Meeting Influence Tips
The last post covered how to use influence mapping to increase your political savvy and achieve better outcomes. Influence mapping helps you strategically sequence the right meetings to maximize your influence. In this post we’ll talk about how you should conduct yourself when in these meetings.
Equal Business Stature
As you work your influence map, approach each meeting as a conversation. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s not a lecture. It’s just two peers chatting. You’re really not there to convince the other person of anything. You’re there to learn about them, discover what similar issues they might be facing, and see if joining forces makes sense or not.
In influence, as with anything, you can only perform to the level of your self-concept. If you have trouble seeing yourself as the other person’s peer, as having equal business stature, then you risk coming across as subordinate or needy. This can sabotage your efforts to grow a coalition around your idea.
As Michael Grinder advises, in each meeting, focus on the person, not the position. Consider each conversation as, first, being about relationship building, and second, being informational. Whether you think someone is Coalition or Opposition on your influence map, you’re still learning and expanding your network by meeting with them. Even if someone doesn’t support this decision, they might support the next. They might suggest you talk to someone else who ends up being instrumental.
Follow the 70/30 Rule
The 70/30 rule states you should do about 30% of the talking and 70% of listening—and that means listening to others, not your own thoughts. Whomever you’re meeting with, the biggest factor determining whether they perceive the meeting as a success is usually whether they feel listened to and understood.
This isn’t likely to happen if you’re doing most of the talking. This also helps you avoid neediness. The more you talk, the more your ego is likely to get hooked, which risks turning the meeting into a lecture or debate.
Active Listening
You should enter the meeting with a mindset of unconditional positive regard for the other person. If you’re not genuinely interested, it will show. So don’t fake it—actually want to connect and learn about the other person. Next, incorporate the skills paraphrasing, reflecting, labeling, and asking appropriate questions.
Paraphrasing is exactly what it sounds like. After someone explains something, briefly restate what you’ve heard in your own words. This allows for three things to happen. First, it demonstrates that you’re paying attention and care. Second, it allows the other person to vet your interpretation. Third, if your paraphrase is an accurate summary, it plays back the message for the other person, allowing them to double check whether that is really what they meant.
To reflect is to repeat key words or phrases verbatim, encouraging the other person to say more about it. For instance, imagine the other person says, “Well, we finally got a new boss. There were some issues there.” There are a variety of places you could dig in. To reflect here you would repeat what you wanted them to focus on, curling your intonation up at the end. Examples here might be, “There were some issues?”, or, “You finally got a new boss?” When followed with a pause there is an unstated, “Tell me more about that.”
Labeling is to put a name on the likely emotions at play. Emotions can influence from beneath the surface or can be labeled and diffused. When you suspect an emotion, name it. They’re often not “safe” to discuss until named. If what the other person is describing sounds frustrating, say, “That sounds frustrating”, then pause. If your labeling is accurate, it will make the other person feel validated. If it is inaccurate, it will elicit better information.
Asking appropriate questions is key not only to active listening, but also to applying the 70/30 Rule and being Socratic (discussed below). When following the 70/30 Rule, you should only be doing about 30% of the talking. You can add to this that much of what you say should come in the form of questions!
Questions are how you keep the other person talking, which means they are how you keep learning. If you’re asking good questions, then not only will the other person very likely feel good about the meeting, but this also means that you’re the one doing the steering!
Ask for Definitions
Be on guard against “mindreading”, which is when you assume you know what someone means without asking. People often walk away from meetings with a sense of “illusory alignment”. This is a false sense of being on the same page. Often, when people unpack their understanding, they find they mean very different things, even by the same words!
When you mindread you are projecting, using your own understanding and interpretation to bridge a communication gap. It is important then to not assume meaning. Common business terms are very often vague. In general, the vaguer the term, the more that listeners must hallucinate what you mean.
Consider words like “value”, “customers”, “leadership”, “Agile”, and “strategy”. People frequently mean very different things by them. Instead of assuming you’re on the same page, ask!
Here are some examples: “When you say ‘leadership’, what do you mean by that?” “What’s a ‘customer’ in this context?” “How do you define ‘Agile’?”
This helps prevent the confusion caused by nominalizations, or what are sometimes called “zombie nouns”. These are words about complex processes or relationships that, when stated as nouns, rob them of much of their context and meaning. It will also help you avoid the illusory alignment generated by “glittering generalities”.
Be Socratic
A Socratic approach, to me, is about asking good questions and using someone’s answers to then reframe their own thinking. It’s less about “convincing” someone and more about helping them unpack their own thinking, identify issues, and realize certain things out loud.
You do this, largely, by just being an attentive listener and asking good follow-up questions. When you ask a question, what you ideally want to hear is something like, “Wow—I hadn’t thought of it like that!”
Learn about the other person. What is their agenda? What are they experiencing that they would like to change? What are the underlying issues they are facing? Discuss what they haven’t had a chance to in other meetings. Sometimes just validating what others are experiencing will be enough to get them on board with your own agenda. I find the table below helpful, adapted from Andrew Sobel’s Power Questions.
Mine for Common Cause
In general, the more you dig into people’s underlying needs, the more higher-level outcomes you will discover that you can align on. If you disagree on tactics, chunk up to a larger goal that you can then align on. Do not listen for disagreement and debate. Instead, reframe disagreement as collaboration. To quote negotiator Kwame Christian, “Lead with agreement.”
Find areas where you can link your issues together to create a larger, collaborative agenda. This increases buy-in. It also improves the quality of your original plan by incorporating multiparty insights. To get at higher-level outcomes you can then align on, apply all of the advice above. Do not assume that you and the person you’re meeting with mean the same things by the same words. Instead, draw out their experience. Ask thought-provoking questions, questions that challenge their frame, that cause them to begin to see their situation in new ways.
You should, after all, want people to realize more value from having talked to you than they were initially even considering. As you mine for common cause you will hear new ideas. Bake them into the combined agenda and share the credit with your growing coalition. Quote coalition members in subsequent meetings. Ask them to advocate for the combined agenda in their own meetings and report back to you. What they report can then also be used to update your map.
Don’t Be the Idea
Keep the focus on the shared agenda and spread the credit around. It is important here to avoid “being the idea”. Here’s what I mean. If I go pitch to the D, to the person with the authority to make the decision in question, then it becomes easy to see the agenda as just “Charles’ idea”. This means dismissing me in the meeting effectively dismisses “my idea”.
Instead, you want as many people as possible with the D’s ear feeling they co-own the agenda and wanting to talk about it. As DeLuca puts it in Political Savvy, your ultimate goal is to provide the D with an “experience of convergent validity”. When you do this, your individual support for the idea doesn’t matter as much.
Conclusion
As we saw last time, to influence a decision, any decision, you need to discover who has the authority to make it, who and what has permission to influence them, and then design the approach accordingly.
This applies anywhere.
In product work, for instance, any design, properly understood, is just decisions made. Influence is the currency. It’s all conversation. The meetings are the medium. The outcome of any set of meetings in part depends on their sequencing. If you want to up-level your impact, seek the most expensive problem you can influence.
I hope this was helpful.
Until next time.
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