Influencing and Persuasion skill

In the business world, people will achieve nothing without communication with influencing and persuasion, people have to communicate with employers, employees, clients, suppliers and customers. Using Influencing and persuasion in those communications can change the course of your career.

True persuasion and influence means that you are able to convince others of the merit of your ideas without needing to bully or disrespect others. Instead, you learn to understand what a particular person needs to hear, believe, or see in order to be persuaded. Then you are able to deliver the missing information or communication in the way the other person is actually able to hear it. Influencing by being abrasive or aggressive can work from time to time, but there will still be underlying disagreement that affects the team.

Source: http://www.parentmail.co.uk/blog 1

Establishing Rapport

Rapport is an important concept in the business world. Establishing a level of relationship with someone so you feel comfortable is what we call rapport.

There are six steps for building rapport.

It is important to remember that people are more readily influenced and persuaded by people they like. And people like people when they are similar to themselves.

• Match the Person’s modality.
• Mirror the person’s philosophy. Body language is a useful tool that you can learn to use. You can mimic another’s body language when you want to build rapport with them.
• Match the person’s voice.
• Match the person’s breathing.
• Match the way the person deals with information.
• Match common experiences. 

 

Linguistic tools for Influence and Persuasion.

• Reframing. It is the process of changing a negative statement into a positive one by changing “the frame” or reference used to interpret experience. The basis of reframing is to separate intention from behaviour and consequence so that you can then draw a correlation between them as a part of your persuasive argument.

• Using someone’s name. Addressing someone by their name is a way to establish rapport because it signals a level of connection, it can make them feel special, and it can subtly remind them that your message is directed to them.

• Mind reading.  You indicate with your choice word that you know what the other person is thinking.

• Lost performative. In this technique you make a neutral, easy to agree statement with no indication of the source of the information.

• Cause and effect relationships. This helps you put across a message when you want the other person to see the effect of what you are talking about.

• Presuppostion. This is something that you have not stated but that is assumed to be present or true for your statement to be understood.

• Universal beliefs. You can use universal beliefs to get the person in the habit of agreeing with you.

• Tag questions. This tool gets the other person to think about what you said and then answer it in their mind. Since we can think about five times faster than we can talk, this can work well in persuasion and influencing.

• Embedded commands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

·         Influencing and persuasion skills – MTD Training.

The Importance of Stakeholders

Today I have been reading about the importance of the stakeholders in a Project, and I know this could be seen obvious. There are times when the project´s success is seen as a change that they do not welcome. 

How can you engage them in the project so they do not affect its results? 

I think you should see things with their approach, try to identify why they are so reluctant to changes, and figure out how you can change their point of view. 

Showing them that their engagement is beneficial for both parts will be the first step for their support. Managing relationships and giving stakeholders attention according to their influence and interest is highly important; it does not have any sense bore people with information they do not need and they are not interested in. 

When should you involve stakeholders? 

The stakeholders are involved in all stages of the project.

Elements to Stakeholder Engagement

There are two major elements to Stakeholder Engagement: Stakeholder Analysis and Stakeholder Planning.  Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people who have to be won over for the project. Stakeholder Planning is then used to build the support that helps the project succeed.

The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are that:

•             You can use the opinions of the most influential stakeholders to shape your projects at an early stage. Not only does this make it more likely that they will support you, their input can also improve the quality of your project.

•             Gaining support from stakeholders can help you to win more resources - this makes it more likely that your projects will be successful.

•             By communicating with stakeholders early and often, you can ensure that they know what you are doing and fully understand the benefits of your project - this means they can support you actively when necessary.

•             You can anticipate what people's reaction to your project may be and build into your plan the actions that will win support.

You can classify your Stakeholders

Source: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/a 1

Someone's position on the grid shows you the actions you have to take with them:

• ·         High power, interested people: these are the people you must fully engage and make the greatest efforts to satisfy.
• ·         High power, less interested people: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.
• ·         Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These people can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.
• ·         Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

What to do when stakeholders do not want to be included?

I think that when you are working and some of your stakeholders are not interested in the project and there is nothing you can do to change that (you have tried every type of relationship and communication). You have to document that as a risk that can accept your project and try to minimize these effects in the development of your project.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCsQFjAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.projects.ed.ac.uk%2Fwebfm_send%2F127&ei=fcL1VKG1J8TxaP-QgsAK&usg=AFQjCNGbR-TRDcZSW9sQYLDMw8Ep4FOUJw&sig2=ImCXpArbWKPj6PcdegkR-w&bvm=bv.87269000,d.d2s&cad=rja

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_07.htm