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How to use influence to build your effectiveness

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Influence is the deal-breaker.

With it, your ideas are taken seriously.

Without it, you won't even be heard.

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To be effective, you need your ideas to be put into practice.

A good idea alone creates no value.

So to create value, you need approval.

This is where influence is essential.

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Most people believe that approval is based on logic.

Logically good ideas are approved, logically bad ones are not.

This is not true.

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Today you will learn how ideas are really approved and how you can get yours approved too.

Newsflash: what you say is not what they hear

Here's what you'll take away from today:

• The reality of message delivery
• The factors that impact your influence
• The difference between long-term & short-term influence
• How to borrow long-term influence
• How to create short-term influence

How messages are received

This is how most people think of message delivery:

Exactly what you have said is received by the person listening.

Here's how it actually works:

In between you and the recipient is the influence filter.

All of their knowledge of you & their feelings about you are used to interpret what you are saying.

Then they make a judgement based on that filtering.

It's not on what you have said, but on what they have heard.

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For example:

If a child tells you to get a new job, would you give that the same weight as an adult telling you the same thing?

How about a parent telling you to party less vs. your best mate?

Or the latest office graduate hire telling you to change all of your processes vs. your boss?

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Humans do not separate the message from the messenger.

The first judgement made on what is said is a judgement made on who is saying it.

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The good news is that you can influence how your message is heard.

Influence factors

I split influence factors into 6 core types:

1. Your perceived seniority​
   - this is a base judgement on the likely validity of your opinion
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2. Your professional reputation​
   - this is what you are primarily known for in your organisation
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3. Your past results​
   - this is how successful your ideas are perceived to have been before
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4. Your alignment to listener's goals​
   - this is how much the listener thinks you can help them achieve their aims
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5. Your confidence in the proposal​
   - this is how much you appear to believe in what you're recommending
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6. Your logical argument​
   - this is how clearly the listener could logically support your case

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Take note that the first 5 of these are not about facts - they are about feelings.

They are perceptions of reality.

Humans make decisions based on emotion first, and then the justify them with logic afterwards.

So whilst the logic still needs to be there, it is the emotional elements that will get you 80+% of the way.

Long-term & short-term influence

The eagle-eyed reader will have noticed the split between 1-3 & 4-6 in that list.

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1-3 represent long-term influence.

These concern you as a person and they take time to build.

They determine if your idea will be heard in the first place.

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4-6 represent short-term influence.

These concern the discussion at hand and could change with each word you say.

They determine if your idea gets approved once it is heard.

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Recognising the difference between these two is critical to landing your message effectively.

Borrowing long-term influence

There is no short-cut to long-term influence.

You have to build your seniority, your reputation & your catalogue of past results with time and conscious effort.

But what you can do is borrow someone else's influence to get your idea heard in the right way.

I had this experience myself in the first 18 months of my career:

I didn't have any long-term influence - so little in fact that my idea was barely listened to at all.

The agency I went to speak to had it in spades.

Same idea, same execution plan, same expected outcome.

Different messenger, different decision.

Creating short-term influence

Short-term influence is much easier to create.

Long-term influence gets you heard in the first place, short-term influence is there to clinch the deal.

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Firstly, you need to know what your listener is looking to achieve for themselves.

Humans are inherently self-serving - not a judgement, just a fact.

If they think your idea will help them to achieve something, you'll have their ear.

Find out what their goals, targets & objectives are before you pitch your idea - a little research goes a long way.

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Secondly, you have to be able to present your case with confidence.

No-one wants to go under the knife of the nervous surgeon.

So practise, practise, practise - know your pitch inside out.

That way you can focus on projecting your confidence in the idea itself.

Confidence is infectious, and you need your listener to catch that bug.

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Lastly, make sure your numbers stack up.

Decisions are made on emotion first, yes, but the logic is needed later as a justification.

You still need to have a solid basis for your idea.

Your listener may need to fight for your idea (and you) further up the chain.

To do effectively, they need to understand how you came to recommend it.

What now?

The next time you want to get an idea approved, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have the long-term influence to open this discussion or do I need to borrow it?
• What story do I want my listener to hear?
• Have I done everything I can to maximise my short-term influence?

Now go get that approval ;)

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Until next time,

- M

Matt Scaysbrook

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