THE ULTIMATE AIM of this book is to enable you to shape the reality that's important to you—to proactively and deliberately pursue your goals—rather than have your future determined by the desires and motives of others. Everything I've talked about so far—building confidence, being resilient in the face of temporary setbacks or low expectations, studying the results of your efforts so you can become more effective, clearly identifying your desired outcome, and developing strategic relationships—is critical to your ability to engineer the professional life you desire.

The art of influencing others is so important to managing your career and to expanding your value to your organization that it, too, deserves special focus. This chapter explores how you command trust and respect without provoking fear or resentment. It examines how you become masterful at achieving the outcomes that are important to you and the work you do.

Choose to Be Influential

Making a conscious decision to be more influential is the first step—and often the most difficult. (See Figure 7.1.) When you become someone who shapes the opinions and practices of others, people begin to pay attention to you. You can't hide in the crowd. Others expect you to have an opinion and a strategy for action. They are also more likely to give you pushback on your ideas.

If you've been comfortable working in the background or relying on the decisions of others, it can be uncomfortable to take more control and to accept the responsibility of leadership. It can be especially uncomfortable for individuals whose differences make them feel they have to work harder to fit in or prove themselves. Many of us were taught to “go along to get along.” Some of us were socialized to believe that we shouldn't share our opinions with those in authority or that we shouldn't challenge the perspectives of our coworkers. Still others feel that they are being too direct or aggressive when they advocate for themselves or a point of view. Because of these varying cultural messages, many professionals from diverse backgrounds often feel that it's less risky to let others set the tone and direction for important aspects of their work lives.

However, this perceived safety comes at a cost. If you don't offer opinions, people stop seeking them. If you don't take control of what happens to you, others decide for you. If you don't develop the skills to shape the commitment and effort of others, you become invisible to the movers and shakers within the organization. Over time, your career stagnates.

There are many ways to use influence skills effectively. Trust that there is an approach (or several approaches) that will fit your personality, your culture, and the needs of the situation. Some of you will learn to take bold stands in public settings; others will prefer to leverage opinions one‐to‐one in private conversations. Some of you will persuade through the power of writing; others will lead by example. Most likely, all of you will need to expand the repertoire you have now; you will have to step out of your comfort zones. To find the style of influence that works best for you, you must commit to building your capabilities in this area.

I'm reminded of four Asian women who attended an Efficacy program almost seven years ago. They were discouraged to realize that their strong cultural messages to avoid self‐promotion were contributing to their feelings of being stuck and taken for granted in their current positions. At the same time, they had a hard time imagining themselves giving the elevator speeches they had developed and practiced in the program. So they made a pact to stay in touch and help one another find ways to take credit for their accomplishments and convey their value to their organization.

They encouraged one another to talk to their managers about their career goals, rather than waiting to be asked. They emboldened one another to reach out to other leaders to discuss their job function and what new responsibilities they'd be interested in. As they were offered new opportunities, they helped one another prepare for their interviews. Their hard work was very successful. By being intentional with their efforts to influence their careers, each of them has been promoted at least once; two of them have been promoted twice since they attended that program.

In addition to the cultural messages you might have received about trying to influence others, there are other factors in many work environments that discourage the pursuit of influential proficiency. Influence skills might be labeled as manipulative. People are accused of brownnosing or playing politics. Some use their influence to take advantage of others or to advance themselves at the expense of their colleagues. When you've witnessed or experienced such exploitation, it's understandable to be cautious about the use of power.

Influence built on manipulation and dishonesty has a shallow foundation—one that typically falls apart in the face of influence built from genuine alliances of mutual respect. True power and far‐reaching influence make an individual and those around him or her stronger.

All organizations need influencers who can gain access to necessary resources or who can mobilize a group of people to get things done. There need to be leaders (formal or informal) who can facilitate a group's effort to solve problems and make a difference. It is only through developing influential proficiency that you have the power to better yourself and those around you.

As I said earlier, the first step in developing strong influence skills is deciding you want to be an influencer: you are willing to take the risk of the greater visibility and the greater expectations for leadership that come with the decision. Your payoff will be the increased control and freedom that comes from knowing how to engineer the outcomes you desire.

Influence Skills Require Practice and Effort

You have to decide you want to influence, and you have to trust that you can learn to influence. It has always struck me as odd that no one expects to immediately know how to program a computer or analyze a spreadsheet. Yet we often assume that some individuals are naturally persuasive and influential, that they are born leaders. Just as you can't learn how to play music without picking up an instrument, you have to put yourself in situations that require you to shape the opinions and behaviors of others. It takes trying different strategies in order to discover which ones are most effective. Influence is like any other skill—perfecting it takes practice.

