Leaders who Influence
See also: Leader as Storyteller | Leading with Authenticity | Leading with Agility | Leader as Coach |
Leaders must build many different kinds of relationships to get anything done in today’s highly matrixed and always transforming organizations. They need to navigate and co-create with a diverse workforce, disparate perspectives, varied personalities, and competing agendas.
Courage, creativity, and humility are key in crafting unusual coalitions to deliver organizational success.
Leaders who Influence
In this program, leaders will learn that — contrary to conventional wisdom — influencing is not about individual charisma or intelligence. It’s about relationships, and how leaders seek them out, build them across differences, grow them, and invest in them.
The workshop will be tailored to meet the needs of your business context and the level of leaders you’re working with. Whether it’s the top of the house, or your high potential talent, we grow leaders’ capacities to:
- Widen the lens. See the range of people, teams, and communities that must be included, engaged, and influenced in order to drive the work.
- See and build “the we.” Understand that it’s about the whole enterprise. Strengthen relationships and invest in building followership up, down, and across.
- Build belonging with people who are different from you. Discover what’s important to others and grow the ability to see and empathize with the perspectives of colleagues, clients, and stakeholders.
- Communicate with presence. Prepare. Relax. Be with the audience. Think. Be creative and flexible. Talk big picture.
- Strengthen core influencing “muscles.” Listen, be curious, and exercise the emotional and intellectual agility needed to synthesize disparate perspectives into new ways forward.
- Choose their “influencing battles.” Learn when (and when not) to try to impact.
- Drive outcomes without reliance on hierarchy and authority.
While growing this essential influencing skillset, we guide participants through a candid examination of their stakeholder networks (strengths, gaps, politics) and explore the obstacles to and enablers for progress.