As with so many things, having a clear and simple process to follow in order to maximise your influence with stakeholders will help you enormously as you strive to become an influential leader. I use my Stakeholder Influence Process to help guide my clients’ thinking and their action when influencing stakeholders (you’ll find out more about this in Chapter 7 of Influential Leadership).
The process isn’t complicated or profound, yet the output can be astonishing — and simple. The whole point of it is to gain clarity about the real world around what you are aiming to achieve — and then begin to make things happen (you can read an introduction to the process here).
The influence process begins with gaining greater focus on what it is you want to achieve. I have found that influence becomes much easier when you can be clear about what you want (to others and yourself). Sounds obvious doesn’t it? Yes, and it is also very easy to overlook.
The kind of goals which many people in large organisations think about using this process with are what I call hard goals — where the end point is quite tangible. Before you reach that point, however, it is better to focus your influence on changing attitudes, beliefs and feelings. Sounds a little vague but it doesn’t need be.
For instance, you might think about your goal in terms of getting the steering committee to sign off your proposals. That’s fine; however, from an “influencing” perspective it would be more useful aiming to get “80% of the committee enthusiastically promoting the merits of your proposals, as evidenced by …” This simple change in focus will immediately begin to suggest a different course of action for you to take. It is also likely to secure you a much more robust sign-off! Little point in getting agreement for it to be revoked the following week.
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