If you want to be successful as a project manager or make a positive impact on your projects, you need to become a person of influence. Your success will depend on your ability to positively influence your project stakeholders. This paper will help you discover your influence skills.
Why write about influence? Over the years, I have managed different projects, and without being conscious of it, I influenced many people indirectly through my behaviors, actions, and decisions. Persuading people to meet my requirements as a project manager was a difficult task when I started as a project management practitioner.
Some years later, I understood that everyone is an influencer of other people. It does not matter who you are or what your occupation is. You don’t have to be in a high-profile occupation to be a person of influence. In fact, if your life in any way connects with other people, you are an influencer. Everything you do in your job, at home, with your colleagues, and friends has an impact on the lives of other people.
Then you, as a project manager, influence all your project stakeholders. In fact, if you want to be successful as a project manager or make a positive impact on your projects, you need to become a person of influence. Without influence, there is no success. For example, if you are a project manager, you need to be able to influence your project stakeholders. Your success will depend on your ability to influence your team members positively. No matter what your professional or personal goals are in life or what you want to accomplish, you can achieve them faster, be more effective, and make a longer-lasting contribution if you learn how to become a person of influence.
Most of you know that the project manager needs to influence without authority in order to achieve project success. However, influence is invisible because it is about how people think. We cannot see people’s thoughts. Thoughts drive behaviour which drives actions and results. We can look at the results that influential project managers achieve but still have no idea about what makes them influential. Just as we cannot understand a person by looking at their shadow, we cannot understand influence by looking at its effects. We have to look for the causes of influence, not at its symptoms.
In my opinion, thinking like an influencer is the first and most important step to becoming an influential project manager. We do not need to sell our souls or clone our brains to become influential. We do not need to become someone else. We simply need to build on the best of who we already are.
I have observed that influence is very curious. Even though it impacts almost everyone around us, our level of influence is not the same with everyone. For example, when you have a team meeting with your team members and you present an idea or make a suggestion, do they all respond in the same way? Of course not. One person may think all your ideas are inspired, while another may view everything you say with scepticism. You need to identify whom you have to influence. On the other hand, an idea presented by an executive to the same person may be accepted more readily.
If you pay attention to people’s responses to yourself and others, you’ll see that people respond to one another according to their level of influence. I consider leadership as a specific application of influence. Influence does not come to us instantaneously; it grows in stages.
We are influenced by what we see. For instance, no matter what I tell my children to do, their natural inclination is to follow what they see me doing. For most people, if they perceive that you are positive, trustworthy, and have admirable qualities, they will seek you as an influencer in their lives. And the better they get to know you, the greater your credibility will be, and the higher your influence can become if they like what they see.
When you attend PMI Congresses and meet people who do not know you, initially you have no influence with them at all. If someone they trust introduces you and gives you an endorsement, then you can temporarily “borrow” some of that person’s influence. They will assume you are credible until they get to know you. But as soon as they have time to observe you, you either build or diminish that influence through your actions. Some people are highly influenced by the image a well-known person has because of the actions and attitudes they believe that person represents.
If you want to make a truly significant impact on the lives of others, you need to do it up close. This brings you to the second level of influence: motivating. You motivate people when you encourage them and communicate with them on an emotional level. This process creates a bridge between you and them and builds their confidence and sense of self-worth. For instance, I always encourage people at professional congresses to participate and present their experiences to others.
The third level of influence is mentoring. This means listening to people’s requirements and problems. You probably will not be able to solve their problems immediately, but at least you can share similar experiences with them. Your positivity here is crucial.
The fourth level of influence is multiplying. The highest level of influence you can have in others’ lives is the multiplication level. As a multiplying influencer, you help people you are influencing to become positive influencers in the lives of others, passing on not only what they have received from you but also what they have learned and gleaned on their own. Few people ever reach this level of influence, but everyone has the potential to do so. You can be a model to the masses, but to reach higher levels of influence, you need to work with individuals. What you say and, more importantly, what you do is a model for those who follow you.
