10 Preparation Steps to Influencing
We have been working with a nationally recognised charity developing staff's influencing skills. Demands on their services are set to increase significantly in this decade to over 1 million service users. This places significant demands on the organisation and their ability to provide a first class service.
Influencing has been identified by the charity’s leadership team as a core individual skill to help them facilitate the increased demand. The staff and managers need to maximise the way they work together, both internally with each other, colleague to colleague, and with outside partners (such as corporate finance sponsors, volunteers, N.H.S. and M.P.s), to develop cooperative and productive relationships.
 
Influencing takes considered preparation. We call this the 10 steps to influencing.....
 
1. What do you want to achieve?
2. What is the range of things the Influencee could offer?
3. What would you be prepared to accept? (In other words what is your fall-back position)
4. What are the facts and figures behind the situation:
- When did it happen?
- How many times?
- Over what period of time?
- What is the effect on the department/individual/organisation?
- What evidence can you provide?
5. Who are you influencing in terms of personality and style of working? What approaches may help influence them? For example:
- Are they statistics orientated?
- Like examples painted for them?
- Are they visionaries where you describe what it would be like if they agree to your proposals?
- Do they respond best to information placed in graphs/pie charts?
- Do they prefer flowcharts and diagrams?
- What values are important to them?
- What sense of humour do they have?
- What pressures and challenges are they faced with at this time?
Thinking about the Influencee in this way can help us plan our communication style during the meeting.
  
6. How will you approach the conversation? What will tune them in? What words will you use? What tactics will you use? (we'll cover tactics in the next tips newsletter)
 7. What objections may they come up with?
 8. How will you overcome these objections?
 9. When is the best time to tackle them?
 10. Where will you tackle them? (It can be advantageous to get the Influencee away from interruptions at their desk)
    
The tips in this newsletter are an extract from our fully designed, ready-to-deliver 1 day course material: Team Leadership Skills.  
Bryan Edwards is Managing Director of ABC Training Solutions Ltd. He runs www.abctrainingsolutions.biz which markets a wide range of fully-designed, ready to deliver workshops, self study packs and other training exercises for the busy trainer. Bryan also delivers a wide range of interpersonal/managerial skills training. He can be contacted via info@abctrainingsolutions.biz