The Power of Influence
In a recent cartoon I saw on Instagram two people were discussing their kids; the caption read: "The kids? They're great! Karen got retweeted by a famous YouTuber and Timmy just hit 16K Insta followers. They start influencing so quick, don't they?"
How to influence on social media is not the topic of this WoW post. Rather our thinking here is about how you can develop the skill and approach of influencing: influencing your team and colleagues to work in the greater interest of the strategic direction of your organization. This is the influence that motivates and inspires confidence in others, and in doing so builds productivity and movement forward.
Some years ago when I was mentoring a particularly good aspiring young leader who was part of my team, I began to deepen my thinking about influence: whether you had it and how you might use it, for example. With this colleague I understood how she felt that her relative youth and inexperience and even her title (a director of programs rather than of people) left her feeling somewhat powerless. In order to get things done and lead the change she had been empowered to accomplish, she needed to feel that people would listen, and want to partner in the change and development that my colleague was leading.
This colleague believed that she needed the title to convey the power she had over people, little realizing that people rarely do what they don’t want to do, whatever the title. The key, I told this person, was to develop her role as someone who could influence opinion. I also tried to have her see the difference between power and influence. Power can be about coercion, making someone do what you want them to do; influence is about leadership, the leadership that inspires others to further the work of the organization—work, that as a leader, you are responsible for, with your team.
Is influence available to everyone at all stages of their career? Can anyone learn how to do it well? Is there a difference between influencing groups versus individuals? How could I have helped that young colleague of mine establish herself as more of an influencer within our organization?
Well, clearly Karen and Timmy are already influencers on social media—which principally means that an enormous number of people follow them; perhaps they listen to what they listen to, wear what they wear, watch what they watch? This then is all about these two teenagers—they and their followers are not part of a strategic direction that will create change. The influencer we want to see in our school or in our firm is someone whose values and approaches both mirror and further the forward movement of the organization. So, yes, it is available to people at all stages of their career, particularly when they are on a journey to self-awareness and success within the work they are currently engaged in, and especially when they understand the power of influence as a tool for better leadership.
Part of influencing is definitely showing your passion for the work you do. There are leaders who regularly speak to large groups of employees and through the stories they tell inspire, and in turn influence their audience to do better. Influencing, however, is much more about building authentic relationships one step at a time. And it’s about using logic and reason to support the ideas you want others to follow, thus allowing them to weigh the pros and cons of the ideas and make up their own mind. Better Up coach, Lois Melkonian, in her January 2021 blog, The secret behind how to influence people, also talks about alignment as a key component of influence. Influencing is not about coercing people to follow you or your ideas but more about helping people see, through logic and alignment, that what you are saying makes sense—and that they can trust you and feel a genuine connection with you.
When I think back to that young colleague of mine and whether or not I could have been more helpful to her, I realize that I might have. Using her goals, which she had developed with great clarity, and which reflected institution-wide strategy, I might have problem-solved with her more about how to engage others in deepening these goals. In doing so, I would have asked her also to assess how successful she was about bringing others on board. A myriad of other questions come to mind, questions that will be helpful along anyone’s journey to become a better influencer: Did she hear others articulating their beliefs in these goals or aspects of them, and how might she harness their thinking and opinions? Did she ask her colleagues to sit with her and make suggestions for changes and tweaks that both improved the clarity of the goals and also brought more people on board? How much time was she spending connecting with people and listening to their ideas about her leadership area? How regularly was she employing logic and reasoning to align groups of people with her and her ideas? Was she making this more about empowering others and thus furthering the whole, and was she striving to bring a wide-range of people into her area of thinking?
Briefly back to Karen and Timmy. Consider how their influence might stay superficial—and truly not real—or at what point it might shift to genuine influence, perhaps when they take up a cause outside of themselves. Successful influencers like Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai use their awareness of the power of media and of young people listening to other young people to help others learn and align their actions for the common good; good influence is available to everyone. Yousafzai summed it up when she said: "I used to think I had to wait to be an adult to lead. But I've learned that even a child's voice can be heard around the world.”
Influence is a form of power, a personal power that we all have available to us at all stages of our lives. Whether it is for social change or for organizational growth, using your influence wisely and for the common good, is core to sustainable and evolving leadership.