Influencing Skills

Influencing Skills Training

Find the next available Open Influencing Skills course

Influencing Skills

Most people's jobs require them to influence other people a lot of the time.

This could include convincing your boss you deserve a raise, inspiring your team to finish a project, cajoling a colleague to do a presentation for you, getting someone to see your point of view in order to have their support at a meeting.

Influencing can also involve persuading other people to be your champions so they will, in turn, be able to provide access to areas you don't have any direct route to now.

We call this 'expanding your spheres of influence', and it can be key to making your presence felt without appearing out of line.

You may try to exert your influence through coercion and manipulation. You might even succeed in getting things done, but that isn't really influencing; that's forcing people to do what you want, often against their will.

You won't have succeeded in winning support.

Real influencing skills are far subtler and fairer than that: they require good interpersonal and communication skills and an ability to get other people to want to support you.

An interesting point about people who use their influencing skills well, is that other people like being around them.

There's a kind of exciting buzz, or sense that things happen when they're about.

Why is that?

Well, think about it for a second or two: they don't sit around wishing things were different while moaning there's nothing they can do about it.

They also don't sit around blaming others or complaining about what needs fixing that will make things better.

They fix stuff.

And sometimes the most influential person in a company isn't the one at the top - it's the one who knows how to get to the one at the top.