Developing Your Influencing Skill

by Colin Gautrey

The objective of exercising influencing skill is to motivate others to do things for you. They may not at first be inclined to do what you want, and this is where your skill comes to your aid. Resistance is likely because you are trying to change their natural inclinations, or at the very least, adjust their priorities to accommodate your request. This is why it requires skill to achieve the result. The more resistance you can expect, the greater the degree of skill you will need.

Developing influencing skill is not an easy task, because of the complex nature of human behavior. Yet there are some simple things you can do which can dramatically increase your effectiveness.

Recently, a colleague and I discovered a simple approach which increases the potential to influence when we were developing the Influence and Political Styles Quotient (the IPQ). We found that flexing your behavioural style can have a big impact. Everyone naturally adopts a different preferred style. Some people prefer to influence with sensitivity rather than assertion. Others are inclined to display much emotion when they attempt to influence, rather than to remain poker-faced.

The interesting factor that has shown up in our work is that each of us has a preferred way of being influenced and usually this is very close to the way that we prefer to influence others. The implication of this is that if you wish to maximise your effectiveness at influencing, you will need to flex your style to match the preferences of the other person.

1. Understand Your Own Influence Style. The IPQ diagnoses your preference on four different dimensions of behaviour: Sociability and Networking, Determination and Dominance, Gravitas and Emotional Management, and Tact and Diplomacy. Which of these do you use naturally? Which are your strengths and which do you prefer to avoid? Understanding this will help you to work out who you will find easier or more difficult to influence.
2. Diagnose Your Target's Preferences. With knowledge of these dimensions, where do you think the person whom you want to influence would rate their IPQ dimensions? Your assessment here will give you the insights into which style is likely to be most effective at motivating them to do what you want them to do.
3. Flex Your Style to Match the Target. The challenge now is to modify your behavioural style to suit the other person. For instance if you are naturally inclined to influence on the basis of friendship, yet your target usually influences with strong assertion, you need to increase the amount of assertion you use when interacting with them.

Let me give you just one of the many examples of how adjusting your style really works. I was recently working with Joe who was struggling to get his boss to accept his ideas. We identified that Joe, preferred to influence with assertion, and when attempting to influence his boss, he was pushing hard with straight facts and rationale. We then considered how his boss attempts to influence him and discovered that he used lots of emotion, enthusing about what he wanted Joe to do and getting quite excited about the benefits. The simple observation that Joe made was that he needed to display how much he cared about his ideas in a more emotive way, which was easy, because Joe really did care about what he was aiming for. The result — it worked first time! Joe reported back to me that his boss had gone for the idea straight away with the comment, "I can see you're really passionate about this, let's go for it!"

The Influence and Political Styles Quotient (the IPQ) is a unique psychometric tool which helps individuals and teams to diagnose their preferred influencing styles. This enables them to learn how to develop their style and also to understand how best to influence others. To find out more about the IPQ, click here.

Colin Gautrey — author, coach, facilitator and noted expert in the practical use of power and influence in the workplace. Colin has coached top executives around the world, run workshops for international teams and always gets results. As an author, he has written several books and regularly appears on the conference stage on his specialist subject of power and influence. To find out more about his work, visit him at www.gautreygroup.com .