How to influence people successfully

To achieve exceptional performance and productivity from your staff, you must work in your power of influence. It is a fact that leaders who are good at influencing do things faster and with minimal effort. When you become a positive influence on your people, you will notice a change in mindset between them as they will feel highly motivated, excited about their work, and take on their responsibilities. Achieving this status is not an easy task and would require you to develop the following three skill sets.

Know your destination before starting your trip

Influence is intangible as it largely depends on the way people think. How a person thinks will determine their behavior, which in turn affects their feelings. As a leader, you need to be influential in your thinking so that you can change the mindset of the people you lead. An example of this is the late South African President Nelson Mandela. When he was released from prison after 27 years on accumulated charges, his main intention was to unify the nation that had been marginalized on racial grounds. To do this, Mandela committed South Africans to appreciate each other through sports and other activities to eliminate any form of mistrust and misinformation among his people of different racial origins.
Having this kind of influence would require you to have a clear aspiration of where you want to go and why you want to go there. Once you are clear on this, you need to work on your empathy to understand what your people want and how you can sync this with your own aspiration. You can achieve this by building a trusting relationship with the people you lead, so that they see you as someone who is always with them through thick and thin. Once your people trust you, they will follow you wherever you want to go.

Focus on your ears, not your mouth

The Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium said: “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.” The power to influence is based on your power to listen objectively and sincerely. When you listen to what your people have to say, you are unconsciously building a meaningful long-term relationship. In addition, when you start listening, you will also create acceptance for your ideas, as your people are prepared to listen to you and, in this process, you could synthesize their views with yours and work towards a win-win situation that benefits you. everybody. . This will then reduce conflicts that stifle productivity and efficiency. Entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson is a huge advocate of listening and said succinctly, “Listen, take the best. Leave the rest.”

Learn to persuade like Aristotle

The last set of skills to be a good influencer is mastering the art of persuasion. The difference between these two seemingly interrelated words is that influence is more about building relationships, trust, and achieving long-term goals, while persuasion is more about being transactional, competitive, and achieving short-term goals. term. As a leader, it is sometimes necessary for you to take this position in the sense that the circumstance you are facing would require you to come up with a quick plan of action that does not allow you to negotiate and influence your people. This is where you need to work on your power of persuasion. However, if you’ve implemented both of the above skill sets, persuading people to achieve your short-term goal wouldn’t be a problem.

Aristotle, in his work ‘Rhetoric’ identified three important factors that you should focus on when you want to persuade someone. He calls these: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional) and logos (logical). Basically what this means is that the first thing you need to persuade is to use your character to be respectful, honest and credible (ethos). The next thing is to persuade by appealing to their emotions giving them an imaginative impact of how they will benefit if they do what you ask them (pathos). However, a caveat here is that this can be abused and as such you need to be careful when taking into account the latter factors, which is to persuade by appealing to your intellect, providing them with the relevant facts and figures that allow them. to make a decision on whether or not they would want to be with you (logos). As long as this is done credibly (ethically), you will achieve your end result successfully.

Ultimately, as a leader, you are in charge and how your people perceive you is largely based on how you can influence them in a positive and passionate way. This is when you leave a lasting legacy.