Influencing without authority

I’m willing to place a bet that your most frustrating days at work come to pass because people with whom you work simply don’t get what you are trying to do - you have trouble bringing them round to your way of thinking, persuading them to change tack or adopt your new idea.

Sound familiar?

If so, you are suffering what many now call an inability to influence without authority. I prefer to think of it as simply struggling to influence others. It’s a difficult thing to do in any walk of life. But working in matrices, collaborating with others in different work areas and the need for quick results only serve to exacerbate the problem.

So, how do you sway people’s opinions, shape their thinking to be in line with yours and induce them to agree and take the action you want? It’s a tricky business but there is a recipe I have learnt that has proved successful over the years - some practical tools that if you are prepared to invest the time and put in the thinking can deliver results.

It’s wasn't easy to persuade a Prime Minister to endorse a not-for-profit out of the myriad requests. It was even harder to coax a CEO from a former business to change their tone of voice so they created a climate of unity in a rapidly growing business. It also took some skill to encourage an HR team to adopt a whole new approach to leadership development. But these have been some of my successes and all without the comfort of formal seniority.

I want to focus on how to influence without any formal authority. After all, if you must resort to hierarchical authority, if you have it, then some would say you have already failed.

People have called such influencing the ‘art of woo’. I really like the sound of that. It’s probably the only time it’s okay to use this word at work.

So here goes…

‘Whatever you are, be a good one’, said Abraham Lincoln.

Being good at what you do is your start point in being able to influence others. Unless you simply adopt the ideas outlined in the rest of this article and become a charlatan. I guess we’ve all met one or two of those in our time.

I used to have a line manager who schmoozed his way through life. But he would take my work and that of other people, remove our names and present it as his own - not that I knew until much later. He was very successful for a year or so. Then, inevitably, he got caught out. His career never quite recovered.

Anyway, back to my point. You need to hone your skills in your chosen area and show others that you are a stand-out performer. From here, it is my experience that all the other influencing challenges become much easier.

People tend to respect and trust competence. You’ll struggle to influence anyone without first having gained their trust. This is a theme upon which I will return, but I mention it here as trust starts with people seeing you as a safe pair of hands who knows their stuff and on whom they can rely to have good judgement and make good things happen. So, whatever you do, don’t be the best kept secret in your organisation.

It’s all very well for me to say become an expert and, of course, how you do that will vary greatly depending on your chosen career. But there is one gem I can share that will help accelerate your excellence, no matter what your job.

And that is modelling people you admire. Let me show you by way of a short story.

I have always found interviewing people for a job a very difficult and stressful thing to do. You only have an hour or so, in which to not only make a judgement about the suitability of the candidate for a role and organisation, but also to put on a good enough show so that they have the information they need to be able to make the right choice for them.

Aren’t the top three choices we ever make in our lives something like choosing a partner, choosing a house, then choosing a job. And we are all supposed to make the right choice for the third one in only one or two meetings? How long does it normally take us to choose the other things I mentioned?

One day, though, I learnt something new. I interviewed for a company with a global leader in their field. And I don’t use those words lightly. I was expecting to have the grilling of my life on my work experience. But what did they ask me when we sat down? “Tell me about where you grew up.”

Initially thrown, I gathered my thoughts and we went on to have a deeply personal conversation for an hour. I got to know him, and he got to know me. Choosing each other was easy after that.

I have modelled the way this leader asked questions ever since. And I am happy to report that it has paid dividends. And selecting the right candidate in interviews has become easier too.

Modelling isn’t copying. It’s deeper than that.

The basic premise is that if someone can do something, then anyone can. And, it is concerned with the how, rather than the what or the why. Young children are exceptional modellers of other people. It’s just that as we get older, we forget how to do it.

The tricky thing is that you can’t just ask someone you admire how they do what they do, as they may not even be aware of it themselves. So, you must deploy your best observation and listening skills, without coming across as a stalker, to see if you can illicit their conscious and unconscious strategies and apply them, in your own way, to your work.

How do they hold themselves? How do they move their body? Where do they look when they speak? Where do they look when you speak? What tone and pace do they have? What stories do they tell? What kinds of language do they use? What is their desk or office like? The list goes on, but hopefully this gives you some ideas to start. But be warned, patience is required.

Cicero said, “If you want to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.” In other words, you must almost become the other person - get inside their head, feel what they feel and walk in their shoes in order to change their perspective. This is 2,000 year-old insight. And nothing has changed today.

This means building rapport - a harmonious, productive and healthy relationship of equals. It’s one of those things, rapport, we tend not to think about it when it’s working but we notice in a second when it’s gone or if it isn’t present. Sounds like that trust word again doesn’t it?

