In the last article (The Structure of Your Leadership Arena), I asked you to map out all the groups that are involved in your arena — that will be essential in helping you to gain the most from this article. Any attempt to understand your arena will falter if you don’t first know its structure. If you didn’t get a chance to do so before, take another look here.
Within your arena, decide which group you wish to be more influential within. You don’t necessarily need to be a member of this group, but you do need to have a clear vision of who they are. It is also worth making sure that your decision here tallies with your earlier consideration about what you want to influence (refer back here).
Make a definite decision on a group you want to learn more about.
Make sure you can answer the following questions:
- Can you clearly define this group, its membership, what the members have in common and also, what other groups it is a member of?
- What other groups have a direct or immediate influence on it? Can you also define these groups?
- Do other groups in the wider setting have an influence on it, perhaps indirectly?
- Where are you in relation to your target group? If you’re not a member, are you a member of one of the other connected groups?
- What influence is being exerted on the group you are studying by other groups in its environment?
- What influence is your target group trying to have on the other groups in its neighbourhood?
It’s the last two questions that may be the most difficult to answer. One way of structuring and simplifying this is to consider each connection between groups. Ideally, try to identify three influences going each way. For instance, on a connection between a sales group and a client group, sales might be trying to influence the price up while the client will want to drive the price down.
Not all influences are opposing. For instance, between sales and compliance, it is feasible that compliance might be trying to influence the sales team to adhere to a given process; however, the sales team might be quite happy simply ignoring them rather than trying to influence the removal of the process.
Once you begin to pull this together, you might also like to rate the strength on influence in each direction on all of the most significant connections between the groups. A simple high, medium or low will be sufficient to get a feel for the pressures within the network of groups.
I’m going to side-step the idea of adding all the connections between the groups and assessing those too (although you might like to do that when you have time) because I want to bring you back to your target group with one final question …
- What are the top three things in the wider setting which are influencing group decisions right now?
The answer to this question will feed into the next article in this series.
Of course, you’re not finished here yet because it would be well worth you applying everything here to all of the significant groups in your arena.
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