What motivates this person in front of me?
Many of us make the mistake of assuming that other people think and feel the way we do about a situation. But different people are motivated by different things, and are looking at different parts of the situation than we are.
These differences are an opportunity. When that other person can see that we look at things the way they do, and understand what they care about, they are more likely to listen to us because we have shown we “get” them. In other words, developing influence depends on understanding what the other person cares about.
An example from my own career: I used to be a product person, so I cared deeply about what would serve the user. When I first started dealing with sales folks, I would excitedly tell them about the new capabilities we had built for the user, and would be disappointed that they didn’t care. Then I started paying attention to what the sales people talked about, and realized they rarely talked about the user. Their conversations were about their quotas: setting the quotas, and progress towards quotas. That makes sense – their performance against quotas determined their bonuses, their compensation and their promotions. Once I learned to translate the user benefits I cared about into how it would help them beat their quotas, I had their attention, and we worked much better together.
To build your influence skills, I invite you to play a “game” as you have conversations with your coworkers and leaders. The goal is to figure out what motivates each person by paying attention to what excites them or what they talk about (like the sales people talked about quotas). Their motivation could be personal status, money, praise, impact, team success, company success, or something else. You may not be able to answer this after one conversation, but if you can develop a sense for each person’s motivation, you will be able to influence them more effectively by communicating in a way that appeals to that motivation.
What has worked for you to be more influential? Please share any tips in the comments!
P.S. I will be sharing more of my perspective on influence this Thursday, May 1st, in a free webinar to Grow Your Executive Influence and Get Things Done. Join the 150+ people that have already signed up at the link in the comments.