Positive influencers add value to other people. I don’t know what kind of influence you have on others today as you read this paper. Your actions may touch the lives of hundreds of people, or perhaps you may influence two or three team members or colleagues. The number of people is not what is most important. The key point is to remember that your level of influence is not static. Even if you have had a negative effect on others in the past, you can turn that around and make your impact a positive one. I want to help you become a person of high influence. You can have an incredibly positive impact on the lives of others. You can add high value to them.
I don’t know exactly what your dream is in life or what kind of legacy you want to leave, but if you want to make an impact, you will have to become a man or woman capable of influencing others.
For several years, I have been sharing my horse story whenever I needed to convince someone of the power of project management beliefs. Only when you believe in something can you truly sell it. I used that joke, and I’m still using it with my customers, colleagues, and peers. I try to be contagious about my passion by telling that joke, and I believe I’ve done it many times. However, I was not always conscious of how I was influencing people with that story over the years. Many people remember me because of that joke; I think that means I was able to influence them in some way. Let me tell you my horse story:
Let’s imagine a gypsy man who wants to sell a horse to a Spanish man. The gypsy man says, “I want to sell you a horse.” The Spanish man replies, “I don’t need a horse.”
“Oh yes, you do,” says the gypsy man. “You have children and a wife. This horse wakes up very early in the morning, prepares all the work at home, goes to the supermarket to buy the necessary food, and when you come back in the evening, everything is done. This is a fantastic horse; you need to buy it.” “I don’t believe you, gypsy man, but I’ll buy that horse,” says the Spanish man. So, the Spanish man buys the horse, and two months later, the gypsy man and the Spanish man meet again. The Spanish man says to the gypsy man, “This is an awful horse; it is bothering my neighbours at 3:00 a.m., it kicks my children every day; I hate this horse. Please take it away.” The gypsy man smiles and says to the Spanish man, “Talk about the horse that way, and you won’t be able to sell it again.”
When I analysed my story over the years, I discovered that I was influencing the behaviours of project managers and executives in my talks and presentations using my horse story. I have been well-known for my positive attitude when managing projects. What I learned is that each of us is influencing people every day, though we are often not conscious of it.
Remember, if you want to influence people, if you want to sell an idea or proposal, you need to prepare yourself (prepare the horse) to be able to sell it (sell the horse). My personal best practice is to be very careful about the words and expressions we use in front of people. In some cultures, because of my enthusiasm and the Spanish jokes I use, I was considered a clown instead of someone using humour to attract and encourage people.
I have tried to sell many horses in my life and needed to understand the type of individual who would ride the horse. I learned that it is also culture-dependent, but most people understood my message on the first try.
There are several definitions of influence:
My definition is the power of achieving things through other people. A project manager has the power to influence their team members and stakeholders, but they need to develop that skill to be increasingly successful. The project manager needs to influence people to achieve project results while maintaining high morale, teamwork, and courage.
Persuasion is important, but it can be dangerous. If you persuade someone the wrong way, you risk losing influence. We have all been victims of salespeople, colleagues, or bosses who use great persuasion techniques to make us do something we later regret.
The next time we encounter that person, we know not to trust them. They may use tricks of persuasion to deceive us once, but we will not be fooled again. This paper demonstrates how you can persuade and build influence simultaneously: instead of avoiding you, people will want to work with you more. But you must persuade them in the right way.
Influencers play for much higher stakes than persuaders. Influencers do not aim for success just once; they want to build lasting commitment. This means that influencers think and act very differently from persuaders. Persuaders start and finish with their own needs. They want to sell their product or implant their idea in another person’s mind. Communication tends to be one-way: the persuader does most of the talking as they extol the virtues of the product or idea they want to promote. Influencers still have goals to achieve but think differently about how to reach them. They see the world through other people’s eyes and adapt their message and behaviour accordingly. The ideal outcome is not simply to persuade someone but to build an alliance of mutual trust and respect. Achieving this takes a lot of time, effort, and skill. However, it is a great investment that yields rich dividends over a long period.
