It has been busy, busy and busy over the past few days.
Transition to new job role is working fine, Tier 2 application with extension of visa successful, Santa coming to us in different forms and much more. The year end is keeping us in high spirits till now.
Another one on those Bray Leino trainings – Influencing Skills!!! It is absolutely a great skill to develop (or further develop) in professional as well as personal life. The one which I attended was quite generic; still there were many things which were food for thought. For example what is a fair mix of extrovert and introvert types? The trainer listed down many characteristics for each of them. Certainly introverts and extroverts have their own favourable and unfavourable factors. One among them was Extroverts are ‘annoying’ and Introverts are ‘boring’. Not necessarily always, it depends on contexts/situations they are in. So a fair mix of both should be considered while dealing with people.
You are on managing a meeting or delivering a presentation; and you get a room full of extroverts. The audience are on a race to talk, talk and talk sometimes to prove their point; or to rebut someone else’s. And some techies in the audience try to question the presenter to prove him/her and the audience that ‘I know more than what you know’. There are presenters who take it in a very constructive way, but often I have seen people getting annoyed with that (I have had to deliver only very few technical presentations in my life, and they were when I started my career as a software engineer). Rest of the presentations in my life were more or less on management side. However, no one expects anyone to know everything about what they present – you could very well be frank and say ‘I am not sure about that, can I confirm and get back to you!’. Also getting an audience full of introverts is not very exciting. You need a good degree of challenge to keep you going anywhere.
One of the key points on influencing people, group of people or an organisation is that can you predict or later determine the degree to which you did the influencing? That was a perfect question as I have never given it a thought. Influencing skills in my professional life has had direct results as well as indirect ones. But then, determination of the degree of it isn’t easy. May be it can be measured relatively. For that, you need someone else or a group of people to do the same which isn’t the case often with work environments.
Another interesting section of the training was that the trainer asked everyone to identify a person who has influenced them in their lives. It was a very open question that it could have been anyone in personal life or professional life. It is not a matter of thought for me as I have the clear cut answer for the person who has influenced me the most in my life – that is my father. The group had a wide variety of answers which ranged from ‘my grandson’ to ‘Mahatma Gandhi’. Mahatma Gandhi was identified by many in the room as one with great influencing skills; and I was the single Asian in the group. It added on to my pride being an Indian.
For me, most of the times I realise when I am getting influenced by people. It can be their power, character, efficacy, skills and the likes which have an effect on me. On the lighter side, I have been a victim of these many times. Anywhere any time,
- when I was in school I was influenced my by teacher,
- at home I was the best influenced by my parents which is my pride
- when I grew up though I don’t like to accept I was influenced by a good mix of people – say friends, my crush-list ones, even celebrities and many more
- when I found my MAN in life I am heavily influenced by that person
- In professional life you have many models in front of you who you accept and like to follow; also proud to say they influenced you.
And I am confident on my influence on certain people who I think should be influenced by me. But, can certainly have further development in the area.
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2 comments:
Hi Lekshmi,
An interesting point raised by you about the degree of influence exerted on a person. I guess there is no specific way to meausre it. At the same time, why should it be measured? Perhaps the answer lies in the field of marketing. One of the marketing management text books states that Culture is fundamental determinant of a person's wants and behaviour. And culture is based on set of values, perceptions, preferences and behaviours that is aquired by a person over the years. So, Marketing personnel influences a customer decision based on how they make their product appealing to the above aspects.
Similarly, while attempting to influence a person, we are trying to get him to make one decision or demonstrate one behaviour. I feel that a person can be influenced by appealing to the fundamental aspects discussed above. For example, if I say Im influenced by my friend, I may be referring to his/her character of honor, that is something I value much. So in that way, if I have to determine the level of influence I have exercised, I may just need to look for only that key decision one makes or behaviour demonstrated which I expect to find in the trainee or listener or friend.
Have a great Year ahead
Pradheesh
Thank you. Wish you too a wonderful 2009!
You are right. I agree decision making is one of the direct outputs to measure the influencing skills. Although influence can be referred to in a much wider context than character of honour I guess. It can be just anything – positive or negative. But as u said the degree of influence can be directly measured from the key decisions made and of course the by-products. In a way everyone does a bit of marketing in their lives, so it can definitely be attributed to wants, perceptions, behaviour etc.
Cheers!
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