Moments of Influence

Are you capturing every opportunity for potential influence?

Are you leveraging every piece of “real estate” in service of your objectives for change?

At CSR Communications, our guess is, you’re missing a lot of influential moments.

Why? Because we tend to focus on the big events or announcements, while overlooking all the little opportunities along the way and in between.

In a recent weekly gathering of our Intrapreneurs Influence Lab, one of our members mentioned off-handedly that she had five minutes on her company’s management team agenda the next day. “It’s only five minutes,” she said, “So I didn’t think about using any of these techniques we’ve been learning…but maybe I could.”

ONLY five minutes?! You can do a lot in five minutes! You can bore people or wow them. You can engage, plant seeds, educate and influence. Or, you can read an update from your PowerPoint slides.

Instead of letting this moment go by with the usual information-sharing approach, we re-crafted her plan as follows:

Create intrigue and capture attention right at the start with three, “Did you know?” questions.

Avoid the generic, “Any questions?” solicitation at the end that typically results in blank stares and invites participants to share ideas on a specific element of the initiative and respond to specific questions.

Plant some allies by reaching out to a couple friendly attendees in advance and asking them to jump start the interaction. This ensures there’ll be at least two ideas and questions in the mix. No “crickets” with this approach!

The result? A highly engaged group of leaders who now feel a sense of ownership over the initiative. Several leaders even reached out afterward with compliments on the session and offers to help. She not only captured their attention in those five minutes, she also created champions.

When’s your next moment of influence? How will you stand out?

Give this approach a try and please let us know how it goes.

Nancy Murphy is Founder and President of CSR Communications, which specializes in helping socially-conscious organizations achieve their next big initiative & rapidly expand their impact. Nancy is creator of Intrapreneurs Influence Lab and brings over 30 years experience to the work she does as a trainer, speaker, and advisor to local and federal government agencies, non-profits, philanthropies and businesses. Learn more at?csrcommunications.com.