Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. About the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership, you're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader.

Speaker 1: 1:11

One of the most common areas of focus for leaders in coaching is navigating relationships at work. For all of us, learning to do this well is an ongoing process, even for the most relational of us. Challenging relationships at work are often the source of a lot of emotional challenges, and at the heart of what makes this challenging is our ability to influence others. I wonder if this resonates with you lying awake at night wondering how to work with somebody, how to influence them to change their mind or to find a way to navigate difficult leadership decisions with lots of opinions. The thing is, without even noticing it, we are actually influencing all the time, at many different points in our day, and learning to do it well can save us a lot of angst. If you think about it every time you want your two-year-old to go to bed, you're influencing. Or asking a colleague to work with you on a project, you're influencing. Leading a team and you want them to work on a new system, you are influencing. And the thing about this is that most of us are not actually that great at it. We come to influencing knowing what we want and we often simply try and convince the other person of that, without really stopping to think about what they might want, their position in the situation and whether or not they're even open to being influenced.

Speaker 1: 2:47

Alongside this, the influencing landscape at work has changed. We've come over the last few decades out of command and control organizations where we believed that we could tell people what to do and they would do it, although I would still argue that even in those situations we needed to influence, but now we're in a time of dispersed leadership, working in matrix organizations or flat structures. We have younger people who want a very different approach to leadership. They want to be led in a different way, and more and more people are in positions where influencing is the main way to get things done. Those of you in leadership roles and those of you not in leadership roles are all needing to influence, and we have less position authority often, and more need to draw people into what we want to happen. What's interesting, though, is this isn't really new. This hasn't come about as organizations have changed. Dale Carnegie wrote about this in his very famous book how to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936.

Speaker 1: 3:59

In this podcast, which is a refresh of an older podcast, I'm going to share practical ways to approach influencing others, and I'm going to offer you a three-step process to help you plan for this, and this process is one that really respects the people that we're influencing. Let me start by what I mean by influencing. For me, it's about the ability to affect someone. It might be about the way they're behaving, or to affect an outcome, and we're doing that without using force or formal authority. We're not there to make people do things. We're there to find a way to help them see why and how they could do it. And if you think about this now, if you think about the people you know who are influential, and you think about how they go about it, what do they do? How do they exert influence in situations, I encourage you now just to think about their behaviors, their attitudes that they come in with, how they treat people and maybe jot a couple of those down and, as we go through this, to see where they might be in relation to what I'm talking about, because it's interesting to see what it is that they're doing that helps them to be successful influencers and how you can borrow those behaviors and approaches.

Speaker 1: 5:19

First, I'm going to share a three-step approach to influencing others to a point of view or an action, and I'm going to share this as an approach that fundamentally respects the other. It respects their views and their perspective, and I'll briefly share the stages and then I'll go into them in depth. The three stages are number one getting really clear about your goal or your desired outcome. This sounds pretty straightforward, but I've learned that we often start with a goal focused on us and not on the bigger picture or the people we're influencing. Step two is to identify your current state, to think about what's happening at the moment and where things that might help or hinder you are in relation to achieving your goal. This is also where we get really granular in understanding the individual group of people we're seeking to influence. And step three is all about action. It's about which action, which of the influencing strategies are going to be most effective, which will fit the person we're influencing or the situation we're influencing in, and what's the best approach. So let's start with step one, which is setting the outcome. As I said, we often approach setting the outcome by considering where we are now, what we want to get out of the situation, rather than stepping back and looking at the broader picture, the context, the people we're influencing, and even thinking about what their vision is or what our vision is that we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Let me give you an example of this. A long time ago, about 15 years ago, I was teaching influencing in an engineering organization and I was working with the marketing team. They had an issue, something they were struggling with around the bidding process for new projects. Their experience was that the engineers brought them in to help them with the bid, but right at the last minute and in their view they could add a lot more value if they were brought into the bidding process earlier, even when their organization was invited to bid. And when I asked them about their influencing goal, their desired outcome, they said their goal was to be invited earlier into the bidding process.

