No, I don't believe this to be the case, but you have to admit, sometimes it seems that way doesn't it? In any complex political environment (or rather, in any large organisation), you need to get to the bottom of what your stakeholders are thinking. Unless you can get the truth from them, you'll be shooting in the dark with your work, plans and proposals. You can't even solve problems unless they tell you the full story behind their reservations or resistance. Knowing this, when you've hit an issue or a problem, you rightly make the approach and ask the questions. Sometimes Read More

The purpose of this exercise is to delve deeper into the individuals who have a major influence within groups and around your work. The idea is to record your initial knowledge and look for gaps that need to be closed. For each of the headings, record a few sentences In total aim for between 750 and 1000 words for each individual you are analysing. Read More

To give you more of a feel for what we mean by group analysis and the level of detail that is useful, below is an example. It is not complete, but hopefully as you read you will begin to get a feel for what the group is all about and how it is working. Read More

Arguably, this mistake makes several others almost inevitable. It also presents a fantastic opportunity to avoid several others too. This is all about becoming so immersed in your own agenda that you fail to translate what you are doing, and what you want others to do, into terms that they can easily understand and relate to. Put another way, this is the mistake of failing to appropriately link your agenda and language to that of the person you are attempting to influence. It creates an immediate and significant hindrance to your prospects. There are several divisions to this mistake. Read More

This exercise is exclusively for participants on the Strategic Influencer Programme. The purpose of this exercise is to help you explore what you know about a group that is important to your purpose, and more importantly, what you don't know. You will never know everything, but you need to know enough to reduce the risk of making the wrong move, or at least, influencing in an ineffective manner. For each group you apply this exercise to, Read More

During the first webinar we covered a number of attitudes that help and support your transition into a strategic influencer. The purpose of this exercise is to give you the opportunity to do a little self-analysis and also, make decisions about adjusting the attitudes you approach your work with. Read More

This text is taken from the original draft manuscript of Influential Leadership: A Leader's Guide to Getting Things Done and is provided here to enrich your learning on the Strategic Influencer Programme.     Since Influential Leaders need to be passionate about their purpose in order to make swift progress, you need to do everything you can to cultivate the passion you feel about what you are aiming to achieve. When you have developed your passion, it will show and it will help you to become more influential. In a work context, passion is an intensive emotion compelling unusual levels of excitement for a particular subject, cause or purpose. It goes beyond simple motivation and Read More

This text is taken from the original draft manuscript of Influential Leadership: A Leader's Guide to Getting Things Done and is provided here to enrich your learning on the Strategic Influencer Programme.   Before you get too carried away by your purpose, remember that Influential Leadership needs to balance longer term progress with short term results. The chief risk that you face is not being able to devote enough time to working on your purpose because of the demands you face right now. Losing your position because of poor performance is unlikely to help you progress towards your purpose – unless you are heading into a completely different arena. Assuming that you are already working in the arena you want to Read More

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