Leading Growth Without Authority: Lessons from Launching a Public AI Event Series
One of the most interesting leadership challenges I’ve encountered wasn’t technical. It was cultural.
While working on a public event series exploring the economic implications of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, my responsibility was to help establish the operational framework for the series and support its growth. The program brought together researchers, economists, and public audiences interested in understanding how emerging technologies may shape the broader economy.
Launching the series required assembling a cross-functional team that included marketing specialists, web producers, livestream technicians, designers, communications staff, and event producers.
The structure was typical of large organizations: many contributors, multiple departments, and very little direct authority.
The question quickly became: How do you lead progress when most of the team does not report to you?
The Cultural Challenge
Technically, launching the event series was straightforward. We needed registration infrastructure, livestream production, promotion, and post-event distribution.
The larger challenge was cultural.
In many research-oriented institutions, promotion and audience growth are not always discussed as primary goals. The focus is understandably on research quality and public service. Yet behind the scenes, one metric still matters when evaluating whether a public initiative should continue:
Did people show up?
Attendance and engagement often become the clearest signals of whether an initiative is resonating with the public.
Recognizing this, I focused on establishing a measurable goal for the series.
Establishing a Clear Metric
Rather than measuring success vaguely, we set a concrete target: eventually reaching 1,000 registrants per event.
At the time, this number felt ambitious within the organization.
The goal was not framed as a marketing metric alone. Instead, it became a proxy for public engagement with the ideas being discussed.
Every week, our conversations returned to a simple question:
Where are we on registrants?
That question helped keep the team aligned around a shared outcome.
Experimentation Without a Budget
Unlike commercial marketing teams, we did not have an advertising budget to accelerate growth.
Instead, we focused on expanding our reach through operational changes and collaboration across teams.
Some of the strategies included:
Extending promotional timelines to build awareness for each event
Expanding distribution channels, including livestream platforms
Leveraging existing email lists across different business units
Encouraging internal staff to participate in promotion
Experimenting with outreach to new audiences, such as college graduates entering the workforce
Not every idea was immediately embraced. In fact, there was healthy skepticism around some of the approaches.
For example, several team members initially believed a two-week promotion window was sufficient. Based on my experience with audience development, I advocated for a longer promotional runway that would allow awareness to compound over time.
We ultimately compromised on a 60-day promotional cycle.
Influence Over Authority
Because most members of the team did not report to me directly, progress required persuasion rather than directive leadership.
This meant consistently returning to the same questions:
What are we learning from the data?
Where can we expand our reach?
What can we test next?
Over time, the results began to speak for themselves.
After several installments, the series began averaging 1,000 registrants per event, a milestone that exceeded initial expectations and became a widely cited measure of the program’s success.
Leadership Lessons
Looking back, several leadership principles emerged from the experience.
Clear metrics create alignment.
Teams work more effectively when success is clearly defined.
Influence matters more than authority.
Cross-functional leadership depends on persuasion, trust, and shared purpose.
Experimentation drives progress.
Growth rarely comes from a single tactic. It emerges from consistent testing and iteration.
Persistence builds credibility.
Early skepticism is common when introducing new approaches, but results eventually shift perspectives.
The Long-Term Lesson
Today, the operational framework for the series is well established. Its processes, promotional cadence, and audience expectations are now part of the program’s structure.
That evolution introduced a different leadership challenge: learning when to step back.
Once systems are built and teams are aligned, leadership becomes less about pushing execution and more about trusting others to continue improving the work.
In many ways, that transition is the final stage of building something meaningful: creating a structure strong enough to grow beyond the person who first pushed it forward.