How to Influence Your Colleagues Your Ideas?

We can design hun­dred and one ways of influ­enc­ing your bosses, col­leagues and cus­tomer but they may not work as effec­tively.   You will be wast­ing effort by gen­er­at­ing vol­u­met­ric attempts to get them influ­ence.  The key thing behind influ­enc­ing exter­nal par­ties is to under­stand what is impor­tant to them.  And one of the more impor­tant things asso­ci­at­ing to impor­tance to them is how they make a deci­sion in their men­tal model.

Every one of us is dif­fer­ent by DNA design.  So are our thoughts.  Our deci­sion mak­ing process are dif­fer­ent from one another based on our indi­vid­ual life expe­ri­ences.  Although dif­fer­ent, we can be gen­er­ally cat­e­go­rized into the fol­low­ing deci­sion models.

1. Auto­matic – Your col­league is fine with what your pro­posal.  They don’t see any impli­ca­tion of what you’re propos­ing.  You’ve addressed directly what they are con­cerned with and they say “yes” imme­di­ately.  How­ever, not every one can make a deci­sion on the spot and you won’t be able to address all their con­cerns at the first session.
2. Num­ber of times – Your col­leagues will agree to help you once you’ve reached the num­ber of times you pro­posed the idea to them.  Not because they need to reach the num­ber of times (maybe), but maybe the case that they did not under­stand in the first few rounds of pro­pos­als.  There­fore, you may come out with dif­fer­ent ver­sions of your pro­pos­als that reach the same objec­tive to aid their under­stand­ing of the proposals.
3. Period of times – This time, it is not the num­ber of times but how long that you approach your col­league.  The dura­tion is the key decid­ing fac­tor to your col­league.  They may not be ready for this pro­posal as they are tied up with some­thing, or they don’t see the need (and ben­e­fit) of accept­ing your ideas yet.  As such, you might want to check back on their com­fort level periodically.
4. Con­sis­tent over time – The last deci­sion mech­a­nism that your col­league relies on is the con­sis­tency over time of your pro­posal.  They may be look­ing at your integrity and con­sis­tency of what you are propos­ing.  This is fur­ther rein­forced by the way you’ve promised and deliv­ered results over time to your col­league where trust is in place.  There­fore, if you are han­dling a col­league with this mech­a­nism, its best to stick with your prin­ci­ples and not make changes over time.  It may be very detri­men­tal when they real­ized that you always change your prin­ci­ples in order to achieve your objectives.

This is taken from the book, The Influ­en­tial Fundrais­ers authored by Bernard Ross and Clare Segal.  This book has con­tent tar­geted to fundrais­ers as the title describes.  How­ever, the applic­a­bil­ity of the tech­niques can be used on all aspects of influ­ence and nego­ti­a­tion.  That is even to influ­ence your col­leagues and boss to a deci­sion or influ­ence a customer’s sales deci­sion.  Be sure of what your col­leagues are bas­ing on in decid­ing and you will def­i­nitely be able to influ­ence them more easily.

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