With any community you’re a part of, you want to maximize the extent to which you provide value and influence others. Right away, the first ingredient is belief in yourself and the belief that you can give just as much as you can gain from your opportunities. In a business, influence presents itself in many forms through leadership, collaboration, and overall communication.
We have to understand that decisions are all made based on influence and persuasion, in sales especially, your ability to appeal to clients will come from how influential you are. Additionally, leaders can have a greater impact on the organization's overall success by effectively influencing their team. This is important, especially for leaders who want their team to follow orders but tend to receive pushback.
A leader cannot simply tell their team to do something and expect them to do it well without persuading them with reasoning. However, this is a common misconception and roadblock leaders run into. By failing to recognize that the effectiveness of their authority only goes as far as their influence on and respect by the team.
On the other hand, subordinates' influence is an essential tool to effectively rise to challenges and build connections with those around them.
The cycle of this concept goes back and forth, the key principle is that to create change in the physical environment, you must shift the mindset of those around you. To do this, here’s what to consider:
Trust
Trustworthy people are critical to constructing a supportive environment, and attracting business are highly dependent on your reliability. You may think this is a given, yet only 43% of employees trust their leader. If you want to attract top talent, establish an environment that is going to appeal to job seekers.
The easiest way to tell where you’re at is by the morale of your current employees. Do they take time and effort with their tasks? Do they bring questions or concerns to you? Do they seek feedback? Take inventory and examine what may need to be adjusted in your approach.
Establish Priorities
As a leader, the team notices when your attention begins to divert from critical thinking to micro-managing. When this happens, you lose a level of credibility, lower employee satisfaction, and fall behind in efficiently reaching your goals. Just as you keep up to date with the status of your team, you must keep up with the status of yourself. This applies whether you’re in a leadership position or not, ensuring you’re on track is always critical.
Engage With Others
The most important part of being influential is establishing good relationships with those around you. While the responsibilities of your role can stack up, they should never make you lose sight of developing a bond with your team. This will take balancing the dichotomy between building and maintaining connections, with demonstrating the skills of a competent and disciplined worker.
To do this, ensure your relationships with the team are professional while involving them in some capacity in your decision-making process. You want to relate to them and actively find ways to bring out the best in them.
Be Passionate
One sure way that people will be influenced is by seeing how invested and caring you are for what you’re doing. This form of leading by example creates a sense of community in itself, by showing that the people who work here love what they do. It’s exactly being a “product of your environment”, if you're in a space where people seem miserable, you probably won’t be too excited to work there.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, you can attempt to be influential through social media, setting standards, or talking about your plans. Yet, if you’re not content with the decisions you’ve made or actively pursuing your goals, your influence will meet a wall. Authenticity is everything, you need to establish a good relationship with yourself before you can expect it back from others.
We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!