Speaker 1: 7:34

The problem with this goal is it's really lacking a why. Why is it important for the engineers to invite marketing in earlier? And there wasn't a hook to convince the engineers that this was a good idea. It's a kind of process goal we want to be invited, not an outcome goal. What are we trying to achieve from that? The engineers I know and love are very practical people. They want to see reasons for doing things, they want to know the why, and there are generally, in fact, different styles between marketing and engineering. So they may be worried about bringing marketing in earlier and the impact on the progress of the bid and they don't want to risk slowing it down. They want to win this bid and they maybe don't want to have more and perhaps very different people in the room.

Speaker 1: 8:21

So with this team, with this marketing team, I invited them to step back, to think about the vision for being involved earlier, and it became very clear for them. They actually thought that if they could help the engineering team, the organization would win more bids and be more successful. They were pretty confident about this and so that became their goal to help the organization win more bids. But we kept pushing and saying, is that far enough? And then they went further. They actually believed that if they were involved earlier they could help the engineering team, support the idea that they were the best engineering organization in the world, and many people believed they were. So they dug deeper into their goal. They thought about what a difference it would make to the teams the engineering teams, the organization when they won more bids and what a difference it would make if people really knew how good they were. And they also thought about what would happen if they didn't get involved. They thought that maybe the organization wouldn't win as much work and wouldn't be seen as this amazing organization, so more opportunities wouldn't win as much work and wouldn't be seen as this amazing organization, so more opportunities wouldn't arise. So now they had a very clear goal, one that was hard to disagree with. It was about being the best engineering organization in the world, being seen as that and winning more bids.

Speaker 1: 9:38

So step one is creating a clear vision and picture of your goal, one that will inspire others so that they see the difference they'll make, they'll see what will happen if they're involved and they'll understand the consequences of not doing that. They'll see the wider context themselves. Step two is identifying your current state. Where are you at the moment? What are the things that might help or hinder you with your goal?

Speaker 1: 10:05

So often when we're influencing others, we influence from our perspective. We think about what we want to get out of the situation and where we want the other people to be, but I believe we're standing in the wrong place. It's much more important for us to stand in the shoes of the other people or the other groups of people, to really think about what matters for them, what's going on for them and what might they need in order to move towards you willingly. Without this, we're pushing them in a direction we want. So we can start by thinking about how they might be feeling or thinking about the situation, and if we go back to our engineers, we can think about what might be going on for them and not wanting marketing anywhere near their bid too early, which seemed to be the case. We can think about the areas which might work for the person and the areas that might be challenging. So if I'm influencing somebody to work with me on a project, for example, their workload might already be tight. So I need to be thinking about that as I consider the situation.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Dale Carnegie said there's only one way under high heaven to get anyone to do anything just one way and that's by making the other person want to do it. So unless we stand in their shoes and think about them, we're going to find it really hard to get them to a place where they might want to be involved In going further with this. I believe that understanding the other person really helps getting to know them, getting to understand what it is that's important to them. We can think about things like their career, their current work experience, their past work experience, their relationship with their boss or bosses, their beliefs, their values about work, their situation, their concern. We can stand in their shoes. We can work out what makes them tick, what keeps them awake at night, how can our situation help them? And if our situation is going to make their situation worse, what can we do about it? We want to think about what's in it for them of going with us, of being influenced, and if there's nothing and sometimes there is nothing in it for them we want to know that as well, because we want to be able to acknowledge and honor this so that when we talk to them, we are respecting the other person.

