How to Win Hearts and Minds with Brain-Based Influencing Skills
Today’s global business environment requires leaders at all levels to adapt to rapidly changing contexts and environments. Most leaders, to be successful, must rely on the skills and capabilities of others to deliver outcomes. This requires political savvy—the ability to know who the influencers are and how to influence them, directly or indirectly, to meet various objectives. Regardless of your role in the organization, you’ll want to develop a range of influencing styles to help you get different people with different perspectives on board.
Effective influencers reliably generate support, commitment, and action from others. In this fast-paced leadership development program, participants learn how to create the foundation for influencing, as well as take away science-backed strategies and field-proven tools that have helped thousands of clients —from new managers to seasoned senior executives—overcome resistance, create buy-in and achieve key business objectives. Each strategy is clearly illustrated with inspiring examples and case studies that make it easy to apply the learning on the job.
Drawing on brain-based research and over two decades of experience helping senior leaders across global organizations achieve their learning objectives, New York Times bestselling author and executive coach Harrison Monarth connects the dots by showing participants which influencing strategies and behaviors are most likely to lead to positive outcomes and which ones to avoid at all cost.
Taught either as a standalone webinar or presented as a series of virtual workshops, this value-packed influencing skills program helps you become a stronger leader who can deliver value in a global context, drive engagement across organizational levels, and create a culture of collaboration and trust.
Participants will learn how to:
- Engage others for impact with warmth, strength, and value
- Establish trust quickly in first impression situations
- Gain buy-in and commitment across organizational boundaries
- Network effectively and build productive relationships
- Adapt to different cultural styles to optimize outcomes
- Communicate with clarity and a sense of purpose
- Foster a sense of psychological safety and inclusiveness
- Build trust and credibility with every interaction
- Show confidence without appearing arrogant
- Influence customer behavior with “exceptional behaviors”
- Understand resistance in others and strategies to overcome it
- Inspire and motivate team members with diverse cultural backgrounds
- Hold people accountable in a psychologically safe way
- Craft and tell stories that influence perspectives and mindsets
A Multi-Module Virtual Instructor-Led Workshop
As an example of what a multi-module virtual workshop looks like, you will find a set of descriptions for the Influencing Skills series below. This series comes complete with interactive exercises and in-between-sessions assignments for learners.
This first module expands your ability to understand the difference between intention and impact in initial encounters, how to create psychological safety from the start, and how to quickly establish credibility without boasting. By practicing new ways of engaging, you will gain immediate insights into the cognitive and emotional processes at work in the people you wish to connect with, allowing you to optimize each and every encounter.
- Learning the science behind powerful first impressions
- Silencing the critic in others’ minds by creating trust
- Projecting warmth, strength, and value from the start
- Creating psychological safety and curiosity
- Understanding what is of value to others
- Connecting and building productive relationships
- Engaging for impact
We all have a reputation – perceptions created by our behaviors, communication styles and the thousands of small and big decisions we make every day. You’ll discover how self-awareness and a clear personal branding strategy can consistently project your true value to others, inside and out of the organization, without sacrificing authenticity. You’ll explore what distinguishes you and how to build from that to create opportunities for influence, no matter where you start.
- Understanding how cultural background affects your personal brand
- Leveraging key insights about identity, reputation, and brand
- Learning about your influencing skills with compassionate observer feedback
- Practicing strategic self-awareness to recognize opportunities for influence
- Choosing your aspirational personal branding qualities for increased influence
- Developing an action-plan with the support of a peer network to keep you on track
Clear and simple communication is anything but easy to accomplish, given the ever-growing appetite for complexity in our knowledge era. In this module you’ll explore how to generate buy-in and commitment from key stakeholders by translating arcane technical information into language that’s easily understood. You’ll identify cultural constraints and how to overcome them in communicating to influence. You’ll also discover how holding people accountable for results doesn’t have to turn into a difficult conversation.
- Managing the cultural differences between high- and low-context communication
- Avoiding obfuscation and complexity in communication to influence
- Mastering communication micro-behaviors that signal competence and confidence and avoiding those that do not
- Holding accountability conversations in psychologically safe ways
- Demonstrating managerial courage in meetings for increased influence
Few skills in a leader’s repertoire are as transformational as the ability to deliver just the right story when the situation demands. You will explore how to recognize and cultivate strategic stories; you’ll identify personal stories that help build trust, overcome resistance and lead people into the future. Focusing on a key executive skill—storytelling—you will engage in hands-on exercises that improve your ability to influence with simple yet powerful narratives.
- Harnessing the brain-based insights that make certain stories resonate where others fall flat
- Crafting simple stories that influence perspectives and mindsets
- Developing strategic story structures that help overcome resistance
- Gaining commitment and buy-in with stories that increase engagement and learning
- Translating opportunities for strategic stories into tangible outcomes
- Knowing when to use emotion and when not to, in storytelling
Rounding out the influencing series, you’ll explore how leaders who possess the ability to “Inspire and Motivate Others to High Performance” outperform all others, according to a study of 20,000 global managers. It is the quality most sought after by subordinates. It is also the quality that is most closely correlated with the highest levels of employee engagement. You’ll learn both the art and the science behind this critical leadership skill.
- Translating insights from motivational language theory into inspiring pep-talks
- Instilling a sense of purpose and meaning in people’s work
- Fostering a culture of inspiration with micro-moments and small gestures
- Understanding the impact of emotions on your ability to inspire
- Recognizing different ways individuals are motivated
- Learning how to motivate disengaged colleagues
- Keeping people motivated, remotely
- Figuring out “The Vision Thing”
