The difference between authority and influence at work
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Release Date: 05/12/2026
Why Is It So Hard to Get Hired in 2026? Job Search Reality with Tank Rhodes, Part 1
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Hiring has always been complicated, but for many professionals, the process feels especially difficult to understand right now. Candidates are navigating long hiring processes, inconsistent communication, changing expectations, conflicting advice, and technology that isn’t always well understood. In this episode, Julia Toothacre is joined again by Francis “Tank” Rhodes, a human resources professional who is also experiencing the hiring process from the candidate side. Tank shares an update on his own job search, and the conversation uses his experience to explore some of the larger...
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Questions to Ask Before Changing Careers
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Thinking about making a major career change? Before you update your resume or start applying for jobs, it's worth taking a step back. Career frustration doesn't always mean you need a new career. Sometimes it's your company, your manager, your work environment, or a shift in your own priorities that's making you question what's next. In this episode, I walk through the questions I encourage professionals to ask before making a significant career move. We'll look at what's happening in your current role, why you're considering a change, how your personality and values influence career...
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When Work Becomes Who You Are: Professional Identity Purgatory with Geoff Curtis
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
What happens when the career you spent decades building becomes part of your identity, and then the role suddenly disappears? In this episode of Control Your Career, Strategic Career Consultant Julia Toothacre speaks with Geoff Curtis about professional identity, high achievement, career transitions, and the uncomfortable space between who you were and who you are becoming. Geoff spent nearly 30 years building a career in corporate communications, eventually serving as Chief Communications Officer at Horizon Therapeutics. Today, he leads Marshall Curtis Communications, where he advises...
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Why Career Development Needs a Different Approach
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Most career advice focuses on one thing: finding your next job. While resumes, interviews, networking, and job search strategies are important, they're only one part of career development. As your career grows, so do the influences shaping your decisions, making it harder to understand what you actually want versus what you've simply learned to expect. In this episode, I share why I believe career development needs a broader approach. We talk about the experiences that shaped my perspective, why traditional career theories don't always reflect today's workplace, and why becoming more...
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What the Hiring Headlines Get Wrong About Gen Z, AI, and Personality Tests
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Hiring headlines about Gen Z, artificial intelligence, the Workday lawsuit, and personality assessments are moving faster than the facts. A study gets published, a lawsuit moves forward, or someone shares a frustrating experience on social media. Before long, a complicated workplace issue has been reduced to a confident headline that may not reflect what the original source actually says. In this Career Trends episode of Control Your Career, Strategic Career Consultant Julia Toothacre looks beyond the clickbait to examine three major conversations happening in hiring right now. Julia explores...
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Long-Term Unemployment, Employment Gaps, and Today's Job Market
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
What happens when someone spends years looking for work, only to be judged by the gap on their resume? In this conversation, I sit down with HR professional Tank Rhodes to discuss long-term unemployment, hiring bias, employment gaps, and what today's job market looks like from both sides of the hiring process. Whether you're a job seeker trying to understand today's hiring market or a hiring manager making difficult hiring decisions, this conversation offers valuable perspective on how the labor market has changed and why employment gaps don't tell the whole story. In this episode, we discuss:...
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Career Change Without Starting Over
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Are you miserable in your career? If the answer is yes, a career change might be worth exploring. But if the answer is no, that does not automatically mean you should stay exactly where you are. One of the biggest mistakes professionals make is treating career change as something that only happens when a situation becomes unbearable. In reality, many career changes happen because someone wants to build new skills, create more flexibility, increase income, improve quality of life, or move toward work that fits who they are now. In this final episode of Season 13, Julia Toothacre talks about how...
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The 5 Types of Managers: How to Navigate Each Leadership Style
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Every manager has a different leadership style, and understanding how your manager leads can help you communicate more effectively, build trust, and continue growing your career. If you're planning to stay in your current role for a while, learning how to work with your manager may be one of the highest-impact things you can do. In this episode, I break down five common management styles, including the strengths and challenges of each, so you can better understand your current manager, evaluate future opportunities, and adjust how you work together. This framework comes from an earlier season...
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Staying Market Ready in an Uncertain Job Market
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Market conditions can change your career faster than you think. In this episode of Control Your Career, Career Coach and Strategic Career Consultant Julia Toothacre discusses how professionals can stay market-ready, build career leverage, and prepare for unexpected career changes without living in constant job search mode. Over the last two decades, professionals have experienced the 2008 recession, the rise of LinkedIn, remote work, return-to-office mandates, layoffs, and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. These shifts have changed hiring trends, career opportunities, and the skills...
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Are Lateral Career Moves Good for Your Career?
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Career growth is not always vertical. For a long time, professionals were told to climb the corporate ladder, stay loyal, take the promotion, and keep moving up. But that advice does not always reflect how careers actually evolve today. In this episode of Control Your Career, Julia Toothacre explores the value and complexity of lateral career moves. She explains why some professionals resist them, why a move without a higher title can feel risky, and how lateral opportunities can quietly build long-term career leverage. A lateral move may not look impressive right away. It may not come with a...
info_outlineIf you’ve ever wondered why some people get pulled into decisions at work while others are told after the fact, this episode is for you.
In this episode of Control Your Career, I break down how influence actually works at work and why it has very little to do with your title, even though that’s what most people focus on. You can be experienced, capable, and respected in your role and still find yourself left out of key conversations, and that gap usually has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with influence.
We’ll talk through what it looks like to move from executing decisions to shaping them, along with what actually builds trust over time, because it’s not the big wins people think it is. You’ll hear how judgment and consistency shape how you are perceived, and why being “good at your job” is not always enough to be included early.
I also walk through how to recognize whether you are being consulted or simply informed, and what that says about your current level of influence. From there, we get into how to build influence without formal authority, along with what might be getting in your way even if you feel like you are doing everything right.
We also address the part that often gets overlooked, which is how organizational culture, bias, and power dynamics shape who gets heard and who gets overlooked. If you want to control your career, you have to understand how to read those environments and respond strategically.
In this episode:
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The difference between authority and influence at work
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Why you may not be included in important decisions
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How trust and judgment build influence over time
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What it means to be consulted instead of informed
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How to expand your influence without relying on a title
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The role of bias, culture, and power in workplace influence
If you want to grow in your career without waiting for a title or promotion, influence is one of the most important forms of leverage you can build.
Read the blog:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/2026/05/12/influence-without-authority-at-work/
Explore all episodes:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/podcast/
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliakrussell/
FREE Career Resources:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/free/