How does the influencing process work?
(Execution Excellence -"Ability to get things done" Series)
Last week, we discussed the importance of developing Influencing skills at the workplace to get things done.
Despite your strong professional expertise, you will have growth only when you influence others positively to get things done. Positional power will help to some extent only. Hence we need to develop influencing skills.
The first step is understanding our influencing style and context, which i have given in the QUALITY OF INFLUENCE framework. It helps to understand the influencing process.
In any transaction with others, awareness of three factors will help to enhance the quality of getting things done.
1. Aware of the situation/context and its impact on you, your function, your organization
2. Awareness of your dominant influencing style, derived voice tone, and expression in terms of the statement
3. Awareness of your counterpart influencing style, derived voice tone, and the expression in terms of the statement
For example,
you want to delegate the PPT presentation preparation ( which you suppose to present to your management) to your junior colleague. They may not be interested in preparing, but you influence them to do it because you are using your commanding authority. Here the context is simple; the beneficiary is yourself, you use a simple commanding style, and your junior colleague gets it done.
In another instance, you must get your travel bill clearance from a finance person, and they are not reporting to you. The beneficiary would be you, and you can not use the commanding style of influence, and your counterpart need not be influenced easily by your style. He may use the rational style of influence, and there would be challenges in getting things done unless you modify your style.
In another instance, with the same finance functions, you need to get the payment release immediately to your vendor. Otherwise, the production line will get stopped. In this situation, you must get things done as soon as possible, and the beneficiary is the organization. You can choose different influencing styles like rational or balancing. You will get things done relatively easier than in the previous cases.
The key point is that every situation requires different influencing styles and must match with counterparts.
The awareness of the situation and influencing style of you and your counterpart will help you to be more flexible. However, in reality, as i observed, most people need to be made aware of the context and style as they use the same dominant style in every situation and are stuck in poor execution capability.
Just relate to your recent incident where you succeeded or failed in influencing others, you could see the framework's relevance, and you will get the importance of flexibility in style with context and counterpart.
Let us discuss the style/tone/statement in detail in the next week.
Have a great week ahead.