Some of us start practicing our influence skills at a very early age. I'm the oldest of five children. My siblings can attest that I regularly tried to persuade them to share my chores and their toys. As some of us get older, we use the skills we have developed to become high school class officers or leaders in campus organizations. If you are one of these folks, trust that you can transfer those skills to the influence demands of the workplace. If you aren't, it's never too late to learn.

Begin by studying how things happen in your organization, both formally and informally. How do effective influencers create a shared vision and commitment? How do they present their point of view in a way that invites collaboration and agreement? How do they handle differing points of view?

Then take an incremental approach. Share your opinions more regularly in conversations with your friends. Offer your point of view to your manager. Speak up in meetings. Or offer to lead a small project. You can't wait to be given a title or permission to be a person of influence. Every work situation has opportunities to suggest an improvement, voice your interests, or motivate others to act. Begin to take advantage of them.

Be willing to experiment with a variety of approaches. Some people need the facts and a good logical argument to be persuaded. Others need to identify with your vision. Still others are willing to go along in return for your support on something important to them. Learn from what's effective and what falls short. Ask for feedback and coaching from someone you trust to help refine your skills. Your willingness to stretch yourself and risk disagreement or rejection will teach you more about influencing than hiding yourself and your ideas. Your successes will give you confidence and increase your comfort in shaping the attitudes and actions of others—the essence of influence.

Identify Your Desired Outcome

As with any area of effective effort, you have to be clear about the outcome you want before you try to influence a situation. You have to know the goal you're moving toward in order to gauge whether you're having an impact—and where you are willing to negotiate. Be open to the possibility that there are likely several ways to achieve your goal, not just the solution you have in mind. Be willing to back up or take some detours when you need to, but stay focused on your desired outcome.

Recently, an employee came to me asking to cut back on the projects she was responsible for. I didn't have other folks who could step in and take on some of her workload; we were all stretched thin. So as much as I wanted to be sympathetic, I wasn't too pleased with her request, and I'm sure I conveyed that. She revealed that a big source of tension was feeling immense pressure to respond immediately to the e‐mails I send out at all hours of the day and night. (I travel a lot, so nights and weekends are my time for reaching out to internal folks.) She never felt like she could be “off” when she was working on projects with me.

With that understanding, we were able to work out a mutually agreeable solution. She would acknowledge my request within twenty‐four hours and let me know when she would be able to complete it. We both went away satisfied with the outcome. I know she's working on what's important to me even if I don't get an immediate response, and she's more in control of when and how she works. Because she could identify that having more control over her schedule—not necessarily a reduction of her responsibilities—was most important to her, it was easier to find a mutually agreeable solution.

Identify the Benefits

Influence happens best in the context of a relationship. To earn support for your ideas and approaches, you have to show that you'll support the objectives of those you most want to influence. The best influencers don't concentrate on pushing their point of view. They concentrate on figuring out why someone might be willing to adopt their perspective or approach. They make those benefits clear to those they want to influence. They've learned that talking more or louder doesn't usually change people's minds. (If the influencer is in a position of power, it might change behavior temporarily, but simply pushing an opinion more aggressively seldom results in a change of heart.)

Being a good influencer requires being a good observer and a good listener. What does the other person have to gain by adopting your approach? What are they concerned about? How can you protect their interests while advancing your own?

Our clients, like all customers, want to know that they are getting a good return on the investment they make in their business relationship with us. I learned a long time ago that when I clearly position our services as an answer to a client's problems—a way to increase productivity or reduce turnover costs, for example—the client is much less concerned about the cost. In order to make my solutions convincing, however, I have to really understand the source of the client's pain and offer an approach that provides relief. This is true in any influence situation: it has to be clear that the influencer has the interests of the other party at heart before that person is willing to collaborate or offer support.

All influencers encounter a lack of support from others at times. When this happens to you, understand that at its core, any resistance is seldom really about you. Rather, ask yourself if you have made the case for why your recommended approach or desired outcome is in the interest of whomever you're trying to influence. The person you're trying to influence is anticipating some cost—in time, money, inconvenience, or esteem, for example—that you haven't convinced them is worth paying. To be successful in your approach, you have to figure out the win for the other person.

Understand the Context of the Situation

Many influence situations are like icebergs: you can see some of the problem, but in most situations there's much more underneath the surface. Just as it was the ice underneath the surface that sank the Titanic, failing to consider the more hidden aspects of any negotiation or influence situation can derail your efforts.

Study the unwritten rules in your organization. How do effective influencers shape the willing collaboration of others? For instance, in many organizations, the real decision‐making is seldom done in group meetings. Opinions are shaped one conversation at a time well before the meeting where the official decision gets made. You can have the best proposal, but if you haven't built support for it ahead of time, it's unlikely to get accepted.

In any negotiation or influence situation, you also have to calculate what's possible. You have to understand the cost of the position you're taking. There are some situations where the cost of negotiation is high and being inflexible damages your credibility as an influencer. The most effective influencers learn to assess which situations are moderate risks and which are unrealistic (for now).