Persuasion is the here-and-now skill we must learn, while influence is our investment in the future. As a project manager, you will frequently need to deal with people, so it pays to master both influence and persuasion. Most project practitioners understand that effective persuasion is necessary for project success, but it is a difficult and time-consuming endeavour. However, it can be more powerful than the command-and-control managerial model it often replaces.
I view persuasion as the language of business leadership. In my particular experience as a project manager, I use logic, persistence, and passion to persuade others to adopt a good idea, and many times I have failed.
What, then, constitutes effective persuasion? I understand persuasion as a learning and negotiating process, involving phases of discovery, preparation, and dialogue. Preparing to persuade team members and other project stakeholders can take weeks or even months of planning, as you learn about your audience and the position you intend to advocate. I have observed that effective persuaders consider their positions from every angle.
Some of the questions we need to answer to be effective persuaders are as follows:
Dialogue occurs before and during the persuasion process. Before the process begins, effective persuaders use dialogue to learn more about their audience's opinions, concerns, and perspectives. During the process, dialogue continues as a form of learning and marks the beginning of the negotiation stage. You invite people to discuss, even debate, the merits of your position, and then to offer honest feedback and suggest alternative solutions.
This approach may seem slow, but effective persuasion involves testing and revising ideas in alignment with your colleagues' concerns and needs. In fact, the best persuaders not only listen to others but also incorporate their perspectives into a shared solution.
Persuasion often involves—indeed, demands—compromise. Perhaps that is why the most effective persuaders are open-minded and never dogmatic. They enter the persuasion process prepared to adjust their viewpoints and incorporate others' ideas. When team members, colleagues, and other project stakeholders see that a persuader is eager to hear their views and willing to make changes in response to their needs and concerns, they respond very positively. They trust the persuader more and listen more attentively. They don't fear being overwhelmed or manipulated. They see the persuader as flexible and are thus more willing to make sacrifices themselves.
Effective persuasion involves four distinct and essential steps:
As a project manager, one of the powerful lessons I have learned about persuasion over the years is that there is just as much strategy in how you present your position as in the position itself. I would argue that the strategy of presentation is even more critical. For me, persuasion is not about convincing and selling but about learning and negotiating. Furthermore, it should be viewed as an art form that requires commitment and practice.
Lack of ambition is a recipe for a quiet life in the backwaters of underachievement. For many project managers, the greatest barrier to success is in their heads. They accept low expectations for themselves. Low expectations are always self-fulfilling. Ambitious project managers have high expectations of themselves and others. They reach for the stars. Even if they fail and only reach the moon, they will be far ahead of others whose expectations reach no further than next year’s beach vacation. The world has never been changed by unambitious project managers. Ambitious people are not satisfied with the status quo. They want to change things and make things happen. Ambition which is all “me, me, and me” is not influential.
It leads to conflict and fails to build networks of trust and support among your team and other project stakeholders. Ambition which is “we…we…we” is influential. It stretches people and teams and builds commitment and camaraderie. The mindset of ambition is focused on opportunity and a positive attitude.
Sometimes ambition makes influential people uncomfortable to work with. They can be driven in a way that less influential people find intimidating. They often appear to be unreasonable: they will stretch people and ask them to do more than they thought possible. Stretching people can build, not wreck, relationships. When people are stretched, they grow and develop and are proud of what they have achieved. That builds loyalty to the person that led them to exceed their own expectations. Stretch is ineffective when it leads to stress, not pressure. The great dividing line between stress and pressure is control: people under pressure who still have control over their situation can perform exceptionally well. People under pressure who have no control over events quickly discover stress and burnout.
