The best ideas don't always win out over time. Often the quality of an idea is not enough to ensure its adoption. Success at Company depends on your ability to gain acceptance for your thinking � and perhaps you find this to be true, at least in part, in your organization as well. This course module offers strategies and tactics for furthering your initiatives using persuasive communication.

In mathematical terms, your professional effectiveness is the product of the quality of your thinking times your ability to gain acceptance for your ideas.

As you aspire to more influence within your organization or with your customers or clients, the ability to influence others becomes a crucial skill.

Communicating

Company prides itself on the ability to precision-question bad processes out of existence. Communications are expected to be crisp. Like a good chess player, you are expected to think further than the move in hand, and to understand the implications of action or inaction.

·         Build your credibility. It is the key to your power of influence. Credibility builds up slowly as you deliver to specification and deliver on time. It is easily lost. You need to guard it jealously; pick your battles wisely. Sometimes the fact that you are right doesn't mean that you get to be right. In the long term, the fact that you were right may not be important.

·         Manage people's expectations. The longer you work on something, the greater the expectation. If you leave it too long, you can only disappoint. Get your initial thinking out there so that you can benefit from others' feedback. No boss likes surprises. 'Inoculate' your managers against contentious issues that you're dealing with. Knowledge ahead of time will help them manage the impact of any negative feedback they may receive. Delivery is important: You have to project your thinking, not leak it!

·         Be positive, assertive, and confident in what you are communicating.

Influencing

There are other things that you should keep in mind when influencing people.

·         Know what you want. What does your desired outcome look like? Draft an email without sending it, or talk an idea through with somebody. You may find that in the process of explicitly articulating your thinking, you achieve a far more precise understanding of your desired outcome.

·         Understand who cares, who the stakeholders are.

·         Provide more options. People don't like ultimatums.

·         Think the process through to completion for each option.

·         See things from the perspective of others. What does it mean to them? You will argue differently if the issue is that of losing face rather than a resource constraint.

·         Speak to the person in charge. Any sales course (and you are indeed selling your initiatives) will tell you that if the person you are talking with is not the decision-maker, then you are wasting your time.

·         Know how decisions are made. In this respect it is good to recognize the informal decision-making that happens when people meet regularly in the gym or canteen.

·         Aspire to achieve a win/win scenario.

·         Maintain an open relationship. This is critical to your long-term success. Remember this when you're pushing for more.

·         Listen to what your manager's boss is pushing. Figure out how to hook your thinking into the same thing. Advertising agencies recognize the power of association. Your chances of success will increase if you can link what you want to do to some bigger, broadly accepted goal within the company.

Strategizing

You understand your environment. You can clearly articulate what you want. Now you should consider the best way to go about it. It isn't always apparent that you have a choice of communications channels, but you do.

·         Face to face.  This is usually the preferred option. Generally, people find it more difficult to be nasty when they have to look you in the face.

·         Telephone. This allows for direct dialogue but you miss reactive body language clues that can be very helpful in fine-tuning your message.

·         Email. This allows you to consider your response very carefully.

·         Videoconference. An especially viable option when you are presenting initiatives to remote influencers â�� and it can be fun. 

·         Group presentation. You can unveil your ideas in front of the group if that is your preference, but this is not always a good way to handle delicate issues.

·         Informal. There is always the 'casually calculated informal approach.'

·         Social. You can â��sellâ�� over pints or dinner (but be careful about who you let choose the wine).

·         Domino. The domino approach can work: Tell person A because you know they play softball with person Z.

Working together

Teams can have very different values, norms, and processes. Unless you enjoy an insider's perspective you are not in a position to bet against their schedule�make no assumptions. By working with other groups I have learned that it is good to invest in your network, a network that extends beyond your formal contacts.

·         Understand how decisions get made and who makes them.

·         Create an insider atmosphere by using a common language or, more specifically, a common set of acronyms. It should be a case of you and them against the constraints, the conflicting schedules.

·         Understand the key milestones and their relevance to your project's critical path.

·         Continually review the level of contact that you have with 'externals' to evaluate the nature and level of investment that the relationship requires.

·         Establish paths of escalation up-front so that they can be exercised without undue contention should that be required.

Using email

People read email messages like they do marketing collateral. A message gets scanned for key words or action items. So:

·         Say what you want in the first lines of the e-mail message. This should compel your recipients, if they are scanning a preview pane, to open it and consider the contents further. Details can be left to the body of the message; people will read them if they want to.

·         Avoid sensationalism. You may find it in your adjectives and adverbs.

·         Be careful about using humor and charm. These are best kept to face-to-face meetings where the relationship has already been tested and found to be robust.

·         Think about the target audience, ensuring that you have all of the stakeholders included. However, be wary of overexposure.

·         Give people an opportunity to back down, change their position, or allow you a concession, one to one. You can always forward your sent e-mail message to the group so that they know you have done something about it.

·         Keep the message simple. Break issues down into constituent parts and if necessary send more than one message. It is very frustrating to receive only two answers when five questions were posed. You just know the other points will not be addressed without further prompting.