How to be an INFLUENCER?

Last Friday I attended a training offered by my company, on "Influencing Skills". It was quite a good training as I took 3 pages of notes.  :)

Here are the highlights of what I have learned from the training:

• When it comes to influencing people, we need to understand these 3 important aspects:
• What - traits for influencing people
• Who - identify the stakeholders
• How - skills and strategies
• Small children are very good at influencing people, because they truly mastered the 3 aspects above  :)
• The level of influence that successful people have on the general public does not necessarily have anything to do with their background, age, money or academic performance.
• Underlying principles:
• Influencers tend to be "experts" in a specific domain.
• Influencers tend to be "early adopters" or know how to build relationship with early adopters to move change through.
• Influencing is NOT bullying, dictating, forcing or manipulating.
• Influencing skills involve
• Social skills - ability to interact with others successfully.
• Information gathering skills - ability to have relevant information in the right context.
• Judgement - ability to assess all aspects of a situation and have the experience to choose how to communicate appropriately.
• The 4 levels of influence
• Model - people follow what they see you do.
• Motivate - encourage or communicate at an emotional level.
• Mentoring - pour your life into others' and help them achieve their potential.
• Multiply - duplicate more influencers.
• Use RAPID to indentify the stakeholders
• Recommend - person who recommends.
• Approver - person who approves; the gatekeeper.
• Perform - person who helps to implement.
• Inform - person who will be impacted by the implementation.
• Decision - person who makes the decision to implement.
• Influence without authority (the Cohen-Bradford model)
• Assume all are potential allies - make yourself likeable
• Clarify your goals and priorities
• Diagnose the world of the other person - understand your potential ally's world
• Identify the relevant "currencies" - what truly matters to your potential ally
• Deal with relationships - trust, good relationship, active listening, emotional intelligence
• Influence through give and take - negotiate win-win

Here are the traits of a person of influence:

• I ntegrity with people
• N urtures other people
• F aith in peole
• L istens to People
• U nderstands people
• E nlarges people
• N avigates for other people
• C onnects with people
• E mpowers people
• R eproduces other influencers

And I had just found out that the above traits are actually taken from this book "Becoming a Person of Influence" by John C. Maxwell and Jim Dornan. You may get it for further reading.

Sadly, I noticed that not many people in the class actually appreciated it.

• 5 out of the 6 fellow engineers sitting on the same table with me were drawing cartoons on paper.
• 3 out of the 5 took some notes, but the length was not more than half an A4-size paper.

The fact that my company's management has taken the initiave to offer this course as one of the "essential" courses for engineers, actually shows that they do see the lacking of "influencing skills" among engineers as a major gap in the organization's efficacy. Perhaps the management has to figure out why people are feeling indifferent about this topic.