Speaker 1: 12:27

If we go back to our engineers, here's a couple of ways of thinking about this in relation to them. As I said earlier, engineers are very practical people. They're often usually data and science and logic focused people who want things done in a very structured and specific way, and I'm really happy that they work like this, because I want my bridges and buildings to be structured and specific and standing. They're often focused on getting things done in a timely manner. So time is important and if we want to influence them to bring in marketing earlier, we have to think about this, because marketing people are often not always, but often a bit different. They may not be so much in the detail, they may be more creative, they may not mind working to the last minute, time may be less of a construct for them and they enjoy trying out new ideas and to see what happens, and you can see this might cause a bit of attention for the engineers, who want things to be done systematically and in a timely manner. So if marketing then want to influence engineering, they're going to have to present their case for inclusion in these meetings in a structured way, with timelines, and include their commitment to meeting the deadlines. They can talk about how they're open to flexing their style to support the successful bid. It's about reassuring people that we're not, in this case, going to come in and disrespect who they are and how they work.

Speaker 1: 13:55

So we've got the first two steps. Step one create a clear goal. Step two is get clear about the current situation and really build rapport. And step three is to take action to influence and to do this, as I've been saying, we want to find a way that fits the person we're influencing and the approach that's most likely to be helpful. I'm going to share with you now seven different influencing strategies that we can try. These are, of course, not an exhaustive list. You may have other strategies that work for you, but here are the seven that I like to use and to refer to. The first strategy is that we can use logic and data, and I've already talked a bit about that and it might seem obvious to some of you, but you may also be surprised by how seldom we miss this out, because sometimes something seems very logical to us and so we don't share it, and also some of us probably me included don't always include that because it's not something I particularly value. But it's incredibly important that we think about logic and data, and that's particularly true if we're influencing somebody who values this and who will need the data to be able to see why it makes sense in order to move.

Speaker 1: 15:11

The second strategy is to use a coaching approach. We can get to know the person. We can understand them, do a lot of listening, use curiosity, asking questions them. Do a lot of listening, use curiosity, asking questions. We can be asking them about any resistance. Why might they not want to be involved In this strategy? We're inviting them to talk about it and I've seen situations where people have used a coaching approach and they have discovered really good reasons why they shouldn't even be trying to do what they were trying to influence to happen. It brings all the information into the situation and it helps the other person we're influencing to feel very heard. We can create a common vision. In this, we work together with the person or the people we're influencing to identify what's possible. Where do we want to be? So? With our engineers, we're focusing on this common vision of being the best engineering firm, and so we might want to come together to work together to create that vision and think about how we bring that into the bidding process.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Strategy four is to use a relational approach, and this is where we start to go back and think about the best influencers you know, because I imagine that one of the good things that you think about them is that they're very relational, that they build good relationships with people in the organization. People are keen to know them and they're keen to get to know others. They like people and they respect people. Simply being relational itself can be a powerful influencing strategy. Strategy five is bargaining, and I think that if you have children, you already know that you're pretty good at bargaining, because they are good at bargaining and there's a lot of bargaining that goes on in the home, and I think we can do more of this at work. If you do this for me, I'm really willing to do this for you. Do more of this at work, if you do this for me. I'm really willing to do this for you and I can do something in return for you to help you further with whatever it is that you're dealing with. Strategy six is about creating an impact. This is about using something impactful or visionary or even shocking maybe visual images or a story that can really have a kind of emotional impact, that can trigger something powerful for the people we're influencing, and I have a bit of a sweet personal story about this.

Speaker 1: 17:30

A very long while ago, I got a job that I was really very happy to get. I was head of organisation development for a large UK-based organisation and, as I said, I was really pleased to get this job, and soon after I started, the CEO invited me to go out on his monthly visits to all the teams. He was great. He went out and met as many people as he could every month. It was a very dispersed organisation, and so I showed up in the car park to get in his car and he just couldn't stop laughing because consciously or not I still to this day don't know I'd worn a suit in corporate colors. Now let me tell you, our corporate colors were purple and I had a kind of bright purple silk suit. It sounds hideous. It was gorgeous at the time shoulder pads and all. It was a lot of fun, though, and he just thought it was gorgeous at the time shoulder pads and all. It was a lot of fun, though, and he just thought it was hilarious. That was the first time he was going out with me to meet people and it caused a lot of hilarity and it became a bit of a standing joke, which, of course, then made it around the organisation and many people talked about me being the organisational mascot.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Now, the thing about that joke is that I made an impact, so people remembered me, and there were times when I needed to go places, come into a meeting, maybe go to the board, and I wore that suit. I became very intentional about it because it helped with my brand. It made an impact. Nobody forgot me because of that suit. So that's a kind of simple and slightly silly way of thinking about it, but anything that does that creates impact can be very powerful. As I've said, you can use stories that bring to life the topic that you're influencing. You can use very visual slides. You can share examples of what will happen if you don't manage to influence people, you can really create an impact.

