THE COMMON CONFUSION BETWEEN: INFLUENCE, INSPIRE AND PERSUADE

Have you ever had your boss or someone else tell you that you were expected to influence others as part of your job?

Did they really mean influence?, Perhaps they meant inspire or persuade! What is the difference?

I will give you my two cents on the subject:

INFLUENCING: Influencing is typically about you getting the higher levels of the organization attracted to your ideas or projects to gain support, but it can also be about engaging members of a team you are asked to lead, so they all give their very best to get to the goal. Influencing is very much like selling something, but it works with ideas also. You are trying to make them want to buy your product/ idea. You get them to agree they need it, you present them with your particular offering, you tell them how it works, tell them all the great advantages and benefits it has and, by the time you are done, if you did it well, they will beg you to count them in, or you make a such a great close with an attractive cost, that they take it immediately. Within this process, you use solid reliable data to answer two (2) very important questions they will ask. Question1: “So what?”; Question 2: “What is in it for me". Your preparation is thus key. No data, no sale, no influencing. This is one of the great teachings from one of my mentors. Thanks Bob!.

INSPIRING: Here in LinkedIn we hear a lot the term “Influencer” to refer to people who generate great insights, great new approaches to thinking about various topics. They use emotions and compelling storytelling, they tell us how things went great for them by applying these ideas in the day to day. We read them and immediately get this urge to adopt this thinking as part our way of doing things. They make us want to be a new, different, better version of ourselves. These people really ought to be called Inspirers. We inspire, not just by what we say, but by what we do. In the workplace inspiration is often found by watching someone do something great, with passion and energy that is almost contagious to others. One of the 5 E’s of leadership talks about energizing, which has a lot to do with inspiring. So, for example, if your boss wants you to help create a new organizational culture around safety, he probably did not mean influencing, but inspiring instead.

PERSUADING: Some might say this is synonym of influencing, but there is a difference because it has less to do with selling and more to do with arm-twisting, in the good sense, of course. While influencing requires to be backed by solid reliable data, in persuading, you may appeal to more subjective aspects. The key word is: Negotiating. Yes, persuading is more about gives and gets, about gaining access to attractive benefits or perks, and sometimes about avoiding consequences. For example, your mom used to persuade you to eat your soup; she did not inspire you or influence you to do so. And this is a great example to build a distinction: persuading is not about forcing someone, threatening, deceiving them or fooling them with lies. This is in itself a big challenge because these are very fine lines too tempting to cross. When you persuade someone, they key is that you present things in such a way that it is clear that what they have to gain is more than what they have to lose, thus they opt for doing what you are proposing. Persuading often requires knowing very well who you are talking to, what moves them, what drives them, what they most desire, their emotions, and always having a few cards up your sleeve to negotiate with. “Make good deposits in your emotional bank account”, said Joe, another, great mentor I had, “you never know when you'll need to make a big withdrawal”.

I really hope this helped you guys out there.

Until the next one.

Ricardo Lárez.