When You Don't Have Influence

I recently had a conversation with a man who was exceptionally good at what he did in a well-known, global company. He was direct and clear in how he led and communicated and from what I could tell he was well respected by management and his team.

But our discussion was not so much about his work, it was about the challenges and frustration he felt with his three teenage children. Unlike work, he felt a lack of positive influence on his children and the outcomes he was getting from the methods he was using to get their attention.

For him his approach was cut and dried, take responsibility for your actions or the phone time diminishes, the game time goes away.?Tell the truth or you lose other privileges.

These approaches were getting short-lived attention and change but not creating expected positive long-term results with his children.

I too have been through this as my wife, and I raised six children. We came to realize that there is a stage in a teen to young adult life that they tend to push back, fight for independence, ignore boundaries, where emotions are high, communication is low.

In our effort to “get their attention” we often times used “carrots” or “proverbial sticks” to control and get the outcomes that we were seeking but did our efforts to influence get their “buy-in”?

It strikes me that as leaders of families and business, we often experience “influence deception”, thinking we have influence when we don’t, even though we have “authority or title” --they should obey or do as I want them to do because I am their parent or in business, I am their boss.

Influence is not earned or accepted when we try to control people and outcomes.

The trick to understanding this, to me, is timeline:?consistency, over time, matters more than outcome.?If we establish rules, even if they are broken, the consistency of the rule and the consistency of the consequence matters—over a lifetime—more than the outcome of a specific situation.

My experience has been that “push-back or resistance does not always mean failure or a lack of influence, but rather may reflect that we may have not earned it or we have not opened the doors of deeper communication to let our influence into the lives of those we lead.

After raising six children and working with many leaders of business and families, there are four insights that have served me in moving forward in being a positive consistent influence for others.

1-Accept when I don't have the influence with them that I thought I did. Do I lead by example?

2-Prayers to find others who could be a positive influence in their lives.

3-Allow the needed experiences to come into their lives to wake them up. Allow the consequences of their decisions and help them grow from them.

4-When I did have influence, help me to recognize it and know what to say and do.

?If it would benefit you to explore how to increase a more positive influence in your family and business, please DM me, I’d be happy to connect and chat.

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