When you up the pace, influencing others and converting your critics become crucial. You may not think you have much spare time to spend growing your supporters and changing the view of potential critics, but investment in such people can be invaluable. Your default position may be to invest more in supporters than critics, but the views of a sceptic can have a 'bad apple' effect on your reputation. Thinking hard about your approach to sceptics is likely to be well worth the investment. This chapter looks at different ways of building partnerships, growing support from colleagues and improving the relationships with those who are critical of you.
The more responsibility you have, the more you are dependent on the support of others and the more vulnerable you are to criticism. Investing in and growing your supporters is a crucial part of building and maintaining your reputation. Identifying and either neutralising or converting your critics is central to improving and maintaining your reputation.
This is not about ignoring the preferences of your supporters or the views of your critics. Thoroughly understanding why your critics take the view they do is central to developing your own perspective in a way that is robust and cognisant of other perspectives.
Who has influenced you most in your working life and why were they able to do that effectively? Often the influence comes through the quality of the relationship, a track record of wise advice, a genuine concern for your well-being and the ability to challenge your thinking in a non-threatening way. Based on your perception of how people have influenced you successfully, how can you develop your influencing skills with supporters and critics?
Key practical steps to enhance your influencing skills include:
Try to understand where the other person is coming from.
Give the person your sole, undivided attention.
Identify what might be the win/win situation for both of you.
Try to find shared values and base conversations around those shared values.
Show that you have credibility and insight in areas of particular interest to that individual.
Successful influencing will involve a long game of building respect in others for your experience and creating a trust in shared values. Think about examples of where previous conversations have been productive, and don't expect instant changes in views or behaviours. Judge success by considering outcomes over the long-term and not the short-term.
Be aware of some common risks when trying to influence people, such as being so nice to someone that you lose your focus on the outcomes you are seeking, or becoming frustrated by a lack of immediate success. It's also important to get the timing right. There will be key moments when an individual is ready to change their perspective, and it is not always straightforward judging when that might be.
Sometimes it is a matter of persuading and not just influencing. Some of the requirements for effective persuasion are similar to good influencing, namely key facts and the quality of the relationship. But there is more of a win/lose outcome when persuading, more chance of damaging someone's self-esteem. Key practical steps to growing your skills in persuasion include:
Structure your arguments clearly and know what your 'killer facts' are.
Be explicit about the negative consequences if your viewpoint does not prevail.
Be ready to respond factually and directly to the views of sceptics.
Build both support for and acquiescence to your ideas with colleagues and stakeholders.
A good persuader will never humiliate those they are working with when they win and will be generous in victory. When they lose an argument, a good persuader will be courteous with those whose views have prevailed to avoid building up resentment. Successful persuasion will involve pacing your interventions, for example, preparing the way to avoid taking someone by surprise and causing them to withdraw or become cross or closed-minded. Listen to the observations of others, sensing when to bring them in as allies. Sometimes members of a discussion or debate 'dig a hole' for themselves or contradict themselves. It's best to allow an individual time to reflect and change their mind in a way that does not humiliate them.
Whatever your existing partnerships might be, it is always worth keeping an open mind about building new alliances, particularly during changing circumstances. Sometimes a partnership might be just an informal alliance. On other occasions a partnership might be more of an agreed formal way of two teams or organisations working together so that the joint outcome is more than the sum of the parts.
Key questions to ask yourself as you build new partnerships are:
What outcomes am I seeking to achieve?
Who has expertise or a perspective that is complementary to my own?
What would be the merit of working in partnership with someone else to deliver the desired outcomes?
What could be the win/win for all those involved?
How much effort would I need to put into building the partnership, and would it be worth it?
Would the partnership work best at an informal level or with a more structured framework?
What is the time period for the partnership?
You need to assess the effectiveness of existing partnerships from time to time, either in open discussion with the other partners or by seeking the views of third parties and those directly affected by the partnership. Using a quantitative measure, however unspecific, can help. For example, asking yourself how you would assess the value and impact of a partnership on a continuum of 1 (poor) to 10 (very good) can focus your mind on how well it is working. Whatever your initial score, asking yourself 'What would need to happen for that score to go up by 2 points?' can be a very useful discipline.
Beatrice, the head of a department in a secondary school, had to work in partnership with other heads of department on various curriculum issues. She assessed the quality of the working relationship with two of her colleagues as 6 out of 10. She concluded that for the score to reach 8 out of 10 she would need to spend more time with these colleagues, looking at shared concerns and reaching a more explicit agreement about how they were going to work together. Her resolve was to meet these individuals for half an hour once every three weeks, agreeing a forward agenda at the first discussion. The result was that the colleagues welcomed the initiative and the quality of the partnership achieved a quick step change.
You may have been focusing on a particular issue for some time. You are clear about the preferred way ahead, but you know that you must build support before your suggestion will become the agreed option. Turning general support into specific support on a particular issue involves a positive relationship and addressing the specific issue in the right way:
Ensure that the ongoing day-to-day relationship with your colleagues is constructive and warm.
Show continued support for your colleagues in their areas of primary concern.
Seek their views at a formative stage, listening hard to their perspective and worries.
Try to reflect some of their issues in your next steps.
Identify the win/win situation where one of the consequences of getting agreement to your approach is benefits for others.
Share your proposals at an interim stage, which allows them to be shaped by others.
Be explicit about the evidence and the value basis for your decision.
Seek explicit help from colleagues in carrying forward the outcomes of the decision.
Publicly acknowledge the contribution of your colleagues.
We all play the avoidance game. We brand someone who criticises us as either ill-informed, irrelevant, outdated, disingenuous, mad, bad or outrageous! In our mind's eye our critics easily grow horns or are doomed to madness or destruction.
A key part of raising your game is to view critics in a new light. The first step is not to be afraid of your critics. Running away rarely helps. Giving yourself time for careful reflection and stabilising yourself is important when the views of critics unnerve you.
Practical steps in handling critics can include:
Understand where they are coming from.
Look in a detached way at the relative merits of their perspective and your own.
Be utterly objective about the strengths and weaknesses of respective positions and potential next steps.
Be ready to modify your position graciously where the critic is right.
Take action to reinforce the factual basis of your argument where the critic is wrong.
Build your supporters and find a context in which to try to work through the issues in a constructive way with your critics.
Decide on the right balance between engaging your critics, sidelining them and ignoring them.
A possible approach to improving the relationship with someone who is critical of you and demoralises you is set out in Box 12.
It is normally worth distinguishing between those who always seem to be against you whatever the circumstances, and those who support you but are independent enough to give honest feedback. There is a risk of lumping the two categories together. Those who are independent minded are always worth investing in. To deal with those who always seem to be against you, success may be about damage limitation and restricting the impact of their criticisms both on you and your supporters.
