Leading With Influence & Persuasion

Module Overview

Would you like to exercise greater influence? Resolve conflicts decisively? Seamlessly overcome stakeholder resistance? Get people excited about your proposals?

Your success as a leader depends a lot on achieving a level of confidence and credibility in developing an ability to do these things.

This 1-day influence and persuasion training course is designed to provide you the opportunity to learn how your behaviour style impacts your success in motivating others to ‘buy’ your position.

Step-by-step, you’ll go from identifying your current style to applying a more effective set of tactics.

Using a learn by doing approach, you’ll go through the entire dynamic process, using behaviour modeling, rehearsals and feedback sessions – and exchange views & insights with colleagues to add to your own experience.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand and apply the key skills that underpin successful persuasion and influencing in any situation
• Use specific written, visual & vocal frames to establish common ground
• Apply influence in resolving conflict, building coalitions, managing stakeholders – and dealing with resistance, objections and other adverse responses.
• Recognise others’ influencing tactics and identify appropriate responses to protect oneself
• Recognise the advantage of using a pre-persuasion checklist in strategising your approach to influence.

Programme Content

Models of influence & persuasion
What is influence & what is persuasion; their associated strategies and skills, and common misconceptions. Apply & defend against the 6 universal principles of influence and the 4 criteria of persuasion.

Building Credibility Training
This session will discuss ways that participants can build their credibility, including first impressions, appearance, demonstrations, and testimonials.

Thinking Styles/Perceptual Frames
A starting point for influencing is to train oneself in seeing all sides of an issue – how to take oblique positions to ferret out where the other person is coming from.

Influencing Style Training
Diagnose your own preferred influencing style & role-play your less favoured behaviours to strengthen your hand.

Constructive use of language and images
Apply appropriate written, visual & vocal frames – including the use of appropriately flexible language that allows the other side to move towards you applying their own meaning and context to your words.

Overcoming Objections Training
We will explore what an objection is and work in small groups to identify our most frequently encountered objections – and brainstorm ways to respond to them. Nine specific objection handling strategies will be presented, including the boomerang, FFF, show your hand & the identify–validate–resolve strategy.

Buy Signals
Participants will learn how to pick up on buy signals from the other side & look at different techniques to close the deal – at meetings, interviews, selling pitches and one-on-one encounters.

Resolving Conflict Training
Understand the different styles of conflict and how to handle conflict effectively; dealing with difficult people; seeing the ‘3rd story’. We will look at a five-step process to resolve conflict and examine how negative attitudes can cause negative interactions, and what we can do to turn those attitudes around.

Workshop Wrap-Up
At the end of the day, participants will be challenged to personalise the learning and develop an action plan to carry back to the workplace.

This course is suited for
Senior Managers, Middle Managers & Team Leaders