many conversations began because something had gone wrong and someone needed to understand why.

One of the rooms I remember most was different. I was teaching a Quality Mindset session to a group that included people from the shop floor through the executive office. They had different responsibilities, experiences, and levels of authority, but I asked everyone the same question: Who is responsible for quality?

The question sounds simple. It was not. Before answering, each person had to consider a personal connection to the outcome. Was quality the responsibility of the quality department? Did it belong to manufacturing, engineering, or leadership? Or did everyone in that room share ownership?

The person on the shop floor had to think about daily decisions. The manager had to consider the environment created for employees. The executive had to consider how leadership decisions eventually found their way into products, processes, and the customer's experience.

The conversation was no longer about a department. It was about personal responsibility. Everyone was connected, and everyone could affect the result.

That moment stayed with me because organizations do not change simply because we tell people what they are responsible for. Change begins when people understand why they are connected to an outcome. Influence works the same way. Just as quality does not belong only to the quality department, influence does not belong only to the executive office.

Throughout my career, I entered some rooms prepared to contribute and others prepared to solve a problem. I am sure there were times when I arrived believing I already knew the answer. Those may have been the rooms that taught me the most.

Every room contains something we do not know. The employee closest to a problem may understand something the executive furthest from it cannot see. An engineer may know why something was designed a certain way, while someone in manufacturing knows what happens when that design meets the realities of production. Sometimes the person saying the least is the person we most need to hear.

I learned that influence does not begin with proving you are the smartest person in the room. It begins with being curious enough to understand the room. That lesson became especially important to me as a woman frequently surrounded by men. When you are different from most people around the table, you can feel pressure to prove that you belong before you simply participate.

Over time, I stopped worrying so much about proving that I belonged in the room. I started thinking more about what I could bring to it.

Sometimes I brought experience. Sometimes I brought a question or a different perspective. At times, my contribution was the willingness to say, "I do not think we understand the problem yet." At other times, my greatest contribution was listening.

I watched people with impressive titles struggle to influence a room, and I watched people without titles change the direction of a conversation because others trusted them. Authority may come with a position. Trust is earned by knowing your subject, admitting what you do not know, listening, following through, and treating the person on the plant floor with the same respect you give the person in the executive office.

That taught me something I have carried throughout my career: Influence is not a position. It is a mindset. I did not learn that from a leadership textbook. The rooms taught me, and they still do.

Life Does Not Hand Us a Mind Map

When we look at someone's life from the outside, especially later in a career, it is easy to connect the dots. One position appears to lead naturally to the next opportunity, and the entire journey looks wonderfully organized in hindsight. It did not feel that way while I was living it.

My career was not a straight line, and there was no carefully constructed map explaining where everything would lead. There were opportunities I took, problems I did not expect, decisions that worked, and others I would not make the same way today. There were moments of confidence and moments when I wondered whether I had made the right decision. That is life.

Yet many of us compare the messy reality of our own lives with the organized version we see of someone else's. We see the title, the business, the book, or the success. We do not see all the years between the dots. I certainly could not see mine while I was living them.

Looking back, I can see what those years were teaching me. Quality taught me to search for causes rather than symptoms. Warranty taught me to look downstream and ask what an earlier decision eventually created. Manufacturing taught me that what looks right on paper must also work in the real world. Executives taught me the importance of decisions, while the people closest to the work taught me to understand what those decisions actually do.

Most importantly, working across organizations taught me that very few meaningful problems belong neatly inside one department.

The dots were connecting even when I could not see the picture. Organizations were filled with talented people, but their knowledge did not always connect. Engineering knew something manufacturing did not. Manufacturing saw something leadership could not see. Quality understood a problem another function considered someone else's responsibility. Warranty often saw the evidence long after the decisions that created the problem had been made.

Everyone held a piece of the picture, but few could see the whole thing.

That is when I began thinking about walls-not the walls separating offices, but the invisible walls between people, functions, and ideas. "This is not my responsibility." "We have always done it this way." "That is another department." "We already tried that." Four simple statements can build very effective walls.

I came to understand that organizations do not always need another process to solve their problems. Sometimes they need a different mindset.

After 30 years in business, I founded my consulting company, 3P Partners. Working with different companies allowed me to see familiar patterns across industries, functions, and leadership teams. Information existed but remained disconnected. Problems were solved, but the learning did not always travel with the solution. Organizations became very good at reacting to problems without becoming equally good at preventing them.

Later, when I sat down to write Mindset Architects: Breaking Down Organizational Walls to Drive Workplace Performance, I did something that makes me smile now. I tried to create a mind map of my life. I had decades of experiences in my head and was determined to organize every lesson and make the entire journey fit neatly onto a page.

It did not work. Of course it did not. My life had not happened according to a mind map, so why did I think I could explain it with one?

Eventually, I told myself, "Deb, stop trying to map the story and just tell it." So I did.

Our stories do not become valuable because we have organized them perfectly. They become valuable when we are willing to understand what they taught us and then share those lessons with someone else.

I could not have drawn a line early in my career that ended with 3P Partners, Mindset Architects, and Broadview. Today, I can see the connection. My career gave me experiences; those experiences became lessons; and those lessons shaped the mindset that gave me the courage to create something of my own.

I have learned to trust the journey a little more.

What Experience Asked Me to Build

My consulting work and the process of writing Mindset Architects led me to another question: What am I going to do with everything I have learned?

I kept seeing organizations spend enormous energy solving today's issue without recognizing that someone elsewhere might already possess the lesson they needed. The same problems appeared in different forms, while valuable knowledge remained separated by functions, systems, and time. I kept thinking there had to be a better way.

That question eventually led me to Broadview, the enterprise software platform I am building to connect problems, people, decisions, actions, and organizational learning. The goal is to help companies move from repeatedly reacting to problems toward preventing them.

Broadview is technology, but the idea behind it is deeply human. Technology should not replace people's thinking. It should help connect their thinking.

I did not begin this chapter at 29. I began it after 30 years in business, after founding a consulting company, and after writing a book. There was a time when I might have asked, "Why now?" Today, I ask, "Why not now?"

Perhaps I could not have built Broadview at 30. I had not yet seen enough, made enough mistakes, solved enough problems, or listened to enough people across enough organizations. Time did not take the opportunity away from me. Time helped prepare me for it.

Women are given many timelines. By a certain age, we are expected to have reached a position, discovered our purpose, or somehow arrived. I am no longer sure where we are supposedly arriving. Life keeps changing and, if we are fortunate, we keep learning.

Maybe you are 30 and wondering whether you are ready to lead. Maybe you are 45 and questioning whether the career you built is still the career you want. Maybe you are 60 and carrying an idea you have never acted upon. Or maybe, like me, you are 70 and still asking what you can build next.

None of us is late. We are simply standing at different places in our stories.

Your experience is not baggage. It is intellectual capital. When we are younger, we often focus on building a career. Later, we can ask a different question: What can I build from my career?

For me, the answer became a consulting company, a book, and now Broadview. For another woman, it may be a new business, a different career, an opportunity to mentor someone, or an idea finally acted upon. The answer will be different for each of us. The willingness to ask the question is what matters.

Influence is not about being the loudest person in the room, carrying the biggest title, or having all the answers. It is having enough confidence in your experience to contribute and enough humility to remain curious. Sometimes it is also having the courage to see yourself differently.

There is no expiration date on curiosity, purpose, or becoming something you have not been before. Your experiences, perspective, and story have value. Use them, because influence is not the title you carry. It is what changes because you were there.

As for me, I am 70. I founded the consulting company, wrote the book, and am building the technology. I am still listening, learning, and asking questions.

I am not finished yet.