How to Extend your Influence
The magnetism of isolation is control and safety.
Isolating yourself may indicate that tasks, problems, and challenges take precedence over people. During isolation coercion usually escalates. You lean more toward authority than relationship.
Worse yet, when you focus on completing tasks, solving problems, and overcoming challenges you sink inward into your own circumstances.
You cannot influence in isolation.
Ken Blanchard observes, “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.”
Influence and isolation collide. You can command from a disconnected-distance. Influence requires contact.
Think of the people you’re losing influence with? Are you spending less time with them? Either they have isolated themselves from you or you have isolated yourself from them.
If you’re losing influence, the contact you most resist is most important.
Influence requires interaction. Think of the people around your office that you most influence. Do they know you? Do you know them? It’s likely you said, “Yes.”
Commanding is one directional. It requires simple obedience. However, influence is two directional and requires willing consent. You can coerce conformity with authority but you lose influence.
You can’t antagonize and influence at the same time. Antagonizing builds barriers, fuels resistance, and, creates power struggles.
If you’re pulling rank, you’ve already lost influence.
The context of powerful, positive influence is respectful relationships built in harmonious community.
Community building contradicts isolation and means:
- You join their team before they join yours.
- They win before you win.
- They influence you before you influence them.
- You, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood,” Stephen R. Covey.
- You give before they give.
No one freely joins your community when they believe you’re in it for yourself.
Community builders reject isolation. They move first. They actively move toward rather than away.
How can leaders better connect and build community?
Great post Dan. Very often by not choosing the appropriate way to communicate, we can feel like we have lost influence. I am not a fan of e-mail, and only like it to confirm for clarity once we have spoken, but I am learning to realize that for some people it is the first and primary port of contact. Where I want it as a follow up, I have had to compromise in order to be able to influence by sending people e-mail as opposed to trying to get a hold of them on the phone as that is where they are most responsive.
Thabo, you make a good point about using e-mail; you also make a good observation, that for some it is a main source of communication. I often find in my coaching practice that those individuals who use a lot of e-mails often are people who are high task people. They struggle to understand recognize the importance of influence through relationship; they also struggle sometimes to understand HOW to make the change once they understand the importance.
Jim
Two other uses for email are the electronic trail and sidecar dialogues that time, distance and shifting priorities prevent from occurring in person. Having done online coursework for a few years now, honing the e-communications processes is essential in the global connection. Still comes back to establishing a foundation, in person or electronically.
Dear Dan,
I agree to all your suggested points about influence. Influence requires interaction, influence collides with command. very true. I really like the impactful sentence “During isolation coercion usually escalates. You lean more toward authority than relationship.
I think leaders can better connect and build community with connecting with people, understanding their needs and influencing them to materialise and visualise their dreams. I believe that leadership is all about influencing and connecting yourself with others need. When people meet their needs through your effort, influence and action, they consider you as a leader.
In the organisations, leadership is about affection and ownership. Leader needs to own responsibility with affection before delegating others. He should stand where followers need leader. I always believe creating trust and being honest and having integrity are the core of any leader.
Great post, Dan. I agree 100% with your assessment, and believe that this is probably why many corporations have such great difficulty with communication. Very little time is spent face to face. Managers and leaders are being driven to accomplish more with less, and the task becomes everything. In order to make that happen, less time is spent with their co-workers and more time is spent with their computers and e-mail. It is a terrible catch-22 that limits their ability to know the people they work with.
You nailed it once again.
Georgia
Thanks for this post, I’m also reminded that the workshop, The Influencer, sponsored by Vital smarts and the book by the same name, offer good insights in how to leverage influence.
How can leaders better connect and build community?
There were some great questions raised during today’s post, Dan. I have to admit one of the first images that came to mind is that of the Zappo’s Staff. For anyone who does not know, their twitter customer service group (@zappos_service) is crackerjack, fun, and engaging. Last week, there was a lot of talk about how they were going to be throwing pies at their CEO, followed by a social outing that evening. I wanted to be a fly on the wall (out of the meringue splash zone of coruse!) to watch that. Many “employee engagement” efforts based on “fun” are more forced than fun. But knowing just a bit about Zappos (I haven’t read the book by the CEO yet), I suspect that Tony Hsieh was engaging in a bit of “They Win Before You Win” – and I suspect some connections were built that day that go beyond shoe sales.
I often had the illusion that isolating myself, when I had a particularly daunting task/problem at hand, was the best possible course of action to overcome it quickly.
