Influencing: Achieve Results without the Authority
- Course:Influencing: Achieve Results without the Authority
- Course ID:INFLUENCE Duration:2 days Where: Your Office (7+ Persons)
- Download Course Description (PDF)
Available as a private, customized course for your group at your offices or ours and in some cases as a WebLive(TM) class.
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Exercise: The primary obstacle to getting results through others
- Understanding mutual goals and partnering
- Exploring barriers to partnering
- Getting Results with a Consultative Approach
- Authority, Influence, Power, and Results
- Consulting as a tool
- Five Steps to getting others to achieve goals
- Developing positive ongoing relationships as a tool to get results
- Rapport building: How to make it work
- Setting Goals and Understanding Implied Contracts
- Setting mutual goals
- Changing “requirements” and “features” to operational issues, e.g., financial constraints, user needs, skill level and misperceptions
- Recognizing differences in communicating and decision-making styles that can be misperceived as conflicting goals
- Turning negative situations into positive ones through reflecting, interpreting non-verbal communications, and asking leading questions
- Problem Solving and Diagnosis
- Dealing with negativity
- Partnering through problem solving
- Making phone calls and voice mail messages seem like in-person interactions
- The research process: Your role as they achieve results
- The interview process: Questioning to uncover the real needs and issues to bring the others to your side
- Presenting Ideas, Recommendations and Solutions that Influence Actions
- Preparing for dealing with resistance
- Ten most common resistance behaviors and how to deal with them
- Preparing for the feedback meeting; gathering allies, designing collaborative dialog
- Presentation openings and closings that grab; presentation formats and styles that influence others
- Persuasion techniques for getting others to say “yes”
- Helping others who can’t (or won’t) decide and more forward
- Follow Through
- The difference between follow through and follow up
- Partnering with other internal clients, becoming one voice to external clients
- Mastering the five steps to getting results through others
- Applying the Lessons Learned
- Report out
- Q&A
Course in a Nutshell
Have you ever put forth and idea that went unnoticed or was refuted, only to later see its alternative fail? Having a great idea is often not enough; it must also be heard and valued. This requires the skills to influence others to take an action, even when you don’t have the authority to force them into the desired action.
All of us periodically find us in situations where we must share our knowledge, expertise, or suppositions in order to influence a decision. The settings can vary. They can include one-to-one interactions with colleagues, team meetings, management briefings, or interactions with internal clients or relevant external parties. Whatever the setting, the goal is always to communicate one’s ideas clearly and convincingly and guide others toward desired outcomes. This course provides the strategies, tools, and abundant practice on real issues that will enable any professional or manager to present and explain complex ideas, to collaborate effectively to achieve mutual goals, to make a compelling business case, and to influence others to make critical decisions.
Customize It!
Our instructional designer will work with you to design examples, anecdotes, exercises, and case studies that address your own industry, business culture, processes, and policies. The course will incorporate state-of-the-art tools and techniques as well as the prevailing best practices.
Learn How To
- Recognize what holds others back from seeing new ideas and develop a change strategy to guide them to see your vision
- Transform technical jargon into powerful language that influences others’ decisions
- Migrate from “one correct answer” to explore others’ possibilities that may at first appear to be un-validated, inaccurate, or even dead wrong
- Use partnering skills to achieve mutual high level goals and accountability plans
- Recognize the seven common faces of resistance and create a plan to overcome them
- Evaluate your own communication style, recognize others’ styles, and match your approach to their needs
- Recognize the primary methods for learning new information and tailor a plan to your audience’s learning styles so they understand and value your ideas
- Discuss solutions in business terms even when thinking in technical terms
- Use influence strategies to sell your ideas to managers, internal clients, and pertinent external parties
- Use “persuasive argument” techniques to help move others to implementing solutions
- Present ideas formally in writing and through presentations that provide a compelling business case and motivates others to take action
Aimed At
All professionals and managers who find themselves in the position of advocating a process, solution, or decision to others while lacking the authority to force them to accept it.
Prerequisites
none
- “It gives me great pleasure to highly recommend Eogogics. They place a strong emphasis on customizing their programs to fit the needs and culture of their audience. Carol was a featured speaker for our Fall Conference. Her presentation was outstanding, as evidenced by many participant comments.” - Kathi Princeton, President, IAAP (WI Division)