Recently I was helping a client to get moving on figuring out the politics around his work. He is working through the modules on the Impact and Influence Programme.
He has knuckled down and done an excellent job, delivering some pretty massive projects/programmes, but has become isolated from the political world. Part of the learning experience.
We were discussing ideas on how he can do this more easily. There is a lot of ideas on what to find out contained in the course video tutorials, but even so, this is often easier said than done.
Here are a few suggestions I gave him, that may be useful for you too:
- Make use of every contact opportunity to ask a few more questions that are needed for the task in hand, especially with senior stakeholders, or remote peers. Find out what else is going on in their world. Share views on current events. Collect their opinions and thoughts.
- Keep close to the checklists in the course exercises. These contain the items it is useful to know, and the article Making Sense of Political Upheaval will help to pull all the little insights you are gathering into a bigger picture view.
- Here’s the corker: Begin each week with some political questions you’d love to know the answer to. Then as you move through the week, remain vigilant and see what you find out.
- Finally, and if I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, and again, make it fun. See this as an intriguing puzzle to be solved. With your intelligence, you should easily be able to crack it!
This is such important work. Without political insight your attempt to influence will be just like shooting in the dark, and you’ll likely shoot yourself in the foot too.
The Gautrey Influence Blog
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