I now know this isn’t really the case, in most situations.
Every task or problem is better taken on by a team of like-minded individuals, rather than by a grumpy solo-leader.
It serves several purposes, too:
1. people you lead will see you count on them for important tasks, you will put valor in what they do for the common goal
2. people you lead will see you are not an arrogant fool, but you admit you need help and you are not afraid to actively seek for it
3. you will have more than one brain on the task, and this is essential to overcome the typical “narrowness” which always happens at some stage of working solo on something
I am sure you can think of more than 3.
Great thoughts today… definitely has me thinking… Thanks for posting.
Dan,
When you start using words like Rank and Commanding you’re speaking a language I’m familiar with.
When I commanded and had a rank I was a dictator from time to time and was successful. But I grew tired of it.
When I decided that I didn’t want to be a dictator I started calling people co-workers regardless of their rank. Do you know what happened? I earned my best personal evaluations but I also was able to get the most out of my team and we earned accolades as an amazing TEAM. They still called me “sir” but I always knew in my heart that without my co-workers I wouldn’t be successful.
Matt
Hi, Dan. A great example is what is happening in Middle East. Authority is loosing field for influence
My take away from this thread is remembering that ‘entropy happens’.
We may have had a relationship, however, sans contact, it deteriorates, it is not static. We may have had influence based on that contact, yet if not nurtured, it too atrophies.
We either are ‘leaning in’ to influence and connection or we are ‘leaning away’. Sitting on the fence hurts and is in reality we are constantly shifting toward or away from others.
And to present the other side of the coin, there is a balance here, time for self and time for others. Without focused time for self to align your own VMV, you cannot communicate that with others and find others of similar perspectives.
Hi Dan, you’re influence. And part of that point is influence is attraction not persuasion.
A timely reminder for me especially in a cross cultural environment where this reminds me I have tried to sway rather than play. Getting frustrated with a different way of doing things, which although I remain convinced is inefficient, it is however the way they do things. So my influence is more improtatnt than my authority if i want them to stay close.
Thanks for listening. Richard
Great topic! What I have found is that building influence with a team that is distributed over the globe is a challenge. The hallway conversations and informal exchanges are not as easily done. It seems that picking up a phone to call someone has some level of built-in resistance to the action, so conversations happen less frequently.
To offset some of these effects, scheduling and adhering to regular 1-on-1 meetings is one method I’ve leaned on. I wonder what other things you or your readers would recommend for establishing regular interaction in order to build rapport and ultimately influence.
Hey Gary, i share that problem. Distace is a killer – especially when time zones areoout by 12 hours. I thrash Skype, and thoug the protocol was not to use video, i do. I think projects which reach globally are good to bring a common language into play, also KPI’s etc are more important as the environemnt moves to a more factual platform. I write an awful lot of very brief emails acknowledging work/effort / outcomes. also when i do visit – it is as much time as possible with my team members. The second matter of building a team is much harder. In a lot of ways it comes back to Joe Tyes – culture trumps strategy every time.
Thanks for the ideas! I’ll implement some of these immediately and will see what the response is!
Your blogs are like cheat notes for life’s tests. Thank you for serving it up for free.
Love the Stephen Covey reference and analysis of Influence being about giving first, initiative and community building (not power, authority and isolating yourself from others).
Truly is about “Creating more value than you capture” as Paul Roetzer mentions in his Persona-Based Marketing presentation at the 2010 HUG Conference in Boston http://j.mp/g021WX
Byron,
Thanks for leaving your first comment on Leadership Freak. Thanks for your encouraging word.
Thanks for adding value by extending the conversation with an external link.
Cheers,
Dan
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Hi Dan,
Influence and Command as said two extreme options, In business management areas influence is more suitable and it will surely help in building the result oriented teams.
Thanks
Great post Dan. Your insights are really helpful. Love the Ken Blanchard books. Have a blessed day.
Stacy
Great article – had to share this one with others. Especially spoke to me as I’ve had troubles balancing the distance between the professional and personal relationships with individuals. Right now I feel unbalanced on the more professional side and disconnected/removed. This something I’m definitely trying to do through similar strategies as you mentioned. Again, great material! Thanks and cheers!
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the good word. Even more, thanks for sharing a bit of your story.
Best wishes,
Dan
Excellent article. Well done. Reminded me of the Prayer of St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen
Thanks again. GBU!