How to Coach Yourself and Others How to Influence, Persuade and Motivate | Page 129

Interpreting Your Self-Assessment Score Clearly, the higher your total score, the more influential you can be in your company or organization. Your total score is important, but so your mix of scores. Many people excel at one or two influence techniques and tend to use them much more frequently than anything else and they are less effective overall than people who have moderately high capabilities in a broader range of techniques. Think of these influence techniques as tools in your toolbox. You'll be more effective if you are good at using six or seven of the techniques than you will be if you excel at using only one or two. The five global influence power tools are logical persuading, socializing, stating, appealing to relationship, and consulting. If you do not have at least moderately high capability in these five influence techniques, then you should work toward developing the ones you are weakest at. On average, these are the techniques you will need to use most often and the ones that will give you the greatest chance of success. The remaining five influence techniques are important depending on your situation. If you are a politician, senior executive, religious leader, or other kind of public figure, then you should develop your skills at using appealing to values. This will be one of your most important influence techniques. If you do not have a lot of role or positional power, then you will probably need to be competent at exchanging (it's how peers influence each other and gain cooperation from the people they need to work with). If you frequently need to influence people who are considerably more power than you, then alliance building will be a key technique for you the master. The weights assigned to these influence techniques reflect their relative importance in your overall influence effectiveness based on the research. In real life, these weights would depend on the situations you face in trying to lead and influence other people. If you must frequently negotiate with people for cooperation, then exchanging would be weighted higher than it is. If you never need to appeal to people's values, then appealing to 129