The Power of Influence: Leaving Your Mark

With any community you’re a part of, you want to maximize the extent to which you provide value and influence others. Right away, the first ingredient is belief in yourself and the belief that you can give just as much as you can gain from your opportunities. In a business, influence presents itself in many forms through leadership, collaboration, and overall communication. 

We have to understand that decisions are all made based on influence and persuasion, in sales especially, your ability to appeal to clients will come from how influential you are. Additionally, leaders can have a greater impact on the organization's overall success by effectively influencing their team. This is important, especially for leaders who want their team to follow orders but tend to receive pushback. 

A leader cannot simply tell their team to do something and expect them to do it well without persuading them with reasoning. However, this is a common misconception and roadblock leaders run into. By failing to recognize that the effectiveness of their authority only goes as far as their influence on and respect by the team.

On the other hand, subordinates' influence is an essential tool to effectively rise to challenges and build connections with those around them. 

The cycle of this concept goes back and forth, the key principle is that to create change in the physical environment, you must shift the mindset of those around you. To do this, here’s what to consider:

Trust

Trustworthy people are critical to constructing a supportive environment, and attracting business are highly dependent on your reliability. You may think this is a given, yet only 43% of employees trust their leader. If you want to attract top talent, establish an environment that is going to appeal to job seekers.

The easiest way to tell where you’re at is by the morale of your current employees. Do they take time and effort with their tasks? Do they bring questions or concerns to you? Do they seek feedback? Take inventory and examine what may need to be adjusted in your approach.

Establish Priorities

As a leader, the team notices when your attention begins to divert from critical thinking to micro-managing. When this happens, you lose a level of credibility, lower employee satisfaction, and fall behind in efficiently reaching your goals. Just as you keep up to date with the status of your team, you must keep up with the status of yourself. This applies whether you’re in a leadership position or not, ensuring you’re on track is always critical.

Engage With Others

The most important part of being influential is establishing good relationships with those around you. While the responsibilities of your role can stack up, they should never make you lose sight of developing a bond with your team. This will take balancing the dichotomy between building and maintaining connections, with demonstrating the skills of a competent and disciplined worker. 

To do this, ensure your relationships with the team are professional while involving them in some capacity in your decision-making process. You want to relate to them and actively find ways to bring out the best in them.

Be Passionate

One sure way that people will be influenced is by seeing how invested and caring you are for what you’re doing. This form of leading by example creates a sense of community in itself, by showing that the people who work here love what they do. It’s exactly being a “product of your environment”, if you're in a space where people seem miserable, you probably won’t be too excited to work there. 

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you can attempt to be influential through social media, setting standards, or talking about your plans. Yet, if you’re not content with the decisions you’ve made or actively pursuing your goals, your influence will meet a wall. Authenticity is everything, you need to establish a good relationship with yourself before you can expect it back from others.

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How To Be A Professional In The Workplace

In any work scenario, you are in a place that requires you to act with a level of composure and professionalism. However, you are still a person with natural emotions and things going on outside of your job that may influence this. Nonetheless, when you’re on work hours, you are now the face of the organization. 

This is especially important when meeting with clients, demonstrating your knowledge and skills that put you in the role to serve them is crucial. Of course, your instincts may not always come to you in a manner that’s appropriate for the situation. This goes back to the importance of emotional intelligence and being able to detach from these feelings. 

Scenario: you’re meeting with an influencer whom you think could be a good fit to market your product. You send them samples of your product and arrange a meeting time to discuss your plans. When you get to the meeting it is evident they’ve done no research on the company or even truly used your product. You clue in quickly that they’re not going to be the ones you pay to market your product. How would you address this?

Do you leave it with “we’ll get back to you” or do you address the situation by explaining why you won’t work with them? The ladder would be most transparent and effective. Yet while this choice is professional, the delivery needs to be just as transparent and professional.

Keeping yourself in check like this means you need to be prepared for anything by having the awareness that anything could happen. Here are some tools to keep you prepared:

Explanations

When a situation triggers something that makes you want to get angry or lose your cool, they can, in certain cases, be replaced with explaining. With the example of the poorly prepared influencer, you simply express the importance of authenticity to your brand's public image. There are going to be times when you need to be stern, but being able to recognize when those times are and when you need to re-evaluate is what makes you a professional. 

