Maximising Your Influence as a Leader
Most managers still struggle with exercising their influence. The days of command and control are over. Traditional power bases are breaking down. For instance, teachers no longer have the authority in the classroom they once had.
Police officers can no longer rely on their uniform to command respect. Managers can’t depend exclusively on their hierarchical position to get things done anymore. Learning to influence is now more important than formal status and authority. This is the basis for a new leadership influence course program.
Maximising Your Influence as a Leader is a practical leadership influence course. It provides participants with 62 tried and proven tools for exerting maximum influence. Most leadership influence courses about influence are either too ‘salesy’ and relate to people in the sales profession or too academic, with little useful application.
Maximising Your Influence as a Leader is designed for managers who need to shift the emphasis from command and control to exerting influence with their staff and boss, colleagues, and an increasingly complex and growing stakeholder pool.
Leadership Influence Program
The leadership influence course program is based on a unique influencing model called the Influencing Capabilities Framework, consisting of four leading influencing strategies: investigation, calculation, motivation, and collaboration and 16 supporting capabilities. There are surprisingly few comprehensive and easy to apply influencing models out there. This workshop is therefore unique.
Influence according to the Oxford dictionary is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. In the context of leadership, influence is about persuading others to think and act differently in ways that benefit themselves, their manager, the organization and ultimately the end user of the product or service, the customer.
It certainly does not mean manipulation or trickery. Influencing must be done from an ethical standpoint. This is an important theme in Maximising Your Influence as a Leader. Participants have an opportunity to assess your own influencing capability by completing the influencing capabilities diagnostic and profile yourself accordingly.
The leadership influence program is broken into four parts. Part I starts the journey with understanding and developing power as an organizational leader. Managers essentially exercise power through their position or personal characteristics. Part I offers 14 tools for developing personal and positional power.
In Part II, participants are exposed to the Influencing Capabilities Framework. The model covers four influencing strategies: investigation; calculation; motivation; and collaboration. Investigation and Calculation use logic to persuade. This means using facts, rationale, and structure to make the case.
On the other hand, motivation and collaboration use an emotional approach to persuade. This is more to do with winning ‘hearts and minds’. Further, investigation and motivation use a push style and calculation and collaboration favors a pull style.
Push is a more directive, one-way style and pull is a guiding and less structured style. All four strategies are important in the right place and the right time with the right people.
Participants can complete the Influencing Capabilities Profile. The profile illustrates clearly the preferred style and approach of the leader. There preferred strategy would suggest that this is their leadership strength, but also can be a weakness. It can be a weakness when it is used too often, in the wrong circumstances. The objective is to try to use all four strategies so that the leader can be more influential in all situations with all people.
For example, if the leader must address a group of people about a proposal, he or she would be wise to structure the presentation to cover all four strategies. Why? It is likely that a group of 10 or more people in a room will have a diverse range of influencing profiles. The leader needs to appeal to all these personalities, if he or she is to be successful in persuading them.
In Part III, the program puts these leadership strategies into context by introducing four famous and influential historical figures and considering how they lead. Each of these famous leaders were selected because they use either investigation, calculation, motivation, or collaboration to influence. Participants are exposed to some video clips of them in action trying to persuade for their cause.
In the final part of the program, participants are exposed to some practical tools and strategies to exercise each of the four influencing strategies. They are encouraged to use several of these tools back in the workplace to broaden their influence and leadership capabilities.