As a CIO, department manager, or individual contributor, the ability to influence your peers, vendors, business partners, and others is key to both your organization and your professional reputation. When people think about influencing others, they often think about short-term tactics that are sales-like in approach and appearance. While these certainly are influence techniques, I would like you to widen your thinking and perspective on influence within the workplace and in general. Below are seven key influence strategies that can be used alone or in combination to achieve your desired outcome. 1. Strategic Influence Strategic influence is a long-term, holistic approach to building the influence you would like to wield in the future. This could be leadership in a business, technical, or social arena. It could also be quietly and efficiently building credibility, connections, skills, knowledge, and/or infrastructure for use in the future. Strategic influence may mean taking a leadership role in your company’s digital strategy, business direction, and key internal projects, and/or implementing processes supporting a leading industry trend. This long-term, strategic influence not only builds your resume, but it enhances your professional brand as a business and technical leader. Use strategic influence to: Create a personal career development plan. Lay the foundation for influencing specific people by performing specific actions now that will pay influential dividends later, such as: Providing some assistance and/or minor favors. Building relationships with those you would like to influence. Increasing your subject-matter expertise. 2. Tactical Influence Tactical influence uses specific, short-term, influenced-based tactics to gain the [...]

When a business users, or someone with IT itself, creates a barrier that blocks your way, such as refusing to sign a needed document, not responding to an important email, or not attending a long-scheduled meeting, it’s natural to sit back and ask yourself one of the following questions: What am I doing wrong? Why doesn’t this person like me? What does this person have against me? Why does this person dislike IT? 1. People Are Not Against You; They Are for Themselves This is a key concept. It is important because it refocuses your attention to the other person, not yourself. If you understand why the other person believes what you are doing is not in their best interest, you can change your strategy or find another way to explain what you want to accomplish. For example, if you are trying to implement new sales management software, you can explain it to the salespeople in one of two ways: “This new sales management software will make you so efficient, we’ll be able to raise your annual sales quotas.” “This new sales management software will increase your efficiency, allowing you to sell more products and increase your sales commission.” As you may expect, the salespeople will definitely dislike the first statement, but really like the second one. Truly understanding your audience is key to influencing them. 2. By Definition, Influence Facilitates Change Continuing on the theme that it is about understanding your audience, you must understand what it is about the way you [...]

I have spent many years designing and teaching classes on various types of interpersonal communication, including: negotiation, change management, conflict, leadership, difficult conversations, motivation, requesting approval, delegation, and others. All of these interpersonal activities are enhanced by the same mechanism—trusting relationships with the individuals with whom you are interacting. You don’t have to be friends. Even though being friends may help, it is not required. Think about your personal experiences. Are you more easily influenced by someone you trust? Are you more likely to go home with a negotiated agreement if you believe the other party will hold up their end of the deal? As an IT manager or Project Manager, it is more comfortable and less stressful to delegate to someone you know will do their best to complete the task without attempting to undermine you in the process. This brings us to an interesting question: “How can we build trust with those within IT and/or business partners we are attempting to influence?” There are actually two answers to this question. The obvious one is what we were taught as children: Keep your promises. Have a win-win mentality. Be honest. These maxims remain true and should always be followed, but often they are just not enough. This brings us to the second answer to this question: Strategically, get to know now those you will try to influence in the future through negotiation, change management, or conflict resolution. Although this is not always possible, try. For example: If you are an IT Manager/Leader [...]

I always begin my keynotes and workshops by asking the same question, “How much time do you spend each day influencing others?”. Its purpose is to help them understand how much time they spend trying to influence people to complete the tasks they have already been asked to perform. The answer is generally between 20 and 75 percent, depending upon job type. IT Managers, Project Managers, Business Relationship Managers, Technical Support, and IT Executives of all types tend to be in the 50 to 75 percent range. On the lowest end at 10 to 25 percent are people in heads-down, transaction-oriented jobs, such as programmers, production support professionals, and those in operational or process type roles. The general correlation is: the more the role requires dealing with people, the higher the percentage of each day that person will spend trying to influence others. ROI #1: Personal Productivity For the sake of argument, let’s say that 25 percent of your day is spent trying to influence other people to do the tasks they’ve been assigned. If learning about influence could cut that time in half to 12.5 percent of your day, then based on an eight-hour day, you would save one hour a day, providing you use that time to do other things. Yes, that’s five hours per week of reclaimed productivity. This time could be used to perform other important tasks or simply leave the office in time to watch your child’s after-school soccer game. ROI #2: Enhanced Work Quality Another advantage of [...]