The Exercise
Look down the list below and see if you are prone to any of the behaviours. If you are, watch out for it / them. Make a note of them as soon as you can after they have happened, and think how you could have replaced that behaviour with an influencing style that is going to bring you more success - being collaborative, consulting people, being quietly rational and logical, or building bonds with colleagues over the professonal values you share. This takes quite a lot of concentrated effort. Here are the behaviours that research says you should avoid in interacting with others:
- Stating a request as a demand.
- Seeming to be threatening (people often don't realise when they come across like this, so you can seek feedback from a friendly colleague).
- Resorting to "This is part of your job description, so you have to do it!" or "That's the way we do things so you must too".
- Ganging up on someone by taking a colleague along with you to insist that something is done a particular way.
All these negative styles can be replaced with collaborative, consultative, rational or inspirational styles - they will be much more effective.
Practice makes perfect
Reflect on how you might appropriately build the collaborative, consultative, rational or inspirational styles into your day to day interactions with people. Make a real effort to use these behaviours – appropriately, of course - over the next four weeks. Making a consistent conscious effort to change your behaviour is the best way of making it stick long term.