Influence is so basic to good leadership that in some sense the words are interchangeable. To influence someone is to lead them, and to lead someone requires persuasive influence.
Yet even in the senior echelons of executive leadership, there is often a need to improve influence skills. Many successful CEOs and C-level leaders would benefit from a more nuanced and complete understanding of how to influence others. In my experience coaching more than 500 leaders, I have found that influence comes down to getting a few things right. Together, these things form the building blocks of trust.
Know yourself. When you lead you’re not an empty vessel: you bring to your leadership everything that you are, deep inside. You bring your passions, your values, your fears, and your story. These shape what matters to you and serve as a wellspring of energy and vitality to help you drive on when the going gets tough.
The more you have full visibility into who you are, the better equipped you are to lead. In the stormy waters of organizational life, you need a dependable compass that helps you address the most important decisions your organization faces. Self-awareness provides that compass: while your context may change rapidly, the innermost core of who you are doesn’t. That same self-awareness also creates a strong foundation for influence. By knowing where you stand, you’re in a much stronger position to bring others along. Your communication and your actions have more power when they align with your authentic self.
There are exercises to help illuminate your self-awareness and reveal your true north. Begin by reflecting on your own thoughts and feelings about a business goal you are trying to achieve that requires influencing others. Ask yourself: why do I care about this, personally? What’s important to me about this goal? What keeps me up at night about this initiative? Reflecting on questions like these leads to greater situational self-awareness and a stronger platform for high-influence communication.
Know your audience. All successful communication requires understanding who you are communicating with—the more nuanced the understanding, the better. You need to know about their concerns, their context, how they think and feel, what words and ideas will move them.
One of my advisors understood this completely. Early in my coaching career, I would go to him with a sales opportunity and he would grill me with questions. “Where did he go to school? Where did he work before?” I was impatient, thinking: “Just tell me what to do!” But only after 30 or 45 minutes of digging deep would he finally suggest a course of action. And he was right: armed with knowledge, I could influence more effectively.
Similarly, whomever you’re influencing—your board, leadership team, external stakeholders—you need to understand them as fully as possible. If you have direct access to them, try asking them questions. Begin your questions with “What…” “How…” or “Tell me about…” These “open” questions elicit more information than leading, narrow questions.
Listen patiently for their answers. Quiet your internal dialogue, slow down, and give them 100% of your attention. Seek to understand the emotions behind their words via their facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. Listen for what they’re not saying.
If you’re worried that all this listening will take a lot of time, don’t! In fact, it is efficient because it allows you to glean much more insight in the same amount of time it would ordinarily take to listen poorly, or to fill the time with your own talking. You cannot increase the number of hours in the day, but through excellent questions and deep listening, you can compress more learning, and more value, into the hours you have. Remember, you will learn more from listening than you will from talking.
If you don’t have easy, direct access to your audience, gather intelligence from people who know them. Avoid engaging with a high-stakes audience without at least some background.
Knowing as much as possible about yourself and your audience is a solid starting point for influence. But it’s not enough. You’ll also need to be impeccable with your thoughts, words and actions. More on that in my next post.