While running a webinar for Warwick Business School in 2016, something quite unexpected happened. This particular event ran quite soon after the publication of Influential Leadership: A Leader’s Guide to Influence. It was the first opportunity that I had had to ask a large group of people to identify the sources of power they were currently using.
As they placed their marks on my virtual slide, something very interesting emerged. Hardly any of them indicated Agenda as a source of power they used. This helped me to realise that the Power of Agenda is a massive opportunity for those who want to grow and develop their career, regardless of their level of experience and seniority.
Let me back up a little.
When writing Influential Leadership, I put a great deal of energy into researching and analysing what makes people influential, and why. Many others have done this before, generally in a more academic manner. What I wanted to do was to turn this into something practical that every leader (and potential leader) could make use of, immediately.
What I ended up with was five principles of power and seven sources of power that in combination explain how power and influence actually works within organisations and groups. One of the sources of power I describe in the book is:
Agenda: the problems and issues you focus your leadership attention on.
This doesn’t just apply to leaders. Anyone who focuses their attention on a particular issue, problem, challenge or objective, will quickly become recognised as having an agenda. It becomes particularly noticeable when they keep talking about it, worrying about it, working on it. Here are a few simple examples:
- A leader who makes it their purpose and mission to change the mindset of their whole organisation to focus on the customer instead of the cost base – has an agenda.
- An individual who becomes so frustrated and angry at the mistreatment of animals that they make it their purpose to eradicate that suffering – has an agenda.
- A middle manager who is ambitious and talented makes a decision to do whatever it takes to gain a promotion – has an agenda.
However, not all agendas are powerful and influential. In order to make an agenda powerful, you need to:
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- Become Obsessive: Yes, your agenda, your purpose, needs to command a significant amount of your time and attention. You need to be thinking about it every day, probably several times a day. You need to be using it as the basis on which you decide what to do and what not to do. The more central to your day, your work, and even your life, it becomes, the more powerful your agenda will be.
- Inject Emotion. In addition to investing time, you also need to invest considerable amounts of emotion and feeling. Apathy promotes inertia not action. Apathetic people are going nowhere fast. So to become powerful, and agenda has to be fuelled with massive amounts of enthusiasm, energy, and excitement. Well, any type of emotion will add power to an agenda, but to my way of thinking it is far better to boost your agenda with positive emotion.
- Make it Visible. Unless people know about your agenda it is unlikely to be powerful with anyone other than yourself. Agendas only become influential when they are influencing others. This means that once the agendas is clear (or at least the end goal/vision) it needs to be promoted to the audience whose support will enable rapid progress. Often this starts slow and picks up pace as more time and emotion is added.
- Ignite Interest. Ah, now here’s the thing. Unless other people benefit from the progress towards your purpose or vision, you will struggle to get them engaged. So a key part of building visibility is to do it in such a way that it maximises the interest of those exposed to it. It is not sufficient for people to say, “Hey, that’s a good idea.” Instead you should be shooting for, “Wow, that’s incredible! How get I get involved?”
- Increase Momentum. Actually, if you’re attending to the points above, this one will look after itself, because others will be pushing your agenda forward. However, you can further add power and influence to your agenda by building a campaign plan, communication plan and anything else that will move things forward faster.
This is all well and good, but what is your agenda?
In the opening chapters of Influential Leadership I help readers to begin to work that out. It is important to get this straight before you rush ahead and do too much, lest you find out later you are heading in the wrong direction.
An interesting little footnote, the agenda doesn’t have to be yours. If you want to know how that works, send me a quick email.
If you found this useful, you’ll probably also like Seven Sources of Power
Colin Gautrey
Provocative Coach/Mentor | Specialism: Impact and Influence
Ready to take the next step? Discover how personalised coaching can ignite your full potential and accelerate your success. When you’re ready, let’s talk about how we can work together to turn your vision into a reality.
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