Competency

True professionals ensure that their efforts are being applied to the best of their ability in every task that comes their way. Additionally, proving that you are capable, willing, and provide value will build your credibility and advance your role. This entails being active in the organization, going the extra mile to build connections, and providing value as best you can.  

Take Ownership

Someone who blames others lacks self-awareness, will struggle to collaborate with others, and fail to demonstrate professionalism. Whereas someone who can own their mistakes, highlight their areas that need improvement, and actively strive to do better possesses the attitude of a professional. Taking ownership is what constructs someone capable of leading others, it is setting an example and continually operating with high standards. 

Good Listener

A good listener will connect with everyone they come in contact with and develop meaningful relationships. Taking the time to listen to people, and taking in their opinions, ideas, and concerns demonstrates you are committed to serving the team with the needs of everyone considered. It will allow others to trust you and know they can be transparent with you, they will begin viewing you as a true leader. 

Knowledge

Having an exceptional level of knowledge regarding your organization's needs, client's needs, product or service details, or whatever the case may be, it is pivotal you are knowledgeable. This will give you the confidence to conduct yourself effectively. Additionally, this will help you prepare for contingencies the team may face, which is where you step up.

Conclusion

Professionalism is the baseline to effective leadership and followership, both of which translate to a well-rounded organization. People can recognize authenticity immediately and will feel more comfortable working with a brand that reflects this. To gain this ability to connect, you must be professional and take the time to build genuine connections. 

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Managing Up: Leading With Purpose

The impacts of effective leadership branch far beyond the capabilities of a leader. In some cases, leadership requires guidance from the bottom up. Your leader will not have all the answers or in some cases be able to reach the desired outcome on their own. When this is the case, subordinates can take initiative to equip their leader with the necessary tools and information to be successful.

This is called “managing up”, and this method applies to leadership in all its forms. In essence, you end up managing your leader to be better for the needs of the team or to influence the desired outcome. This is by no means “changing” or “fixing” your leader, it is simply stepping up to give them and the team the support they need. Additionally, you and your leader are both striving to be better and advance your careers. 

The incentive for managing up for the individual is so that you (being in a lower-ranked position) can demonstrate your qualities as a leader and develop a dynamic that utilizes each of your strengths. Sometimes all it takes is a change in your attitude or speaking with the leader directly to give intel on a situation for them to be effective in their task. Eventually, showing that you are a capable and effective leader can lead to opportunities for advancement. 

This concept can be difficult to grasp and effectively implementing it can seem intimidating but there are some simple characteristics you can implement:

Open To Learning

Often a leader will have several direct reports which take a lot of their time, to begin with. Having someone who isn’t coachable will make this responsibility even harder. To stand out, if you are in each meeting asking questions, and applying feedback, they will allocate more time and energy to you. Think of this as an investing scenario, if you are showing that you’re willing to grow, they will give you the tools necessary to do so. 

Proactive Not Reactive

You can get ahead of situations by actively communicating with your leader on what’s being done and what could be done better rather than waiting for them to ask. Subordinates should use their intuition and apply their efforts in a manner that will help their leader and the team as a whole. This takes some of the burdens off leaders and allows you to stick out from the majority in a way that demonstrates competency. 

Empathetic

A leader who knows their team and understands their needs can find ways to adapt their approach to the needs of the group. Vice versa, a subordinate who takes the time to know their leader, can build a supportive relationship between the two of them. Realize that there will be times when your leader needs a nudge in the right direction. Avoid rank clouding your view of what’s important, put yourself in their shoes, and get involved in problem-solving. At the end of the day, you’re all striving for the same goal. 

Feedback

Just as you receive feedback, don’t be afraid to provide your leader with feedback as well. Nobody’s perfect in their role, opportunities for growth and development are what construct a professional. This same concept applies to information, if a leader is taking on a situation where they may need guidance, subordinates can take initiative to provide it.

Advancement

Either or both of you may have aspirations to reach new levels in your careers, find out what they are. To manage up, you need to know what the goals and intentions of your leader are so you can guide them when applicable. They will look out for you in the same way and now the relationship is supportive of both of your needs. 

Conclusion

Managing up is an initiative that will serve anyone in an executive position or someone who wants to gain skills from their current organization while influencing outcomes. Doing this takes time, it requires you to be accountable for everything that goes on in the team. If you want to get the most out of your career, this is the kind of attitude and hunger you must possess. 

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!