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Influencing Skills - part of life and work
I can't say my work isn't varied. I suppose that when you specialise in how people think, feel, behave and change there is a huge range of possibilities. So earlier this week I found myself facilitating a senior management team away day. They wanted to improve their influencing ability with partners and other agencies. Having delivered team building events before, I usually like to have a theme that runs through them, so on this occasion it was influencing.
Influencing is part of everyday life and a person's ability to influence will dictate how their career progresses. That's because for a modern manager, technical skills are not enough. For example you could be a brilliant accountant, engineer etc. but without well developed negotiation and influencing skills your career will stall at a certain level making it difficult to progress into senior management.
People are not only interested in how to influence others, but how to influence themselves, for example to become less stressed. How can you prevent yourself getting into an anxious state at times when it is so counterproductive? This is all about influence too, and can be learnt on my stress management courses but also in personal consultations where we can be more focused on individual needs. The interesting thing is that the limitations a person may have in influencing others can be a reflection of the limitations they have on influencing themselves. People who are very self-critical can often be critical of others, even though they may not realise how they are coming across.
Anyway, the managers seemed to have gained a lot from the day and it served the twin aims of team building and learning powerful influencing techniques. If you wish to discuss running a similar event, please feel free to call me on (01926) 856746.
Last updated: 07 August 2009