Do your ideas get the attention and appreciation they deserve? Are they reflected in your team’s decisions and outputs? Not always? If you’re not making the impact you want, it might be because you’re not seen as strategic. However, being seen as strategic takes more than being strategic; it also means being influential. Here are the factors contributing to your influence and tips you can try if you want your ideas to be taken seriously.
What Makes You More Influential?
One reason your ideas might be getting short shrift is that you approach influence as a purely intellectual process. In that mode, you collect iron-clad evidence to bolster your argument and try to convince everyone of your idea’s merit. Sadly, that approach is hollow and often ineffective. (It’s ironic because you probably recognize how ineffective this strategy is when someone tries it on you, yet the norm for data-heavy intellectual floggings as the standard way to persuade others might feel too strong to ignore.)
There’s a more effective approach.
The key is to recognize that influence is a social and emotional process rather than strictly an intellectual or cognitive one. When I say it’s social, that’s because influence happens inside the other person. That means your influence attempts start long before you think and extend well beyond your presentation of the facts.
You have to figure out how to be effective throughout.
How to Be More Persuasive
Let me start by saying that this isn’t exactly breaking news. We’ve known how to be persuasive since Aristotle published his three-pillar model of rhetoric (ethos, logos, pathos) in the fourth century BCE. Let’s dust off that approach and tailor it to a situation where you need to find ways of having a more immediate impact.
Credibility
The first pillar of influence is credibility. The importance of credibility is tied directly to the fact that influence is a social and emotional process. The unfortunate truth is that the quality of your idea, the strength of your argument, and the value of your plan could be irrelevant if the person you’re trying to influence doesn’t put any stock in you.
This should be a call to action for you to be routinely thinking about the most important people in your sphere of influence and the approaches you will take to enhance their trust in you. Credibility is a long game, but here are a few things that might help if you need a credibility boost in the short term.
Expertise: What do you know? What have you done? Who has certified your skills? Long-term expertise is about knowledge and experiences. If you have to bolster your perceived expertise in the short run, inject a dose of knowledge by attending meetings in another area, interviewing experts, or reading pertinent articles. Then, make a point of sharing what you did and what you learned.
Track Record: What have you done? How did it pan out? Did it work? A long-term track record is a portfolio of relevant experiences where you’ve succeeded—not something you can conjure in a few hours or days. In the short term, if you don’t have relevant examples, lean on examples from other areas where you demonstrated you could learn something new.
Methods: How will you do it? What’s your plan? Has it worked before? If your expertise and track record aren’t all that, you can enhance your credibility by leaning on the authority of an existing method or approach. Tried and true techniques, benchmarked data, or methodologies from reputable professional bodies or consulting firms can all reflect credibility on you and your idea.
Connection: Who are you? Do I like you? Can I trust you to think like me? Finally, you must factor in biases and prejudices, which are always present when someone assesses your credibility. In the long term, build connections by demonstrating that you trust people enough to be vulnerable with them. In the short term, find common ground by discovering you’re both Liverpool fans, fly fishers, or people who used to work at Cisco.
One last thought about credibility. You don’t necessarily need strong credibility with the decision-maker if you have a good relationship with other influencers. In that situation, you can borrow credibility from people who trust you by asking them to vet and endorse your ideas.
Logic
Probably the most obvious part of becoming more influential is improving the logic and strength of your argument. But while this is obvious, you might not be making your case as expertly as you think. Do you have room to improve on any of these dimensions?
Structure: Does your argument flow well? It’s hard for your audience to get on board with a plan they can’t follow. Ensure you use a logical order and provide organizing principles to help the audience understand and internalize your argument. Don’t do this alone. You’re probably a poor judge of whether your argument is structured well because you have the curse of knowledge. Run it past someone else and take their suggestions for structuring your argument.
Evidence: Are there data to back up your claims? Are they reliable and relevant? Far too many influence attempts involve people opining about the best path to take without any evidence for why that makes sense. Make sure you have proof, and remember that your evidence has its own credibility—low-credibility evidence can do more harm than good.
Counterarguments: The best influence attempts aren’t snow jobs with information cherry-picked to support your position. If you want to be more influential, show that you’ve looked at multiple options, considered the risks, and worked to counter any biases in your decision-making process.
Images: Another secret is that if you’re trying to be influential in a way that dislodges people from their current perspective, it can be beneficial to use images, graphs, and other visuals to do the talking.
Emotion
If you’ve done what you can to establish your credibility and packed your approach with well-structured facts and figures, your last lever is to dial in the emotional content. Think about both sides of the argument. How do you make your proposal’s upside sound more attractive and valuable while minimizing the fear and anxiety associated with its downsides?
Humans are emotional decision-makers, so don’t ignore how people feel about your idea.
Storytelling: Can you add a story that helps bring your proposal to life? Is there a hook or an arch that will draw people in and get them cheering for your plan? Stories are convincing (more convincing than they should be because we often weigh anecdotes in stories more highly than objective evidence).
Values: Do you know what your audience and the decision-maker value? Do you know what’s at stake for them? It’s best to do your homework to understand these dynamics in advance, but if you don’t, you will need to listen carefully to their questions and comments to know how they’re anchoring their decisions.
Aspirations: Can you paint a picture of how the world will be better if you implement your idea? A strong argument pulls on the decision-maker’s heartstrings (or their ambitions, greed, need to win, etc.) so they feel the prize is worth striving for.
Risk: Have you assuaged the decision-maker’s concerns about what might go wrong if you proceed with your approach? You need to consider the risks and anxieties that are holding people back. Avoiding talking about the risks will not make them go away; it will just leave the opposition unsurfaced.
Adaptability
One final comment—straying from Aristotle. You can have an extremely compelling argument built on a foundation of solid credibility, strengthened by logic, and energized by emotion, and it might not be enough. Rarely will your approach be as good as an approach that you tweak, change, and iterate with others. If you want to be influential, give people opportunities to put their fingerprints on the plan.
There you have it. Invest in the long-term approaches if you’re trying to become more influential. If you have to influence someone now, try this:
- Seek out a source of expertise and share how you’ve incorporated your new knowledge into your proposal.
- Highlight past examples where you’ve done something similar or where you’ve been successful in applying a new skill.
- Draw on a well-known or credible method or external expert to increase confidence in your approach.
- Find common ground with your audience and decision-makers.
- Borrow credibility from others by asking them to vet and endorse your ideas.
- Run your approach past someone else to get the flow right.
- Add evidence with strong credibility from sources your audience will trust.
- Highlight the risks of your plan and how you’ll mitigate them.
- Use graphs and images to change engrained opinions.
- Tell stories to make the problem, the plan, or the potential outcome more compelling.
- Identify the values and beliefs beneath your audience’s perspectives and frame your argument in themes that have currency with them.
- Make an emotional case for what will be better if you enact your plan.
- Validate and empathize with their perceived risks and work together on how you might mitigate them.
- Adapt your plans based on the feedback you hear. Don’t be precious about your language if tweaking something would make it easier for your audience to agree.
Having great ideas is only the first part of the problem. You also need to convince people of the merit of your approach. Doing so will require much more than a logical argument; you’ll need to strengthen your credibility and case.
Additional Resources
3 Big mistakes you make when trying to influence
Dealing with trust issues on your team
Simple Steps to Rehabilitate a Bad Reputation