Communicate to Accelerate.

On Adaptability, knowing your audience and your power to influence.

If you want me to do something, see something, buy something, respond to something, you have to do something. And that is communicate. In a way that gets to me [and works for me]. Getting your point, your work, your value across to peers and patrons requires the skill of effective communication. And you and I can get better at it. The ability to get others to read or hear what we have to say means that we are able to persuade or influence them.

Communication, with all the talk about learning and acquiring this skill, is never really about us. Rather it’s about the hearer and reader (our audience). And in between us and this real, virtual or imaginary audience, are barriers that must be overcome.

Some barriers are physical and environmental, others are social and yet others, are the diction and manner of speaking. In my case, not being born in the United States means that I have what someone familiar only with the American English diction would call an “accent.” And according to communication experts accents can be a barrier to communication.

I don’t necessarily agree with that assertion. And neither should you, since it so happens that every one has a perceived accent to others elsewhere in the world.

But accents aside, how do you ensure that you are communicating optimally for purpose and impact?

Tips on Communicating for Purpose and Impact

• ?First: Recognize that communication can be visual, verbal or written and one, two or all the types can be leveraged to your advantage and credit. And in leveraging, remember that the more succinct the better. Or what I call pack it with punch and not water. What’s the core message you are trying to send? Or what communication task are you trying to achieve.?And for who? Your boss wanting a brief report or status update is going to require a different skill set from you giving a presentation of those same findings. Or you going for an interview would require a different set of tools from the communication bag.
• Second: Assume you are on other side, watching, listening, or reading, and ask yourself, why should they care about what I’m trying to communicate? Asking what’s in it for the audience allows you to keep your message in whatever medium on point.
• Third: Why are you communicating? This is what I call on whose or what basis are you speaking? Persuasion and influence are boosted by power and confidence, and all four concepts are psychological constructs. As social agents within society, we all have power bases that we can stand on when attempting to communicate with others.

There are six power bases for social influence (by leaders) as laid out by J. French and B. Raven, the social psychologists who identified them — legitimate; reward; coercive; expert; referent; informational that can be further split into two equal groups. The first three are positional while the latter three are personal bases.

Positional Power Bases

1. Reward—power to control distribution of rewards given or offered to the audience.
2. Coercive—power to threaten or punish those who do not comply with communicated requests or demands.
3. Legitimate—authority derived from the power holder's legitimate right to communicate.

Personal Power Bases

1. Referent—based on an audience identification with, attraction to, or respect for the power holder.
2. Expert—based on audience knowledge of the power holder’s earned skills and abilities.
3. Informational—based on the use and application of informational resources.

Understanding these bases of power allows us to recognize those that we can apply effectively to a situation at hand. This in turn can increase our confidence which leads to an overall net positive outcome.

As an example, from a positional bases, simply by being a LinkedIn member, I have legitimate power to communicate through the creation of this newsletter. The data on its subscribers reflects the fact that I have a degree of referent power. The earned degrees, certifications and work experience, affords me an expert power base. Informational power base is par for course because many have access to the same informational and knowledge resources I have; the difference lies in how those resources are creatively used and applied for the good of the audience.

Another central reason for knowing and understanding your power bases is that it allows you to own your place in work conversations. If you have ever been talked over, interrupted or treated as if your ideas don’t matter,?a recognition of your power bases and knowing that you earned your seat at that table, you can always re-direct the conversation or restate your position to ensure you are being heard.

If you’re just starting out in your career and think that you have no power to influence, I want to tell you that’s not true. You may not have much leverage on the positional power bases but you can swing from your personal bases and do it well.

Knowing this should give you some measure of confidence to get to work finding ways to build on your power bases. You can only build by doing and getting feedback from others with more power capital, recognizing that everyone started from some of the same places we now find ourselves.

More communication power to you!

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Thank you for taking the time to read the Career Acceleration Precepts newsletter.

How are you going to build on your power bases to help you communicate for impact?