Influencing Across the Organization
Why this course?
Leaders must be able to sell ideas, build credibility, enlist support for change initiatives, and get results through strategic conversations that influence how others think, decide, and act. They often must do this without using the authority of position power. In numerous current surveys, CEOs identify influencing as one of the most critical skills for leaders at all levels. Influencing Across the Organization provides leaders with the knowledge and skills to hold conversations that can influence others to bring about desired business results, whether communicating with direct reports, peers (perhaps in a different part of the organization), or their managers.
What makes us different?
Influencing Across the Organization is strategically customized for client-specific situations, needs, and culture. Participants apply influencing skills to their own real-life scenarios, not off-the-shelf case studies. The workshop emphasizes intensive practice and skill building, not theory. Participants learn not only what to do but also how to do it, through video labs in which they see themselves as others see them, often for the first time. This approach produces the aha! moment necessary for sustained behavioral change. This means that managers return to their jobs, do them differently and better, and, follow-up research shows, are still doing so 12 months later.
Managers return to their jobs, do them differently and better and are still doing so 12 months later.
How does the course work?
Influencing Across the Organization is an intensive, high-impact, hands-on learning experience. Our unique video-lab approach allows each participant to practice addressing their own real-life situations, not theoretical case studies.
Before the workshop, each participant will complete the Influencing Style Indicator. The results of this questionnaire will help them select appropriate strategies for influencing depending on the situation.
Typically, Influencing Across the Organization is 16 hours in length, including three video labs. More than 2/3 of this time is spent in small groups in video labs: practice, coaching, feedback, and feedback from the coach and peers.
Each lab group has four participants and one coach/facilitator. Each video session covers a different kind of influencing conversation – with peers, with managers, and with employees.
What are the benefits to your organization?
Leaders and other professionals who are skilled influencers will
- generate greater buy-in to change initiatives
- achieve greater alignment with business goals and greater consensus on priorities
- improve the quality of decision-making
- accomplish goals by working nimbly across all segments of the organization
What will participants learn?
As a result of this training, participants will have more impactful conversations with colleagues across the organization, managers, and their own employees. In this workshop they will develop the skills of:
- getting to the table with colleagues and business partners to influence business strategy and decision making
- uncovering opportunities to use their expertise to add value to others’ initiatives
- understanding the underlying interests, goals, concerns, and needs of others across the organization
- persuasively presenting options and alternative solutions that meet the needs of key decision makers while protecting larger organizational interests and values
- raising and appropriately addressing points of disagreement and conflict to negotiate solutions that benefit all parties and the organization
- using influence rather than position power to impact employee performance
- being viewed as a business partner who adds value