Ever been in a tough spot to influence or persuade people around you? Looking to learn the best ways to influence people around you?
Well, if you ask me, influencing and persuasion skill starts getting built right from our childhood. Remember, as a child, we would try to influence our parents on how important the computer is for us, or persuade them to let us go to the fun fair or a college trip. It was never a YES as the first answer and we would use various different tricks and tactics to get what we want.
And now we are here trying to learn influence skills. You might be saying that influencing parents is different than influencing clients or stakeholders. Is it really? Are your parents not your stakeholders during that given point in time?
You would need to provide data points on why the computer is important to you, how would it eventually impact your performance and how can it lessen the burden on your parents in the long run for teaching them.
Principle 1: Make your stakeholders heroes in their story
We would know who would be easier to influence and who is important for us to influence on various matters.
For example, many of us would go to our elder siblings to get it communicated, for certain matters we would go to our father, and similarly on certain matters to our mother. How do you know or how do you decide whom to reach? And this brings us to our second principle of Influencing Skills.
Principle 2: Pick and Choose
Remember not everyone might be important at every stage. Prioritize who you want to influence first. At a higher level there are 2 types of characters at every stage of influencing:
- Non Playing Characters: Ones who are present but might not be interested in the current state of the discussion. You could use them at a later stage when needed.
- Playing Characters or DMUs: The decision-Making unit or the Playing Characters need to be kept in the loop and is an important candidate to influence
Principle 3: Priorities Change. All stakeholders are important at different stages
Again, remember to map all your stakeholders and figure out who is controlling the people and resources at this point in time. Refer to my blog Stakeholder Management on how to map your stakeholders. Priorities of the stakeholders would continue to change over the period of time and hence continue to map your stakeholders at every stage to make a better decision.
Making assumptions is one of the biggest mistakes we do while trying to influence our stakeholders. We assume someone is already influenced and doesn’t make an effort to present. For example, for a few things when our grandparents have the highest influence on a few matters and we assume that they will anyway approve it. In this process, we plan everything and at the last minute, the proposal is denied.
Principle 4: No Assumptions!
One of the simple things that we would generally do is show that we are responsible. And we can do this by achieving smaller milestones like we would do our basic chores perfectly before showing our parents that we are capable to take care of ourselves. This would over time develop trust and becomes easier to influence. It then becomes a piece of cake to get any kind of approval.
Principle 5: Small commitments build trust to gain larger commitments
As a child, we would know what strategy would work best for someone. In fact even today, I am sure we would make use of the strategies that work well for someone and these strategies would change from person to person. Sometimes we make use of the emotions to influence while sometimes logic would work and sometimes a mix of these things. And this makes me introduce myself to the famous Rhetorical appeals of Ethos (Credibility), Pathos(Emotions), and Logos(Logic).
Principle 6: Identify what strategy works best for the stakeholder
As I mentioned we have been practicing these influencing skills right from our childhood and almost daily in our lives, it’s time to apply the same with our client stakeholders in our professional space.
I have also covered the 6 most important principles of persuasion in my previous article on Stakeholder Management.
Challenges of Influencing
Even after knowing all these principles of influencing, there might still be challenges while trying to influence people in a room. Influencing is in fact the toughest when there are people with different ideas in the room. Even if the end goal is the same, the process to the end goal might be different for everyone.
Understand that everyone in the room has an equal voice and authority. If there is an authoritative person in the room, then the power can be used to enforce a decision and one might need to influence only the one who is in power. However, this might not always be true. And in such a scenario one of the key concepts is NEGOTIATION.
Having a negotiation contract that works in the favor of both parties is the only solution here. This is also called ZOPA(Zone of Possible Agreement).
Active influencers always look towards the narrow possibilities of ZOPA by being the Anchor first when Infleuncing and Persuasion does not work
