If You Don't Know Where You're Going

To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Often, the greatest distinction between the person who comes away from a meeting with a good result and the one who is disappointed is that the first person was clear about what he or she wanted before the meeting began. Being aware of your objective and consciously working toward achieving it takes time and energy but is usually considerably more effective than improvisational advocacy. So…the first step in planning how you're going to influence another person or group is to frame an objective.

In this book, we'll generally use the word, “goal” to refer to the longer-term results you hope to achieve and “objective” to mean the result you intend to accomplish during a specific influence opportunity. Most of the time, achieving a larger goal will require that you achieve a number of influence objectives.

I've spent many difficult hours, both as a consultant and as a member of an organization, sitting in meetings and imagining what someone from another, more logical planet, might assume were the influence objectives of the participants.

Judging from the behavior used (such as sarcasm, put-downs, and direct attacks), it might seem that they were trying to do some or all of the following:

• Get a colleague to admit that he or she was bad, wrong, or stupid
• After achieving that, get the same person to acknowledge the correctness or brilliance of the influencer and/or his or her idea and to agree
• Have a third party agree with the influencer on both counts

If asked, of course, the participants would probably say that their objective was to influence the others to agree with and implement a suggestion or proposal. However, they didn't behave as if they were attempting to move the others in that direction—or else they would have noticed that everything they were doing was fixing the others more firmly in their own positions and increasing their resistance. Being clear in advance on what you hope to accomplish can help you avoid these meetings from hell and achieve the result that you really want. Making your underlying intentions conscious enables you to decide whether or not your current influence objective is one you really want to achieve.

Having a conscious goal or objective is risky; it raises common human fears of failure and of alienating others who may see us as too aggressive. If we don't make a commitment to influencing an outcome, we have the luxury of blaming others when we don't like the results of decisions that might have been within our sphere of influence. No amount of sophisticated understanding or practice of influence behaviors will make up for the reluctance to commit to an influence goal or objective. Deciding that a result is unattainable before you give it a fair shot may create short-term comfort but leads to longer-term disappointment in yourself and in your life.

You'll learn the most from this section of the book by creating an influence plan for a situation you've identified as important to your own success and well-being. In Appendix B, you'll find a template for a complete influence plan. I suggest that you try using the template, or modifying it to include issues that are important to you and exclude ones that seem irrelevant. Use it to plan for an important, upcoming influence opportunity at work, at home, or in your community. After you've implemented your plan, regardless of the outcome, make notes on what worked, what didn't, and what you learned. This is a discipline that will help you to grow and improve as an influencer. Try to make new mistakes each time, rather than repeating the same old ones. If you never make any mistakes, you're probably not taking enough risk and not doing much influencing.

Developing a Challenging Influence Objective

Your influence objective provides the motivation to succeed, so it should be attractive enough to be worth the effort, yet achievable enough to keep you from giving up too easily. I remember a high school acquaintance who attempted to prove that God did not exist by praying that the Deity would cause a light switch to fly around the room (the word “sophomoric” has useful layers of meaning in this case). Someone else remarked that he assumed any self-respecting God would have better things to do with his or her time and that he assumed the would-be atheist did also. So it is with influence goals: they should be worthy both of your time and of the efforts of the being you hope to influence.

Influence objectives must be aligned with your long-term goal and realized within a short and specific time frame. It won't help you to grow as a powerful influencer if you have to wait several weeks to see whether your behavior has achieved any results. You need to know at the time you're actively influencing whether what you're doing is moving you toward your goal. This will help you know whether and when you need to change or rethink your approach.

Your influence objective should be clear to you, not vague and amorphous. Ideally, it should be one that would be understood both by you and by the other party if you were to state it directly, using Tell behaviors. “I would like to influence my teammate to participate actively and contribute ideas in our team meetings” is clearer than “I would like to influence him to be a team player.” Of course, you won't always begin with Tell behaviors, and you won't necessarily spell out your goal to the other person in so many words. However, you need to be both clear about it and focused on whether you're moving closer to it or further away.

Figure 8.1 is a useful set of criteria to test whether an influence objective will be effective. Rather than giving up on an influence result that may seem, at first, to be unattainable, use the criteria to sharpen and improve your objective. For convenience, they are summarized by the acronym, FOCUS.

The Value of Persistence

Something that clearly distinguishes successful influencers and leaders from others is that they are persistent in the pursuit of their influence goals and objectives. They don't take “no” for an answer very easily. They tend to know when to back off (see Chapter 20) and wait for another opportunity and are sensitive to when they should change their approach and tactics and try again.

Persistence helps in several ways. First of all, you may have been mistaken or were missing some important data in your original analysis of the framework for influence. Or the individual, organizational, or external context at the time wasn't supportive. Your original timing could have been off. Since then, some players may have changed, priorities may have shifted, unanticipated events may have made the picture more favorable. Perhaps your influence relationship with the other person has improved—or you could cause it to improve. Giving up too easily doesn't allow you to explore these possibilities.

Secondly, the fact that you're persistent (without being inappropriately aggressive) lends power to your influence attempts. Caring about an issue deeply enough to continue to bring it to others' attention demonstrates the strength of your commitment. One member of my staff used to greet me with a cheerful, “I'm baaaack!” before he launched into another pitch for something he believed to be important. He knew that eventually his persistence would pay off, although he might have had to be flexible about his approach and about specifics such as timing and cost. He would often make several strategic retreats and try again before I was sufficiently worn down to agree—but his success rate was high, and I was not put off by his efforts.