I have seen some project managers think they are the centre of the universe. Influencers may also think that they are the centre of the universe, but they do not always show it. So, you need to work hard to see the world through the eyes of each person you want to influence. As a project manager, I was always asking myself difficult questions:
Walking in other people’s shoes is not about being nice to other people or even agreeing with them. It is about understanding them. Once we understand someone, we can start to play their tune. The core skill for walking in other people’s shoes is very simple: listen to them but listen actively. Good influencers have two ears and one mouth and use them in that proportion. We can only understand other people if we listen to them. Given that most people enjoy talking about their favourite subject, themselves, the simple act of listening builds rapport at the same time as building our knowledge of the people we want to influence.
The commitment mindset is central to the world of influence, not control. The control mindset likes hierarchy: power comes from position. This makes it very limiting: the control mindset does not reach beyond the barriers of the hierarchy to make things happen outside a limited range of control. The controlling mindset is enabled by the organisation, but also limited by it. The controlling mindset thinks that commitment is a one-way street: anyone lower in the organisation must show commitment to people higher in the organisation. Teamwork for a controlling manager means “My way or no way”: if you do not obey, then you are not a good team player.
The commitment mindset is not constrained by hierarchy or by the formal limitations of power. The commitment mindset builds a network of informal alliances which enables the influencer to achieve things far beyond the dreams of the controlling mindset. Commitment is a two-way street based on mutual obligations. Building commitment takes time and skill. Influencers do not expect to build trusted partnerships overnight. These things take time. But once built, such partnerships can pay dividends for a lifetime.
There is a hard edge to the commitment mindset. The influencer may be generous, reliable, committed, and adaptable in the quest to build trusted partnerships.
But the influencer is always expecting something in return and sets that expectation from the start of the relationship. Partnership means give and take. Bowing to the wishes of other people is the road to popularity and to weakness. Influencers learn that trust and respect are more valuable currencies than popularity.
Influential people start at the end. They work out the desired goal and then work back from there. They map the journey from the destination back to today. If we start from where we are, we may decide that our goal is not achievable. If we start at the end, the only question we should ask is “how do we get there?” not “can we get there?”
Starting at the end is a mindset which consistently drives different and more effective behaviour. It is focused on the future, not the past; on action, not analysis; and on outcomes, not on process. The mindset shows itself in the questions asked in common day-to-day situations:
Starting at the end requires firmness about the goals but flexibility about the means. This flexibility makes it much easier to adapt to other people and to build commitment. People who are stuck in the control way of thinking lack such flexibility: they hope that strict compliance with a process will yield the right outcome. They use the same map, whatever their journey may be. However hard they run, they never make progress; they simply cover the same course faster. Starting at the end ensures the influencer chooses a worthwhile destination.
I have never found a recipe that allows you to create a magic potion called influence and persuasion. Instead, you can learn a range of skills and techniques. You do not have to learn them all at once. My best practice is to try one skill at a time. Each skill will make you a better influencer and a better persuader. Learn all of them, and you will acquire a sort of magic in which people appear to be willing to follow you. This paper is a guide for you. I have learned from experience more than anything else. So this guide is the help you need to start experimenting with.
This paper is oriented towards practising project managers and executives who need to cope with the daily reality of dealing with difficult team members, colleagues, executives, and other project stakeholders.
Each skill is the product of constant trial and error. I illustrate both the features and successes. The failures are important. If you can avoid the many pitfalls that I fell into in the course of working on this book, it will save you considerable pain. Each of the skills is illustrated with real-life examples. The good news is that you do not have to follow a script to be influential or persuasive. You can be yourself with your own unique style. But behind that style is a rigorous set of skills, structures, and ways of thinking which enable you to succeed. Enjoy your reading, ask questions yourself, and give me feedback about this book if you want to. I hope to influence you in some way and also receive some feedback from you when you finish your reading. Everybody can influence somebody.
I do not know exactly what your dream is in life as a project manager, or what kind of legacy you want to leave. But if you want to make an impact, you will have to become a person capable of influencing others. In my opinion, there is no other way of effectively touching people’s lives. And if you become a person of influence, then maybe someday when other people write down the names of those who made a difference in their lives, your name just might be on the list.
In conclusion, I would like to share some of my best practices with you:
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