To achieve exceptional performance and productivity from your staff, you must work on your power of influence. It’s a fact that leaders who are good at influencing get things done faster and with minimal effort. When you become a positive influence for your people, you will notice a change of mentality among them, as they will feel highly motivated, enthusiastic about their work and take on their responsibilities. Reaching this state is no easy task and will require you to develop the following three skill sets.
Know your destination before you start your journey
The influence is intangible since it depends a lot on the way people think. The way a person thinks will drive their behavior, which in turn affects their feelings. As a leader, you must be influential in your thinking so that you can change the mindset of the people you lead. An example of this is the late South African President Nelson Mandela. When he was released from prison after 27 years on fabricated charges, his main intention was to unify the nation that had been marginalized on racial grounds. To do this, Mandela committed South Africans to appreciating each other through sport and other activities in order to eliminate any form of mistrust and misinformation between his people of different racial backgrounds.
To have this kind of influence requires that you have a clear aspiration of where you want to go and why you want to go there. Once you are clear on this, you need to work on your empathy to understand what your people want and how you can sync this with your own aspiration. You can achieve this by building a relationship of trust with the people you lead, so that they see you as someone who is always there for them through thick and thin. Once your people trust you, they will follow you wherever you want to go.
Focus on your ears not your mouth
The Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium said: “We have two ears and one mouth, so we must listen more than we say.” The power to influence is based on your power to listen objectively and sincerely. When you listen to what your people have to say, you are inadvertently building a meaningful long-term relationship. Also, when you start to listen, you will also create buy-in for your ideas, as your people are prepared to listen to you in turn, and in this process, you could synthesize their views with yours and work towards a win-win situation. win that benefits everyone. . This will then decrease the conflicts that stifle productivity and efficiency. Entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson is a big advocate of listening and he succinctly said, “Listen, take the best. Leave the rest.”
Learn to persuade like Aristotle
The last set of skills to be a good influencer is to master the art of persuasion. The difference between these two seemingly interrelated words is that influence is more about building relationships, trust, and achieving long-term goals, while persuasion is more about being transactional, competitive, and achieving short-term goals. As a leader, you sometimes need to take this position in that the circumstances you face require you to come up with a quick plan of action that doesn’t allow you to negotiate with and influence your people. This is where you need to work on your power of persuasion. However, if you have implemented the above two skill sets, persuading people to achieve your short-term goal would not be a problem.
Aristotle, in his work ‘Rhetoric’, identified three important factors that you should focus on when you want to persuade someone. He calls this: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional), and logos (logical). Fundamentally, what this means is that the first thing you need to persuade is by using your respectful, honest, and credible character (ethos). The next thing is to persuade by appealing to their emotions by giving them an imaginative impact of how they will benefit if they do what you are asking of them (pathos). One caveat here though is that this can be subject to abuse and as such you need to be careful in taking into account the last factors which is to persuade by appealing to their intellect by giving them the relevant facts and figures which allows them to make a decision on whether they would want to go with you or not (logos). As long as this is done with credibility (ethos), you will successfully achieve your end result.
Ultimately, as a leader, you are in charge and how your people perceive you is largely based on how positively and passionately you can influence them. This is when you leave a lasting legacy.