Consider your role a privileged position. You are privy to lots of information. You have contact with your Executives, team members, customers, clients and suppliers.
Even with the current COVID restrictions in place limiting face to face contact, if you take a minute to think about all the people you have connected with today (good old Zoom and Teams and an ever increasing reliance on email!), that’s a pretty impressive list I’m sure. Consider that list over the course of a week – a month – a year – and you’ll realise what a vast “reach” you have to influence and persuade.
In this series of blog posts I will share with you the benefits of being able to persuade and I will introduce you to a model you can use to structure your persuasive communication so you can step up to being an influential professional.
In this blog post, let’s be clear about the definitions of “influence” and “persuading” so we have absolute clarity on what we are considering here.
According to Merriam-Webster “influence” is
“the power to change or affect someone or something : the power to cause changes without directly forcing them to happen”
Influence does not use direct force and one word I personally twin with “influence” is “integrity”. This is not “manipulation” which in contrast is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as
“controlling someone or something to your own advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly”.
Rather like a “back-to-school” English lesson then, the verb (my young daughter says “that’s a doing-word mummy”) “persuade” is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as
“to make someone do or believe something by giving them a good reason to do it or by talking to that person and making them believe it”
Using these definitions then, when considering yourself as an influential and persuasive professional remember you are then, first and foremost professional, discrete, confidential and integrity-driven.
Enjoyed this post? You can read Part 2 of The Influential & Persuasive EA, PA & Administrative Professional here!
