Thursday, July 12, 2012
Today’s video is on the topic of influencing. This is a nice segue from the last video tip on communication because most of your influencing comes via your ability to communicate effectively; both verbally and nonverbally. Regardless of whether you need to influence your superiors, subordinates or peers, there are ways to effectively and efficiently do so. Similar with communicating, it is essential that when you influence, you know your audience. Knowing what they need and what their objectives are with regards to whatever it is you need to influence them about will guide your influencing tactic and also ensure that you have the most useful information to influence them. The other thing that knowing your audience does is enables you to focus your influencing. Clearly you cannot influence everyone on everything but knowing what is critical to your superiors, or to a peer in another department who you need some support from, can help you focus in on creating an influencing strategy that will be beneficial for all parties involved. What this also does is helps you speak their language which is another critical part of effective influencing. When you know your audience and what is important to them, you are more able to speak their language and communicate with them in such a way that they not only know that you “get it” and understand what they need but do it in a way that gains their support. Using all of these techniques helps to enable you to not only effectively influence but do so more easily.
Plus, if you have been regularly practicing all the other behaviors that we’ve mentioned in all the prior videos, you are creating an environment where others want you to lead them because they trust you. This support creates also facilitates an ease of influencing because not only do you have support from but greater self-confidence. I assure you that if you take time to know your audience, focus your influencing in a way that is beneficial to all parties and can speak the language of those whom you are influencing, you will be well on your way to creating successful, efficient and effective influencing skills.