For instance, I was coaching an individual about setting better boundaries between his workload and his personal commitments. This was a person who believed he had to say yes to everything, so we were working on prioritizing those responsibilities that yielded the best return. He had identified client contact opportunities as his first priority. As a result, when he was asked to attend a high‐profile internal training program open only to folks who were seen as having high potential, he asked the program coordinator for a rain check since the date conflicted with a big client conference he had been invited to attend as a participant. Unfortunately, he gave little explanation about why he declined the invitation. Although I applauded his efforts to be more strategic in how he spends his time, he failed to calculate the cost. The invitation to attend the internal training was seen as a real plum; declining it cost him a significant level of support from the manager who had proposed his nomination.

It might have been possible to negotiate another opportunity for the training; it certainly was possible to negotiate other opportunities for client interaction. But because this individual didn't fully calculate the cost of asking for a rain check, he didn't influence the situation in a way that was aligned with his best interests.

I've seen people champion a worthwhile cause—the organization's approach to inclusion, an improved work process, or a new product—and become frustrated, derailed, and dismissed because they expected change at a pace the organization wasn't ready to adopt. Then, instead of focusing on how to shape incremental progress, they lost their credibility by being righteous about their expectations for change, rather than strategic in the steps ultimately required to prevail. The best influencers don't settle for the status quo; they always believe they can make a difference. But they also pay close attention to the signals about how to use their leverage and work at influencing change in stages.

Build Alliances with People Who Have Influence

As your span of influence expands, you can't personally influence every individual whose support makes a difference. You need to have connections with others who will help shape your desired outcomes.

Understand that these alliances need to extend in all directions within the organization. Often, people on the front line can just as quickly sabotage the effective implementation of a good idea as someone who is higher up. They might not be able to pull the plug on a budget, but they can certainly make costly mistakes or ignore the effort entirely. On the flip side, the ability to influence the discretionary efforts of those you rely on for executing critical projects expands your contribution to the organization exponentially. You are not only contributing your own efforts but also the efforts of those you influence.

In the previous chapter, we talked about networking—getting to know people and having them get to know you. Building an alliance is a higher‐order relationship. It's when two people have worked together enough to understand their shared interests, and they agree to work on each other's behalf in order to accomplish an individual goal. Each side knows what they have to gain by collaborating and what they have to lose by conflict.

At one point in my career, the CEO of my company was adamant that we needed to accelerate the time frame in which our most promising talent became officers. He charged me with designing a process that would reduce the development time for an officer from the typical ten to fifteen years to five years. This was a task with many obstacles. There was understandable internal resistance to the notion that we would select a limited number of people for a targeted development experience. And there was skepticism that it was possible to create an effective officer in only five years. I knew that if any accelerated track were going to be effective, it had to have the buy‐in of the line leadership, or else those selected would not receive the internal support required to ensure they had the appropriate experience and business savvy.

Before I began planning how to structure the program, I had extensive conversations with the various officers. I learned about their interests so I could win their support. For some, it was simply understanding that this project was important to the CEO. Others saw it as a means of more aggressively growing our business. When I had the backing of enough leaders to establish the credibility of the effort, I proceeded with designing the details: how we would handle the selection process, which schools we would tap for an accelerated MBA experience, and the developmental rotations that would be critical.

Had I been given this assignment earlier in my career, I think I would have erroneously believed that because the CEO charged me with making this happen, I could go ahead and put a process in place. Fortunately, by the time I had to take on this project, I had learned the importance of building alliances. I knew I had to build support and credibility for the overall idea—and for the specifics of the implementation—so that the rising officers would be legitimately positioned for success.

Influence Is Not Asking for Permission

There is a subtle but very important distinction in the attitudes of the most effective influencers. Effective influencers believe they have the power and the right to advocate for what's important to them. They are appropriately respectful of authority, they are cognizant of the current limitations and challenges in any situation, and they understand the critical importance of others' buy‐in. However, they don't ask for others' permission to pursue what's important to them. They give themselves permission—and then proceed to devise a strategy for gathering the resources and support necessary to accomplish their goals. Instead of thinking, “They won't let me,” they think, “What do I need to do next?” This fundamental belief—I have the right and the capacity to shape my circumstances—causes a profound shift in the quality of one's influence efforts. It places the power for change squarely with the individual rather than abdicating that power to others.

Own the power to be an effective influencer. Developing your influence skills is at the heart of achieving the professional career that's important to you. If you don't shape your own circumstances, someone else will. How to exert influence is a learnable skill. Whatever level of influence expertise you have now—whether it's refined and far‐reaching or still rudimentary—commit to expanding your ability to make things happen for yourself and for others. Every one of us has opportunities to practice and learn how to tap the willing support of others if we choose to be intentional about expanding our breadth and depth of influence.