Influence is Everything
- How do you ensure your message is conveyed with presence and impact?
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How do you build rapport with stakeholders?
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How do you galvanise and lead your team with clarity and creativity?
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How can you be credible, connected and influential, whatever the context?
1. GET THINGS DONE AND BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIPS
You don’t need to sacrifice your relationships at work to get things done. Nor do you need to give up your goals for fear of damaging an important alliance. When you’re intentional and flexible in your use of influence behaviours you can meet objectives and develop strong and trusting relationships at the same time.
2. FACE YOUR CHALLENGES WITH CONFIDENCE
With a knowledge of different influence behaviours and strategies to hand, you can face into challenges and capitalise on opportunities; get ideas heard, tackle difficult conversations, galvanise teams, overcome roadblocks.
3. OVERCOME YOUR PERSONAL BLOCKS
Knowing what influence behaviours to use and using them authentically allows you to overcome your fears and negative beliefs. You can adapt to the situation, make objective choices, and maintain your presence and impact. Your personal blocks no longer diminish your performance.
What do we mean by Positive?
When you achieve your objective and maintain or build your relationships, you have positive impact.
If you focus too much on just getting the job done, over time people will feel steamrollered, or forced, because you’re not paying attention to the relationship.However, if all you do is focus on the relationship, it’s likely that you’ll back off from meeting your objective. And then people will perceive you as avoiding.
Positive influence is about taking an intentional view of how much energy you give to the task, and how much energy you give to the relationship.
What is Power?
Positional Power might be made up of a combination of your status, your job title, your expertise and your access to resource. Personal power is an internal resource made up of the physical, mental and emotional energy that you have to complete a task, make a change, overcome a challenge.
Your positional power + your personal power = your total power
The total power that you can apply to a situation is a combination of your positional power and your personal power and, if you can learn to use them both positively, then you are giving yourself the best chance to be influential.
The total power that you can apply to a situation is a combination of your positional power and your personal power and, if you can learn to use them both positively, then you are giving yourself the best chance to be influential.
What is Influence?
Influence is your power in action. When you apply your power to something that you want to achieve, it is visible in the way that you behave and can be felt by others: your power is converted to influence.
There are all sorts of factors that can diminish the amount of energy that others actually experience when you attempt to influence. Sometimes those factors are external – a last-minute agenda change or the fact that you’re running late might derail some of your careful planning and cause you to lose energy. Sometimes those factors are internal – your thoughts, beliefs and preconceptions can adversely affect the energy that others feel. You’ll probably revert to behaviours with which you feel most comfortable but, if they’re not suitable to the situation, you run the risk of failing in your objective, damaging your relationship, or both.
If you have influence flexibility, you’ll be comfortable with a range of behaviours and will recognise which situations are most likely to be impacted positively by which behaviours. That way, more of your positive power is converted to positive influence.
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Choose a virtual or blended learning programme.
The Situational Influence Model is simple but genius and the course does an excellent job of introducing and giving you experience using the model.