Influence is an important part of everyday life, whether you are the wielder or the recipient of it. Wielding influence implies a bit of ego, because you want your way done. I do not think influence is necessarily a bad thing; it is something that can be used for good or bad. Bad people will yield bad influence, good people will yield good influence. It is as pretty simple as that.
In order to wield influence correctly, there unfortunately is a ‘game’ and rules that have to be played. Hopefully the reader of this is someone who wields influence for the ‘good’.
I’ll give a real example at this point. Let’s say that you work at a family company and you ask your uncle to do things a different way.
He says no. Now what?
If he said no, you pretty much are wrong or he is wrong. If you believe you are right, you need to persuade or influence him of your thinking.
Another caveat.. your mileage may vary.. but these come from things I have read and some personal experiences.
Don’t Preach
This relates to one of those weird situations that even if you are right and you preach to someone, most likely you aren’t going to get to them. The act of preaching to someone most of the time puts the other person in a defensive mode. It creates a hierarchal relationship that you are the better, wiser, and smarter one and the other person is the stupid one. And even if that is true, it doesn’t matter if they don’t listen to you.
What you have to make sure to do is create context and justification for the point you want to be made. So instead of saying ‘do it like this’, you can ask, “what other alternative ways have you thought of in doing the task?”
A person who does this amazingly well is Jon Stewart in The Daily Show. Instead of preaching political stances, he creates humorous situations about how ludicrous some things in politics are. Through satire he is able to convince people of his stances effectively because people who watch him are in an emotionally relaxed state without their defense guard up.
Know your enemy
Okay, most likely this other person literally not your enemy, but what this means is to know how the person acts and feels. The first thing is to look out for the level of receptiveness that person has. If the person has a low level, then there is a high chance you aren’t going to have the chance to wield your influence. In this case, you can influence the environment around the person and hope the person comes around.
If you want to influence someone, you need to have the ability to run mock scenarios in your head. This means if you want to have something done, imagine you asking them a question about the task at hand. How would they react? Is it a successful reaction or a bad reaction?
The ability to step in someone else’s shoes requires refining the skill of empathy. If you can step in the other person’s shoes, you probably knows what makes the tick and their vulnerability also.
Remember.. also have a strategy in your head. Unfortunately there are times you are just surrounded with politics, and you have to navigate the maze to have something done.
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
This relates strongly to the first point of don’t preach. What is so strange about this, is even if you are right, it doesn’t matter if no one listens to you. So in addition to what you say, you need to be very careful on how you say it.
How you package your message to the other person depends on what the other person is like. General guidelines here are to force the other person to question their own stance to lead towards yours. If they come to your conclusion, but they think they thought of it, then whatever right? Let the other person take credit and be happy their mind changed.
Be proactive
This sort of goes in line with the statement ‘if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back.’ If you create the scenario where you are doing lots of favors for someone, you build political capital. Eventual at some point of time, you can redeem the political capital with a favor.
If you think about it, this probably occurs more often than you think with your friends. If your friends do favors for you, most likely you’ll do favors for your friends. And it’s a healthy interchange.
However if you are in some organizational type environment, it helps to do some favors because eventually you’ll need something.
Be liked
It sounds sort of stupid, but people sometimes forget to have influence, you need to be liked. Who wants to listen or do a favor for an asshole? Most likely no one. All these rules seem sort of Machiavellian, but if you are sincere hopefully you won’t run into the situation of being called a manipulator.
Another big thing is.. be sincere. I think people are pretty smart where they can spot bull shit or someone doing something for their own personal gain. If you really care about other people, I think the same care will come back to you.
Ideally.. if you are a really progressive environment, then a lot of these rules don’t apply. But every organization or group has some type of politics. If you want to be the influencer, then unfortunately you will have to play by some of these rules. Happy manipul…. influencing!