Influencing others at work is a key skill that can help you achieve your goals, build trust, and foster collaboration. But how do you influence others without being manipulative, pushy, or bossy? Here are some tips to help you develop your interpersonal skills and influence others in a positive and ethical way.
Before you try to influence someone, you need to understand their needs, motivations, values, and preferences. This will help you tailor your message, tone, and style to their perspective and interests. You can learn more about your audience by asking open-ended questions, listening actively, observing their behavior, and doing some research. Knowing your audience will also help you avoid any potential conflicts, misunderstandings, or resistance.
By building Trust, good communication listening to them, giving time and space, equal weightage to their ideas and pitches, by motivating, giving credits at the right time, appreciation among others, giving time to time feedbacks, pointing out mistakes in a positive way. And many such small things.
Influencing others is not a one-time event, but a process that requires building rapport and trust over time. Rapport is the feeling of connection and harmony that you create with someone through your communication and body language. Trust is the belief that someone is reliable, honest, and respectful. You can build rapport and trust by being friendly, respectful, empathetic, and consistent. You can also use humor, compliments, and common ground to break the ice and create a positive impression.
Persuasion is the art of convincing someone to do something or agree with something by using logic, emotion, and evidence. There are many techniques you can use to influence others, such as reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, and consensus. For example, you can use the principle of reciprocity by offering something of value or help before asking for something in return. With scarcity, you can highlight the urgency, exclusivity, or uniqueness of your offer or request. Authority involves demonstrating your expertise or credentials. Consistency means asking for small or easy commitments first and gradually increasing them. Liking requires building rapport and finding similarities with your audience. Finally, consensus involves showing social proof or statistics that support your argument.
Communication is essential to influence others, as it enables you to express yourself, your emotions, and listen to feedback. To communicate effectively, you should be clear and specific in your language, avoiding jargon or ambiguity. Additionally, you should be confident in your tone and posture, as well as respectful and courteous towards your audience. Moreover, you should be assertive in expressing your opinion without being aggressive or passive. Furthermore, it is important to be empathetic and compassionate towards your audience's needs and feelings. Lastly, you should be responsive to any feedback, questions, or concerns they may have.
Influencing others is not a static process, but rather a dynamic and flexible one. To ensure success, you need to be able to adapt your approach according to the situation, the feedback, and the outcome. To this end, it is important to monitor the reactions and behaviors of your audience and yourself during the interaction. You should also evaluate the effectiveness of your influence tactics and communication strategies, and modify them if needed. Additionally, asking for feedback, clarification, or confirmation from your audience can be beneficial if you are unsure or unclear. With practice and reflection, you can develop and improve your influencing skills at work in a positive and ethical way that benefits both you and your audience.
Another way of influencing others would be by showing the way. Often, we try to make a coworker to do something in a particular way but to no avail because of miscommunication or improper instructions. I’ve found out the best way to influence someone positively is by replicating the task to be performed to certain extent as well as being open and receptive to any queries that the person might have.