Speaker 1: 19:20

The final strategy you may be surprised to hear me mention is actually coercion. So this is where we tell people and of course, it's not a great influencing strategy, but it is one. This is where we tell people what to do. Now, clearly, we want to avoid the strategy at all costs. It's a last-ditch effort, but we can remember that it's there and it doesn't mean, of course, that if we tell people that they will actually do it and if we use it more than once, we may lose the relationship if we move to coercion too early. But it is there for emergencies, critical situations. It's something that we shouldn't forget, that we have.

Speaker 1: 20:02

You'll have your own strategies, and I'd be really curious to hear what the other influencing strategies are that you have when you're going into an influencing situation and as you're thinking about it, you might want to go about planning two or three of these different approaches. You might want to do vision and data, for example, and I would suggest always using a relational approach, but test them out, because some will work in some situations and others will work in other situations. Test them with people who are going to be involved and see which strategy they think is best. So there we have it. We have three steps. Create a clear vision, identify your current state, particularly around the people, and use an appropriate strategy. I asked you state particularly around the people and use an appropriate strategy. I asked you earlier to think about the people you see influencing effectively and how they behave.

Speaker 1: 20:54

And as we follow this three-step strategy, it's good for us to think about our own behaviours and think about their behaviours and see if there are things that we can learn from people who are influencing well that we can weave into our own strategies. And I think there are some things that we can definitely do. We can always be listening and curious. It's so important Adopting a coaching approach as an overall strategy or even just thinking about it as a human approach, learning to listen, show empathy, help other people feel that they're understood, and we can do this also by being confident. So if we're confident and we believe in the thing that we're influencing people about, that also helps other people to trust us In that listening and curiosity. It's also really important that we're open to being flexible and adaptable, because there's no point in listening if we aren't able to change things that we can. So we come into a situation we know we need to influence people and we're open to moving and shifting if we hear reasons why that really matters. Another behavior or skill that's really important to learn is about creating a clear argument and to build the case for the area that we're influencing in, and I think being willing to spend some time on that supports us in achieving our goal.

Speaker 1: 22:18

And in all of this, it's worth thinking about where and what method we're using to influence. This might seem obvious, but are we going to do it on a call or via email? It can be difficult for some things to influence by email, but others maybe those that are very database might be better in an email, because people are going to see all the evidence. Or are we going to wait to bump into the person in the pantry and do it in a very informal way? Or does it require a formal presentation? Does it require a long paper? Does it require lots of different conversations with lots of different people? So really thinking about that is important, and also thinking about our timing, so making sure that we time it in a way that's going to be effective for the people we're influencing.

Speaker 1: 23:02

And if all of this doesn't work, don't despair, go away. Go away, think again, try different strategies. Go in on another day, get feedback, talk to others about the best approaches, see what you can do to keep moving towards your outcome, as a few final thoughts always always hold. And see the other person as a full human, someone to be respected and trusted, even if they're very resistant to what you're trying to influence them on. Don't lose sight of who they are. They're resistant because of things that are important to them.

Speaker 1: 23:34

Appreciate people, thank them, share what you see in the attributes that they have that are powerful and impactful for them, and be kind and generous and impactful for them. And be kind and generous and, as I've said, be willing to change and flex. I wish you well as you go into thinking about developing your influencing skill. It's one of those skills that we can keep learning and keep growing, and it is possible for us to get much better at it, to keep learning and to be a very human influencer. Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend, and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom, or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.