Presence is everything. It dictates perceptions and allows you to overcome moments of crisis. It helps answer the question; what is your influence style? Strong leaders have a mixed bag of skills that are pulled from when the situation demands it. To be a great leader, you need to understand what tools are needed at that specific moment in time. Through coaching, warming up to the potential use, you are preparing yourself for reality. This is no different than a firefighter saving lives after successfully completing training. Make no mistake about it, you have the key to the lives of your team in your hands. You have a choice to make. React to every situation in a negative way, with unlearned skills or take the time to practice using the right hard and soft skills to be a complete leader. Being a leader that inspires, challenges, appreciates, and helps your team develop into something they will cherish for the rest of their lives. By focusing on the relationships you have, you will attain strategic influence skills that help you convince your company to adopt your suggestions. You can make the decision right now to learn so that you make positive impacts on the lives that depend on you. This learning comes from developing your influence presence. To be your best, you must challenge assumptions and assumed constraints, practice to have the characteristics of a strong influencer, use your personal power, develop your circle of influence, and tie your influence to strategic priorities. By focusing on these, you will undoubtedly become a better leader.

Challenging Assumptions and Assumed Constraints

The unsurmountable feeling you get sometimes, where you think you can’t make something happen. You have an idea, but it gets shot down before you even have the chance to let people know about it. That inner voice held you back again. The anxiety of thinking you are not able to make an impact. You don’t need to let these feelings control you. You know those thoughts of “that will never work.” Those thoughts in your head were created by you based on perceptions you have about other people and your abilities to influence change through them. With small steps, you can make a path to overcoming these feelings. 

These assumed constraints have no space in the mind of a successful leader. You certainly can second guess yourself, but stop wasting your life with worry. Ask yourself, what it would take to see through those thoughts that hold you back as a leader. What can you do to overcome them? Who are the players involved? What approaches can you take to influence the change you desire? For example, take an idea you have for making a change at work. You feel your boss will not listen to you, so you most likely will just let the idea go, without bringing it to the table. It’s not your fault for having these feelings, since your boss shoots down all of your ideas. This is a matter of influence, changing how you present the ideas to your boss. Would your boss listen to your ideas if you had the support of others on the team? Perhaps you need to present evidence that allows you to win over your boss. All it takes is one success for you to knock down the barriers in your mind.

Try framing everything differently in your mind. Tell yourself what you will do to overcome, then note the actions you will take to make it happen. Once you have crossed those items off, you will certainly have a better chance at turning your assumed constraint into motivation for change. Let’s learn how to work with the people that impact our careers. If you have someone in mind right now as you read this, try to make an impact on their perception of you over the next week, and track it on paper, measuring how they newly interact with you based on the mere fact you are now preparing for discussions to help you strategically influence their perceptions.

Characteristics of a strong influencer

We all know the importance of team. It comprises our past, present and future as an organization. We need to empower a team to be a strong influencer. When you speak, do your peers listen? Are you able to make an impact with your presence? It is critical to lead by example, prepare your dialogue, and offer key insights to your teammates in order to propel their perception of you as a leader.

You must also be a good coach. One that understands the situation of individuals on your team, propelling their learnings based on guided insights from you. Ask yourself, if your team was to leave a reference on your LinkedIn profile, what do you think it would say? It is critical to reflect on their learning style, their performance situation, and give them praise for successes along the way. This is the recipe for coaching to success, based on understanding, facts and effort.

Lastly, you must be a leader that creates an inclusive environment. This takes a lot of effort, yet pays off continually. It doesn’t just happen overnight. An inclusive environment is a reaction to the outcomes of many moments. It is the way a team perceives you and the surroundings you have created. Within the walls of your office place you must take action in order to fuel success. That action can be as small as recognizing everyone’s birthday, and as grand as listening to each and every team member, actioning the issues they bring up. Teams are always looking for a vocalized outlet. As their leader it is up to you to become the sounding board. If you do not crack the code of openness, you will become the brunt of their chatter, with negativity at the forefront. That is a recipe for failed leadership. I’d like to challenge you to celebrate something tomorrow at the office. Recognize someone you are having issues with, proving to them that you would like to overcome the issues wedged between you. 

Use Your Personal Power

These soft and hard skills can make the world of difference. It’s the ownership of who you are and what you can do, all used to persuade and make an impact through influence. Your personal power answers the questions: What are your personality traits? What expertise do you have? It is a reflection point, where you can make a big difference by understanding your expertise and limitations. Many times our manager’s will hold us accountable to our personality traits. I have been told I am too passionate and I react too quickly. This is who I am, and it certainly holds me back. I have learned over time to not send that email too quickly. My desire for quick resolution now has a better sense of prioritization. Once of the most important uses of Personal Power is the focus on emotional intelligence. By removing authoritative approaches and replacing them with empathy and understanding, we are building bonds instead of working off of pressure. By doing these things we are seeking true desire for success, founded in appreciation for what we do and who we do it for. 

Develop Your Circle of Influence

The larger the area of your circle of concern, the less successful you will be. We need to move away from thinking about the things we cannot change, and move forward to what can be changed. This means focusing on your circle of influence. Be in command of what you can actually make a difference in. There are so many analogies we can align to this topic. Take an office that continually loses network connections, effectively shutting the business down. We can focus on the issues of losing the connection, following the same steps every time the network goes down. Our team can watch leadership go into a tailspin, or leadership can take the reigns, and action a solution. If it happens once a month, perhaps there is a place nearby that would be willing to let teams work for a few hours, then you can use the rest of the day as team building time. Use this time to bring a smile to the faces of your teammates. Never let them feel there is no plan, and that you cannot overcome issues. One of the greatest gifts you can give a team is preparation. Prepare for the worst, expect the best. With a game plan in place, you will be able to make a difference in the lives of everyone you lead. Another example could be the use of a reporting dashboard that is not showing the right data. We could look at the issue every day and blame the operations team for not fixing the issue. But, we are better off with sitting in on an operations meeting to ask questions about how they build the dashboards, hoping you can influence their senior managers to try a new approach. Your willingness to learn and ask questions is the better way to making an impact.

Tying what you influence to strategic priorities/customer

Your influencing map helps you tie priorities to strategic influence. The What always depends on the Who. Your Who is internal and external. Strategic priorities align a company to achieve their business goals. If we tie that to who you influence, you have a potential recipe for creating masterful culture that defies gravity in the eye of success. First, take a business goal that you have right now. Something that impacts the customer. An example could be improving the NPS scores your business receives for customer service. Is it possible to make an impact on that score if your representatives are not interested in what they do? Of course not! So how can we relate this goal to your strategic influence? Let’s first poll our representatives to understand where they are. That devotion and commitment to taking action for them, will immediately boost their desire to help. Very simply, in order to tie influence to strategic priorities, we must understand where the connections rest. There must be knowledge of the cause and effect that binds your customer to your representatives. 

These topics should help you develop into a more strategic leader. Our words are meant to motivate your desire to learn more. Please refer to www.haveronconsulting.com to learn more.