Leadership Persuasion And Influence Techniques ...
Influence and persuasion is essential to success in our professional lives. With every business challenge comes an opportunity to influence an outcome. An ethical application of persuasive skills lets you achieve unmatched results. Whether you need to convince clients to sign a contract, garner support for a proposal, or win new business in competitive bids, persuasive skills are the driving force that will help you accomplish your goals.
Leadership Persuasion and Influence Techniques ...
Influence is something we learn in childhood. It takes place in families, among friends, in communities, at the workplace, and in society more broadly. An average person influences 100 or more people a day. Our research shows that influencing is one of the 4 critical leadership competencies for every leader at every level in the organization.
In this white paper, we help leaders understand the 3 outcomes of influencing, the 3 types of tactics that can be used to influence others, and the 6 essential persuasion skills for effective influencing.
Each person has a preference for how they would like to be influenced. Selecting the best influence tactic is important to achieve the desired outcome with a person or group. Effective leaders understand the way others want to be influenced and apply the right tactics to build alignment and commitment. Leaders who combine the 3 persuasion skills and tactics are likely to be evaluated as better performers.
Ethical use of refined persuasion skills are basics for effective leadership, and they lead to the success of everyone on the team and to the greater benefit of all internal and external stakeholders in the company.
There are many methods and techniques for persuasion that cannot be covered here. There is much to learn in this area of leadership knowledge and the right leadership training courses will most definitely point you in the right direction.
Dr. Jackson,Great article out there, while emphasizing on persuasion and influence. I agree that one of the key elements to persuasion is deliberate attempt to influence others. Meaning that both persuasion and influence works hand in hand. Your thoughts on ways to use persuasion strategies to improve leadership in developing countries?
Read on to discover the rational persuasion definition, the benefits of rational persuasion, an example of rational persuasion, and how to become a more influential leader using the rational persuasion influence tactic.
Rational persuasion must rely on the use of facts and a robust argument to be effective. The influencer must be perceived as having greater expertise or access to better evidence than the people they want to influence.
One of the biggest tests of a leader is how they use persuasion to encourage action from people outside their official sphere of influence. This is a common situation and usually arises when the objective of one team requires the input or action of another. For example, adjusting legacy processes to accommodate a new organisation-wide system.
Although persuasive leadership centres around a set of core principles, the way you use them will be specific to your personality. It helps to work with a qualified trainer who can identify the best way to adopt the principles of persuasion.
Let's begin with a little mental gymnastics. Take a moment to decide on your definition of the words "influence" and "persuasion." Then, decide if each of the following statements falls under the category of Influence or Persuasion:
The less distinction between your definitions of influence and persuasion the higher degree of difficulty you probably experienced trying to separate the above statements. From a purely semantic point of view, it's not such a big deal to use these terms interchangeably. From a leadership perspective however, the distinction can be the difference between your team carrying you on their shoulders after a victory or having them stuff you in a locker before practice.
Based on my definitions, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, & 12 are squarely under the influence umbrella. Items 1, 7, 8 fall under persuasion. The others can go either way depending upon the circumstances or timing of a situation.
In time-sensitive circumstances, positive persuasion techniques are a handy means for expediting results. However, for most leaders, influence is the preferred means to a productive end. This is because influence is based on a foundation of trust and credibility that has been solidified over time. If persuasion techniques are applied in situations best suited for influence, the persuader is often perceived as manipulative and any compliance is temporary at best.
Persuasion used indiscriminately can easily be described as the ability to "sell ice to Eskimos." But, do the Eskimos trust you or buy from you again when they realize you've sold them something they don't really need? How comfortable do you feel with that decision even a few short minutes after you make it? Chances are you have doubts. Because you don't necessarily trust the person who persuaded you, you experience misgivings or "buyer's remorse." On the other hand, a strong leader who takes the time to reduce any uncertainty before encouraging others to act or make a decision can use persuasion techniques without eliciting such negative feelings.
Persuasion techniques, when applied with integrity and a sincere intention to make a positive contribution in an individual's life or to the betterment of the group, are a powerful lever for moving the decision-making process along. In situations where we've made the proper investment in relationships, we can use persuasion techniques such as framing, fairness, and timing to show respect for the people who deem us influential.
If persuasion is the hammer you pull out the moment you see a nail, influence is the apprenticeship and training you go through long before you attempt to build a house. Influence grows out of well nurtured relationships. It's the end-result of actions, behaviors, and intentions geared toward building trust, establishing credibility, and adding value. Persuasion is more of an "in the moment" skill. It's the combination of charisma, talent, and technique that can get things done without preamble. Ironically, despite its expediency, persuasion is actually best received by people who have faith in the persuader's degree of influence.
Having your voice heard within your organization is crucial for advancing in your career as well as having your company grow. In many cases, enhancing your persuasion and influence skills is key to inspiring others to change.
Managers who employ rational persuasion emphasize the most positive benefits of an argument, with advantages given more prominence than disadvantages. This type of persuasive technique is commonly used in leading upward; that is, for example, to influence the actions of a management team or board of directors.
When implementing organizational change, you must put people before process. Rational persuasion is a highly-effective leadership technique to achieve this. By enveloping change in logic, you help others to develop a change mindset because they understand the rationale behind the change initiative.
Rational persuasion is also an effective technique for growing sales in the ambiguous environment. Developing a logical case is a strong influencer of buying decisions, and helps to create customer relations that last. Organizations move through eight steps in the buying decision process:
Collaboration, consultation, inspiration, and personal appeal all have their place in the armory of influential managers and leaders. However, these influence techniques work most effectively when combined with rational persuasion. The result is highly engaging leadership that serves to solidify support for logical solutions born from expertise, experience and knowledge.
We try to influence other people hundreds of times a day. (1) Those with greater skill win others over to their point of view more often. Once you learn the best (and most persuasive) techniques, it will become easier for you to succeed as well.
Leadership remains, as it always was, basically concerned with communications. Transferring information - facts, values, ideas, and their meanings - is the heart of the leader's task. Recent technological improvements, largely in the computer and telecommunications fields, have made possible important new developments in the way leaders - indeed, all people - move information. The effective use of information transfer techniques is critical. Even more critical to effective inner leadership is the need to control the type and content of its communications to followers so that the leader's desires are realized in subsequent follower actions.
Several techniques are presently associated with the idea of attaining the inner leader's desired performance. Among them are electronic mail, cellular telephone technologies, image processing, teleconferencing, fibre optics, and the Internet. A detailed discussion of features of each of these techniques is not pertinent to this discussion. Nevertheless, these technologies represent new, faster, more generally accessible channels of communication delivery that will continue to enhance and extend the scope of influence of both leaders and led.
These newer electronic techniques also represent alternative sources of information available to followers, sources that may make inner leadership both easier and more difficult. These new ways to communicate multiply the inner leaders communications options and the speed at which knowledge can be transferred. For example, e-mail has opened multiple channels of communication and information flow. As a result, work-community structural boundaries have become fuzzier and corporate culture looser, less formal, and less important to work communities in the inner levels of the corporation.
While some of these factors move toward better communications systems, others may complicate, and even reduce, accountability for the communications between the leader and stakeholders. Nevertheless, these and the other communications techniques portend significant change in the manner and locus of leadership practice now and in the years to come. They do not change the purpose of most of the communications between inner leaders and their followers: to get them to think and act in ways the leader wants them to think and act. 041b061a72