Who wouldn’t want to be more influential? The benefits are numerous—from improved job satisfaction to faster career progression, to increased departmental budgets.
I recently contributed to The Australian Corporate Lawyer on ‘the Secrets of Creating a More Influential Legal team’. Speaking with in-house counsel about how their role has transformed in recent years, I thought many of these lessons were relevant to the wider 21st century business world. Legal counsel, like many marketing, insights, and sales departments I know, have had to adapt from information providers to influential team players. As I spoke about in an earlier article, this requires significant skill development in building relationships, positioning, communication and problem solving.
Securing Your Share of Limited Resources
Whatever you are trying to accomplish in an organisation, you need resources. This might be budget, skills, senior time and involvement, or the many other types of business support. In every organisation all resources are limited. Put simply, the less influence you have in the business and on the bottom line, the fewer resources available to you.
Business is people
When we think of business, we tend to think of financial planning, profile and loss, products and services. But when you think back to what made something happen in your business, and perhaps when a great idea wasn’t executed, what was the cause of that?
The answer is probably people. Business isn’t money. Business is people. Given this fact, it’s astonishing that we are not taught more about how people work, what makes people work well together, how to work with someone to get the best out of them, how to create environments when ideas thrive through empowerment, and what motivates people and what hinders them.
People to business are what water is to fish. Essential for life but often invisible. Yes, our knowledge and skills are essential. But they don’t make or break our projects. Budgets can curb our behaviours, but it’s people who set those budgets.
Consider: there are two levers to pull to ensure you get the opportunities you deserve. One is your expertise, the other is your skill with people.
It is essential that you develop your people skills to get what you want from your work. The most effective people skill you can develop is empowering others.
A study by McKinsey shows how people skills will become ever-more important. Higher cognitive skills are going to be more important too—but apart from technology skills it is people skills that will get stuff done in the new world of work.
What do your stakeholders think?
The way to judge this is not to ask yourself how influential you think you are, but how influential you think your stakeholders think you are. This will probably vary by stakeholder, but nonetheless, it is a good guide.
The lower the level of influence, the less budget, the fewer career opportunities, the less job satisfaction and the weaker the staff retention. Climb up the ladder to being a core influencer and you are an essential part of strategic team decision-making from the beginning. You’ll be supported by strong business relationships, have high levels of autonomy, mastery and purpose. You will achieve a high profile in the company and enjoy good job satisfaction.
Create an Influential Team
- Position your team for progress. This is your chance to decide how you’re used and model it for the business. What is your purpose? Are you protecting, enabling, empowering, driving, identifying opportunity …? What will be the parameters within which you work? How can you show others how to work with you?
- Be proactive and develop an informed point of view. To add value, you need to get into the game sooner and get across the situation quicker. This requires taking time to find out what’s going on and how you can help. Your solutions will then come from your specialised and informed point of view. Stretch your thinking to add value.
- Personalise your communication. Create trust. Get to know your team and stakeholders. Tune in to what they want and how they like to work. This will allow you to empower others.
