Executive Coaching: Articles

Leadership by Persuasion

“Effective persuasion becomes a negotiating and learning process through which a persuader leads colleagues to a problem’s shared solution.” —Jay A. Conger, PhD  Professor of Organizational behavior, London Business School Author, Winning ’Em Over: A New Model for Management in the Age of Persuasion

As a leader, your success depends upon your ability to get things done: up, down and across all lines. To survive and succeed, you must learn to persuade people: to convince them to take action on your behalf and under your direction, often without formal authority.

Persuasion is widely perceived as a skill reserved for sales and negotiation. Now, it’s an essential proficiency for all leaders, requiring you to move people toward a position they don’t currently hold. You must not only make a rational argument, but also frame your ideas, approaches and/or solutions in ways that appeal to basic human emotions.

Discovery, Preparation, Dialogue

Any attempt to persuade may provoke colleagues to oppose and polarize. Because persuasion is a learning and negotiating process, it must include three phases: discovery, preparation and dialogue.

Before you even begin to speak, consider your position from every angle. Presenting your ideas may take weeks or months of planning to learn about your audience and prepare your arguments.

Dialogue occurs both before and during the persuasion process. You must invite people to discuss solutions, debate the merits of your position, offer honest feedback and suggest alternatives. You must test and revise ideas to reflect colleagues’ concerns and needs. Success depends on being open-minded and willing to incorporate compromises.

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Office Politics: Survival of the Savvy

There’s one skill everybody at work wishes they were better at, but you won’t find it taught in MBA courses: office politics.

Tales of political sabotage, power plays and turf wars are part of any organization’s history. Nonetheless, political competence is the one skill everyone wishes to have more of — but no one admits to it.

Political competence is the “ability to understand what you can and cannot control, when to take action, who is going to resist your agenda, and whom you need on your side. It’s about knowing how to map the political terrain and get others on your side, as well as lead coalitions,” according to Prof. Samuel B. Bacharach who wrote Getting Them On Your Side, 2005.

Defining Political Savvy

It’s naive to suggest that all office politics are destructive and unethical. If you define politics in such a narrow and negative way, you overlook the value of political awareness and skill. When political astuteness is combined with ethics and integrity, it can produce positive results for you, your team and your organization.

By avoiding or denying its existence, you underestimate how political behavior can destroy careers, a company’s reputation and overall performance. If you define politics in only negative terms, you are naively under-political, which leaves you vulnerable to overly political, self-serving individuals.

Three Phases of Political Competence

Political competence can be developed in an ethically sound way with a three-phase process.

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Once Again, How Do You Motivate People?

You know you have a talented group of people working for you. You may have personally hired some of them or seen their excellent work in other teams. But all of this talent is meaningless if you cannot raise the bar and motivate people to produce their best work ever, for you and your team, right now.

When people feel inspired to live up to their full potential, companies thrive. There’s a positive shift in the work environment, and the resulting culture boosts morale and productivity.

When you inspire motivation, you’ll see the following advances at work:

• People come up with new ideas about how to solve your company’s most pressing problems.

• People get along well and collaborate in teams to create new ways of doing things that can revolutionize the marketplace for your products and services.

• People work with boundless energy, giving their time, enthusiasm and drive to forward the company mission.

• Even during challenging times, your people remain steadfast and loyal.

• People take pride in their work and feel responsible for the company’s future.

If you’re a manager or team leader whose employees exhibit such behaviors, you work under ideal conditions. When such energy is evident, truly great things can happen.

But what if, like the results of the Gallup Organization’s study of engagement at work, some of your people are not fully dedicated to their jobs? What if one-third of your team members are simply going through the motions, showing up but withholding energy?

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This is a brief synopsis of an article available for purchase for your newsletters and other materials with non-exclusive reprint rights from ContentforCoachesandConsultants.com

The full 2000 word article is based on the book Motivating People for Improved Performance, a collection of timely articles from Harvard Management Update and Harvard Management Communication Letter, part of the Results-Driven Manager Series (2005, Harvard Business School Publishing).

Here are the concepts discussed in the full article:

A Paycheck Isn’t Enough
Is Motivation an Inside or Outside Job?
Helping People Find Meaning at Work
8 Career Anchors: What Matters Most
Strengthening Personal Qualities
Fostering Commitment Beyond the Job
Open-Book Management Style
9 Steps to Creating a Great Workplace

This article is available for use in your newsletters, blogs and web site content.

If you're interested in learning how to purchase similar content you can use for your own newsletters and blogs, visit ContentforCoachesandConsultants.com.this article; simply email Patsi to indicate your selection.)

Leadership Personality: Do You Have the Right Traits?

“Personalities at work are like cars in the city: They often can keep us from our destination.” Pierce J. Howard, The Owner’s Manual for Personality at Work, 2001.

How well do you understand basic personality differences among the people at work? Knowledge of personality structure, dynamics and development is helpful to your:

1. Personal professional development
2. Relationships with associates
3. Relationships with superiors and the organization in general

The bottom line is performance. Whether you are working in a team, leading a department, or selling a service or product, the way you communicate and persuade is critical to your personal success and your company’s overall effectiveness.

If you aspire to climb the leadership ladder, you will need to learn the basics of personality. Without studying for a PhD in psychology, you can gain a firm understanding of your own personality and those with whom you work.

Psychologists now believe that of all the various methods for classifying personality dimensions, only one stands out as the most statistically robust: the Big Five. This means personality factors can be differentiated and distilled into five separate components:

N = Need for stability, negative emotionality, neuroticism
E = Extraversion, positive emotionality, sociability
O = Originality, openness, imagination
A = Agreeableness, accommodation, adaptability
C = Consolidation, conscientiousness, will to achieve, goal-oriented

How Much Is Trust Worth?

Trust in senior leadership is worth a half a million. Early today I spotted a great post from Shel Holtz's blog, A Shel of My Former Self about the value placed on trust in senior leadership. Here's an excerpt:

Trust in leadership worth half a million
Posted: 21 May 2006 01:24 AM CDT
in Shel Holtz's blog, A Shel of My Former Self

Regular readers will know that I believe senior leadership communication is a vital element of internal communications at all times, whether significant change is occurring or not. I’ve received two more pieces of evidence to support this notion.

Angela Sinickas  sends along the first in the form of research by Warren Shepell,  a global leader in employee assistance programs. According to the firm’s research, seven things are required for maximizing employee engagement.

At the top of the list, according to the research: “Trust in senior managers.” Trust in supervisors was high up on the list, weighing in at number four. Ranking above that, at number three, though, was, “Understand their organizations’ vision and strategic direction,” just the kind of big-picture issue senior leadership would communicate; supervisors would interpret that information to localize it and help employees understand how those big-picture vision and strategic direction will affect their work.

To read more about the 2nd piece of evidence, visit Shel's blog.

Leading by Persuading: Article Reprint

Here's an abbreviated version of the Leadership by Persuasion article, available for use as long as you keep the resource box, (i.e. my name and website url), intact. It is published over on the Leadership Impact Factory site here.

If you wish to access and purchase the full 2000 word article, go here, Content for Coaches.