Influencing

Have a look at this picture. What do you see? Now show it to your colleague. What do they see? Do you both see different things?

Imagine influencing in this instance if you wanted to paint the pillars and your colleague can only see people? How difficult would it be to get them to agree to paint pillars they cannot see?

This can often be what is happening when you are struggling to influence people at work and at home to do what you think is important? They just see different things or things differently, so we need to help them see what we see so that we can move forward together.

Here are some things to help you:-

Approaches to Influencing

We can use a Push or a Pull approach to influence.

Push	Pull
Pushing the person or the situation to your viewpoint	Pulling people with you
Forcing your views	Gains a deeper commitment from the other person
May be blunt and direct	They feel good about the outcome
Can save time

Both styles have a place in our lives. For example, if there is a health and safety risk the push style would work well but if you are influencing change over a long time period a pull approach may sustain the change longer.

Why would anyone be influenced by me?

We all have power levers (French & Raven, 1960) we just don’t always realise it. Here are some power levers for you to consider if you have them. Still not sure? Drop us an email at shona@neishconsultancy.co.uk and we will help you explore yours.

Power Levers

Organisation Power	Coercive powerLegitimate/Position powerReward powerResource power
Personal Power	Expert powerPersonality powerSocial power
Knowledge Power	Network powerInformation power

But how do I decide what to influence?

Steve Jobs, 2011 gave us the The Circle of Concern to help us focus on what have control over and not waste energy on the things we haven’t. To use this tool, make a list of all the things that concern you, now place them into the circles on our worksheet.

The circle of influence should contain the things that you can influence, and the circle of concern should contain the things that worry you, but you have no control over.

Want to explore more – look out for the Influencing open courses we are running, see Events.