Tips for Building Your Influencing Skills
Last night’s ASTDNY Training Director’s Special Interest Group was on the topic “Effective Communication and Influencing Skills for Learning Professionals” and featured executive coach Ginny O’Brien, author of Coaching Yourself to Leadership and founder of The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership-development coaching firm.
Be mindful about yourself, others, and your business
O’Brien opened by talking about the three components of her trademarked integrated leadership model, which are the same three components needed for effective influencing:
1) Lead authentically, from your heart. This requires a deep understanding of your own personality and values.
2) Build respectful relationships with others. This requires developing your emotional intelligence so that you can establish trust and build rapport with others.
3) Communicate a vision. This requires being able to think strategically about where your business is now and where you want to go, and then being able to articulate how to close the gap between the two.
More info about this model is available at www.columbiaconsult.com.
Communicate assertively
O’Brien focused on the following tips for assertive communication:
* Project confidence with your body language - show that you believe in your own idea
* Be clear - avoid rambling by writing down your message before talking about it
* Know where your audience is coming from and adapt to it
* Ask powerful questions to gain understanding
* Maintain your emotional boundaries, so that you don’t get deflated or lose hope
* Use deep breathing to control your physical reactions to your emotions
* Listen deeply - the more you listen, the more you can adapt your message in such a way that it will actually influence people
* Practice visualizing a time when you were at your most powerful and influential - see it and remember what it felt like when you were at your best, and then practice calling up this image and how you felt, so that you can tap into this feeling quickly at any moment. You can use this both to prepare for important conversations and to regain control of yourself immediately if you hit an emotional trigger that makes you lose momentum.
Talk in such a way that others can hear you
O’Brien shared that effectively connecting with and influencing others requires consciously adapting your style to match others’ styles, and she referenced the DISC personality profile as a tool for doing this. The DISC model groups behavioral characteristics into four general styles, which everyone displays to varying degrees:
1) Driven people tend to care about directness, clarity, concision, logic, data, and the win. They hate wasting time.
2) Influencers tend to care about harmony and relationships, and so they seek out the win/win. They tend to care more about engaging with people than about data.
3) Steady, amiable people tend to like logical methodologies and need time to process information. They hate to rush.
4) Compliance-focused, analytical people tend to care about detailed and organized data, and they tend to stick to the facts over personal relationships. They don’t want to be pushed into decisions, and they don’t want long conversations.
Her tip for figuring out which style is a person’s dominant one - which will guide you in matching your style to theirs - is to first look at a person’s energy in groups. Drivers and Influencers are extroverts, so their energy will be high in groups, whereas Steady and Compliance-focused people are introverts and will exhibit low energy in groups. From there, look at a person’s work style. Task-focused people will be Drivers or Compliance-focused, and harmony-focused people will be Influencers or Steady people.
A new meeting feature
SIG Chair Sanford Gold introduced a useful new meeting feature called Community Time, which sets aside time for the group to share challenges, solutions, and resources.
ASTDNY President Lance Tukell and President-Elect Jim O’Hern closed the meeting by encouraging participation at the chapter’s upcoming summer events, which can be found on www.astdny.org.
Last night’s ASTDNY Training Director’s Special Interest Group was on the topic “Effective Communication and Influencing Skills for Learning Professionals” and featured executive coach Ginny O’Brien, author of Coaching Yourself to Leadership and founder of The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership-development coaching firm.
Be mindful about yourself, others, and your business
O’Brien opened by talking about the three components of her trademarked integrated leadership model, which are the same three components needed for effective influencing:
1) Lead authentically, from your heart. This requires a deep understanding of your own personality and values.
2) Build respectful relationships with others. This requires developing your emotional intelligence so that you can establish trust and build rapport with others.
3) Communicate a vision. This requires being able to think strategically about where your business is now and where you want to go, and then being able to articulate how to close the gap between the two.
More info about this model is available at www.columbiaconsult.com.
Communicate assertively
O’Brien focused on the following tips for assertive communication:
* Project confidence with your body language - show that you believe in your own idea
* Be clear - avoid rambling by writing down your message before talking about it
* Know where your audience is coming from and adapt to it
* Ask powerful questions to gain understanding
* Maintain your emotional boundaries, so that you don’t get deflated or lose hope
* Use deep breathing to control your physical reactions to your emotions
* Listen deeply - the more you listen, the more you can adapt your message in such a way that it will actually influence people
* Practice visualizing a time when you were at your most powerful and influential - see it and remember what it felt like when you were at your best, and then practice calling up this image and how you felt, so that you can tap into this feeling quickly at any moment. You can use this both to prepare for important conversations and to regain control of yourself immediately if you hit an emotional trigger that makes you lose momentum.
Talk in such a way that others can hear you
O’Brien shared that effectively connecting with and influencing others requires consciously adapting your style to match others’ styles, and she referenced the DISC personality profile as a tool for doing this. The DISC model groups behavioral characteristics into four general styles, which everyone displays to varying degrees:
1) Driven people tend to care about directness, clarity, concision, logic, data, and the win. They hate wasting time.
2) Influencers tend to care about harmony and relationships, and so they seek out the win/win. They tend to care more about engaging with people than about data.
3) Steady, amiable people tend to like logical methodologies and need time to process information. They hate to rush.
4) Compliance-focused, analytical people tend to care about detailed and organized data, and they tend to stick to the facts over personal relationships. They don’t want to be pushed into decisions, and they don’t want long conversations.
Her tip for figuring out which style is a person’s dominant one - which will guide you in matching your style to theirs - is to first look at a person’s energy in groups. Drivers and Influencers are extroverts, so their energy will be high in groups, whereas Steady and Compliance-focused people are introverts and will exhibit low energy in groups. From there, look at a person’s work style. Task-focused people will be Drivers or Compliance-focused, and harmony-focused people will be Influencers or Steady people.
A new meeting feature
SIG Chair Sanford Gold introduced a useful new meeting feature called Community Time, which sets aside time for the group to share challenges, solutions, and resources.
ASTDNY President Lance Tukell and President-Elect Jim O’Hern closed the meeting by encouraging participation at the chapter’s upcoming summer events, which can be found on www.astdny.org.
