How to develop your influencing skills
Image by Gwen King via Unsplash
To succeed as a leader, we must influence others over whom we don’t have direct authority. Use these 5 influencing styles to your advantage:
➤ Rationalizing: Do you use logic, facts, and reasoning to present your ideas?
➤ Asserting: Do you rely on your personal confidence, rules, law, and authority to influence others? Do you challenge the ideas of others when they don’t agree with yours?
➤ Negotiating: Do you look for compromises and make concessions in order to reach an outcome that satisfies your greater interest? Do you make tradeoffs and exchanges in order to meet your larger interests?
➤ Inspiring: Do you encourage others toward your position by communicating a sense of shared mission and exciting possibility? Do you use inspirational appeals, stories, and metaphors to encourage a shared sense of purpose?
➤ Bridging: Do you attempt to influence outcomes by uniting or connecting with others? Do you rely on reciprocity, engaging superior support, consultation, building coalitions, and using personal relationships to get people to agree with your position?
Here is how to use these styles to bring your influencing skills to the next level:
1️⃣ Write down which influencing style you use as soon as you notice it.
2️⃣ For a week, note how effective each way of influencing was.
3️⃣ Notice which influencing style you used the most.
4️⃣ Experiment with using the styles you don’t tend to land on often
Most people unconsciously tend to use only one or two styles.
The most successful leaders use all 5 styles on a regular basis. That’s because different situations and different people respond differently to each one.
Following this four-step method builds your capacity to mindfully grow your influencing skills.
These insights are derived from an article first published in Harvard Business Review.
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