Personal Influence

In my experience we’re all leaders since we influence others. Try not sounding like your mother or father some time!

True leaders who lead business and sales teams stand out through committed people and successful results!

The person in my corporate life who remains in my mind as a true leader is the person who recruited me into the world of financial services. Not surprisingly, he’s now at the top of the tree, largely because he’s highly effective at leading people. However, I’m not sure that he has a clear sense of how he does it.

What makes an effective influencer?

They act intuitively and may not know how they do what they do, or at least are not consciously aware of the process in sufficient detail to successfully transfer the skill.

Ineffective people managers on the other hand just can’t seem to get through to their people, even though they have the best intentions, read and research, go to courses, and exert a lot of energy doing so.

The fact is that no amount of information can help if you don’t know what you need to learn!

When there is an issue in business, the norm is to do an audit of the process and the person’s skill level, recommend change, up-skill the person and implement the new process.

The paradox is that when there is a problem communicating with and influencing a person, the answer most often is to performance manage and counsel them. This is rapidly followed with much ado, wasted time and energy, negative influence on others and perhaps then to part company and recruit someone else. The next recruit may then become another problem!

In many cases the performance management process may be engineered by the best in the HR world and be robust. However, the person operating the process, the manager, needs to be sufficiently skilled to get a positive result.

So why don’t we audit how we influence others?

We are complex organisms with complex programming. Think for a moment about our fragile PCs, when our computers go down we scream, re-boot and if all else fails call a technician.Similarly it’s useful to check our personal software and de-frag our disk, then up-grade carefully. We want to increase our capacity not shut down!

We need to look at what we do, how we do it, and add some choices so that we can change behaviour to what is more effective.

I recently worked with a dynamic person who runs a growing profitable company. This person has so much ability and energy, innovative ideas and robust systems in place that the Company’s success is assured. The major issue, one that cost time, energy and way too much angst was how to recruit effective top grade people and manage their performance issues.

I’m pleased to say that having guided them through a self-audit and assisted in giving some clear processes, their self-confidence now matches their ability. Now experiencing less stress on this front they are getting on with doing the work they love.

This is a gradual process and the positive results they have already achieved are convincing enough to keep them motivated. As they build personal skill and confidence in this field, their motivation increases and they are consciously a true leader.

I have often said to developing managers that it’s predominately how we are rather than what we say that influences the people we manage. To be effective and get results as a true leader our behaviour must be congruent with what we say.

The good news…it can be learned!

Thanks to Noelene Dawes from http://www.emotionalresilience.com.au/ for providing this article