Think of a problem you’re trying to solve. Maybe you want to get your team (or yourself) approved to attend an important industry conference. Maybe you want your company to buy that next whiz bang piece of printing equipment that will make your job more efficient or take your creative processes to the next level. Perhaps you have a difficult customer relationship. Maybe you want to be promoted up to the next key rung of your career ladder.

In all of these situations, no matter what your title or reputation, you’re not involved in an equal partnership. You’re the underdog. As an underdog, you have no power or advantage. You hold none of the “cards” while the person you want to persuade holds all of them. To get what you want, you’ll have to change the mind of someone more powerful than yourself.

And the powerful people are different. The typical influence tactics you may have read about for general influence situations don’t often work with powerful people. These situations call for extreme influence tactics.

Based on my comprehensive national research projects involving 1,000 surveys and underdog influencers – and who they persuaded, as well as interviews with the powerful people whose minds were changed, we now know that the following tactics are essential for upward influence, particularly in the workplace.

Winning Upward Persuasion Tactics

Among the seven extreme influence tactics uncovered in my research, there are several that are counter-intuitive but will help you win.

First, pack your passion. The common advice to “be passionate and you’ll win” only works when you are helping the person you want to persuade either win new friends or become a hero. Otherwise, you appear unpredictable, unstable, and powerful people don’t like unpredictability.

Be vivid. Vivid communications mean you are proximate to your influence target —you are face to face. Remote influence tactics rarely work with those up the food chain. They need to see you are willing to make the effort to win them over.

Create a team with connected converts. “Connected converts” are those who have a relationship or leadership position that connects them to the decision maker in some way, and ideally, who are converts to your position—-they used to be on the other side, so their conversion to your team gives your cause credibility.