Building rapport requires an investment in your audience and knowing who the opinion-formers are. Then focusing on the audience of one, treating people as individuals rather than starting to generalise about certain groups. Your unconscious bias, and we all have some, will scupper you if you go down that route.

For me, building rapport starts by paying genuinely close attention to what people say, what they do and how they feel.

Let me give you an example of this in action.

I recently decided to buy a new car. I had chosen the brand I wanted but not the type of car. There were several options I liked. I was greeted by a sales representative at the showroom and given a cup of coffee and asked to have wander around. He’d be with me in a minute.

After a while he returned and asked me what I was looking for. “Something comfortable but fast,” I said. “A long-legged cruiser that has a luxurious but sporty feel. A great sounding engine is also important as I haven’t quite made the jump to electric yet. I also want something that’s airy, light and spacious”. He seemed confused.

He motioned me over to one of the cars and said. “Take a look at this – beautiful isn’t it? Stunning shape, a range of vibrant colours and the latest design. I can really see you in this one.” And so, it went on.

We can see already that our language was mismatching. The way we thought about cars is completely different. I’m all about feel and sound. He’s all visual. The conversation seems awkward now and the chance to build rapport is slipping away. I’m not going to spend that much money with someone I don’t trust to understand my needs.

I change tack and go visual in my language. “Can he show me what it looks like inside?”. “Can I see the specification for the engine?”. “What might a discount look like?”. Rapport builds, trust builds, we get on like a house on fire and I walk away with the best car I have ever owned. And at a healthy discount. He was right, it really is a beauty.

For me, language is probably the most important part of your influencing armoury. If you want to persuade people, listen out for the clues they leave you when they speak - then paint pictures, invoke symphonies, or conjure emotions to hit the right spot and never under-estimate the power of a good metaphor.

Do this well and you will build relationships and resources around you and then you will find yourself plugged in to the heart of what’s going on in your organisation. This is gold dust.

It’s our flexibility to adopt new styles with new people that means we will have the best chance of building rapport and achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. Invest the time to meet others in their world, rather than expecting them to come to yours, by seeking to understand their motivations, beliefs, values, skills, assumptions, and their reality. Then try learning something about them that you find genuinely interesting, so you, in turn, seem genuinely interested in them.

I have a reputation for being able to get on with people at work whom many other people find difficult. It’s all down to being able to build rapport.

A long and very productive stint in a global information and analytics business has taught me many things but the most valuable is the power of data and its ability to drive extraordinary innovation.

For my part, I have always liked numbers as well as words, so I have always been keen to show the value of what I do by linking it to the kinds of data that so often resonate with decision-makers in large organisations.

Bringing in data as a convincer, also has the effect of bringing in context. In different parts of the world we see distinct preferences for high or low context. Some cultures want to know all the details and the back story. Others just want to know what you plan to do, when and precious little else. But it is my experience that if people are to be influenced, they all want a broader context to show that implications of new ideas or changes have been properly thought through. That’s why, increasingly, we see decisions by consensus and consultation. It helps bring in broader perspectives and reduces risk.

One of my most productive and successful years at work was driven by the use of powerful and insightful data. I looked in detail at an employee opinion survey which revealed one specific part of employee engagement that was somewhat in need of fixing. This part was employee advocacy or the propensity of employees to recommend their employer as a good place to work. Improving engagement and advocacy has many knock-on benefits in terms of customer service, productivity, performance, compliance, innovation, safety and recruitment. It’s a strategic target worth hitting.

I built a strategy around this one data point and showed how by telling human interest stories and showcasing employees in user-generated video that we would be able to improve the advocacy scores.

So, we set about a year-long campaign which broke all records in terms of engagement by any measure we chose to investigate. At the end of the year employee advocacy scores were tracked again, along with employee referral rates and we had made unprecedented positive strides. This work formed a central part of an award-winning, global approach which ran for several years and kept on delivering.

The lesson here is finding a diamond in the data can go a long way to not only make the case for change but also to prove that you have arrived at the end. Ta-da!

By the way, I never use exclamation marks in my writing, and neither should you. There is only one exception, however, and that is after the word at the end of the last paragraph.

One final thought before I set you off being excellent at work and honing your observation skills. The addition of a pinch of data also helps you, and your audience, get to grips with the age-old conundrum of what is important and urgent, what is one but not the other and what is neither. Very often, I find that people conflate urgency and importance, which can mean getting them onside becomes more difficult. Data helps to make the case for prioritisation and this can yield dividends in your influencing campaign, especially when people are busy. And who isn't busy these days?

This now brings us to the end of the recipe for woo.

I hope it has provided some food for thought.