Have you every wondered why some people seem to be able to overcome any barriers and get their ideas accepted. What is the magic ingredient that they have and can you develop it for yourself?
In the modern organisation there is an increasing dependence on technology such as emails, over face-to-face communication. The impact of this is that it has eroded some very important skills sets such as influencing and persuasion.
If we think on this a moment, we can see how this will start to erode all manner of subtle influences that will have important impacts on how we make business choices. Decisions are rarely a binary relationship between proposal and decision, especially when we are talking about things that matter such as strategy, investment decisions or new ways of working.
For people in the know, such as those individuals that have always been good at climbing the corporate ladder they have an intuitive understanding of what influencing means and how to go about doing it. These individuals are often able to promote their agenda and push through thorny decisions with difficult stakeholders without ever appearing pushy. So how do they do it and can you learn from them?
Here are three of their golden rules:
Only use email as a fall-back position. Of course you need to use email and it is an essential way of getting information out to people, but key influencers know that if something is really important, they will always speak to the key decision makers and get their thinking before the send button is pressed.
Think about it for just a moment. What is your chance of success if you are sending a proposal or decision cold to a key influencer without giving him or her any warning that you require their support. However by contacting them first you have already take the first and most important step in engagement, by getting their buy in early, which leads to the next rule.
Never look for a solution to your own idea. Influencers are very good at realizing that they must solve the problems of the organisation or more precisely the problems that they key decision makers are concerned with. Too many young gifted managers become the judge jury and executioner of their own ideas only to have them rejected by the board at the last hurdle. Not necessarily because their solutions were bad, but because nobody but that individual was involved in deciding if it was a worthwhile cause or not. So before solving an idea without a clear problem, talk to the senior stakeholders. Share your ideas by all means, but then listen to theirs and see if you can see an opportunity that already has senior stakeholder buy-in. If they came up with the idea, why wouldn’t they support it? But they cannot be a lone voice in pushing an idea through which leads to the third rule:
Think Federally. Decisions these days are rarely taken by one individual, but rather a group of individuals, so even if you have the most powerful and most influential stakeholder on board, you would always need to share the idea and seek support from other key decision makers ahead of any key decision meeting. Providing a short pitch, asking of their opinions and clarifying what you need from them (usually their support) will all help to avoid an idea being sabotaged at the last hurdle.
So if you have some influencing rules that you would like to share please do comment here.
For more information about how agents2change can help you with your influencing skills, please contact us on [email protected]
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