Sell Your Horse: Developing Your Influence Skills for Project Success

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.

Introduction

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 thin...