In The Structure of Your Leadership Arena, you will have begun to lay out the groups within your organisational environment, with a natural emphasis on those which are more closely connected with your purpose. Understanding the Bigger Picture, will have helped you to analyse individual groups. A progression on this is to consider now the key individuals, and to do this as widely as possible.
It is vitally important to go beyond the obvious when thinking of these people because often there are unseen influences at play within the wider network of connections — or certainly unseen by those who are not looking. Now is the time to look hard.
Begin by putting aside the previous two exercises and think about your organisation as a whole. What you need to do is assemble a list of as many powerful people as you can. When I say powerful, I mean those who are able to get what they want done (see below for more articles on power). To begin teasing this out, who:
- Generally get what they want?
- Make the most noise?
- Are the most challenging people?
- Have high visibilities in the organisation?
- Can hire new staff when others can’t?
- Feel able to largely ignore functions like compliance?
- Can block and veto other departments/people?
- Does everyone keep talking about?
- Are closely associated with other powerful people?
- Have been promoted recently?
- Generate the largest profit/revenue or control the largest budget?
The purpose of this thinking is to create a very long list of people who you may need to develop or strengthen your relationship with. You will not do this for everyone on the list, and in the next article I will start to show you how to economise on your effort and focus on the most-fruitful stakeholders for the short and the medium term.
So, for now, create a list in your notebook, or somewhere safe in a spreadsheet. Keep this handy as you carry on with your work over the next few days because as you go about your business, you will find plenty of people to add to your list.
And yes, there are a lot of things to read below. This is a critically important subject area if you want to become more influential.
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