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Powerful Influencing

  • Classroom

    Course Details:

    Duration: 2 days

    Price: Please call 01844 211665 for pricing


    Next available course:

    For course dates and more information please call 01844 211665

About the course

Most organisations now have flat, flexible structures, so business analysts invariably need to use influence - rather than authority - to get things done. For example, you may need to use influencing skills to convince senior stakeholders of your ideas or plans, to negotiate a solution to an issue, or defuse a conflict that’s brewing between your team members. Good communication skills are of course essential, but influencing is about more than just getting your message across. People who have mastered the art of influence are also skilled at putting themselves in other people’s shoes and understanding what motivates them, to gain their buy-in. 

In this two day course you will explore the key concepts of influencing, assess your current approaches, and discover how to adapt and develop to get people to say “yes” more often. Armed with these insights and working with your own real-world scenarios, you will be introduced to a range of practical methods, tools and technqiues to enable you to become a more confident, powerful influencer at work.

This course will help business analysts to:

  • Gain insights into your own and others’ personality types and motivators
  • Understand your own default influencing style – how it helps and hinders
  • Build strong levels of trust with stakeholders by creating and maintaining rapport
  • Create an individual plan for managing relationships with key stakeholders
  • Develop your influencing skills for a range of challenging environments
  • Improve your ability and confidence to handle difficult people and situations
How is the course structured?

To give you more of an idea of what you’ll learn and how the course will help you, here’s a quick guide to the 2 days.

Day
1
  • Influencing - Styles & Process
  • How People Communicate 
  • Engaging Stakeholders
  • Defining Outcomes – Planning for Success
Day
2
  • Influencing - Styles & Process
  • How People Communicate 
  • Engaging Stakeholders
  • Defining Outcomes – Planning for Success
Anything else?

A comprehensive course manual is provided and the course can be tailored to reflect the emphasis required by the customer.

This course is delivered by our partner, Skills Shift - a unique management-training company that focuses on helping organisations cope with the one guaranteed constant: change. All trainers have a proven track record in management positions and have created success out in the real world.

Full course outline

 

Powerful Influencing (a two-day workshop)

Course Content

Day 1

Introduction

  • This session introduces the course and sets the wider business context for influencing skills, explaining why it’s a key skill for today’s professionals. We review the course objectives and content to ensure everyone has a common understanding. Participants are also invited to share their personal learning objectives and we identify the key learning priorities for the group.

Influencing - Styles & Process

  • An Influencing Styles questionnaire enables participants to assess their current style and discuss how it might be helping - or hindering – their abilities to persuade and influence others. With this information, they gain important insights into their specific personal development needs.

How People Communicate

  • Good communication skills are an essential foundation for successful influencing. In this session participants discuss at the key sources of misunderstandings in communications. They are introduced to the concepts of filters and perceptual positions, and learn how beliefs, values and personality type can affect the quality of their communications with others. Using this knowledge, they consider why certain people are so “difficult” - and how spending some time getting to know them better, could be invaluable to being able to influence them. 

Engaging Stakeholders

  • Engaging stakeholders is key to winning their support for a project. But not every stakeholder can be engaged in the same way. Participants analyse their stakeholders using the Power/Interest Grid and define their respective levels of power, influence and interest. We introduce effective communication tactics for each stakeholder, depending on their place in the grid, which will form the basis of an influencing strategy.

Defining Outcomes – Planning for Success

  • Successful influencers are always clear about the specific outcomes they want to achieve from their communications. Participants are therefore introduced to a practical technique for defining their influencing outcomes and creating an action plan to achieve them. Participants will practice using this framework to define an outcome and create an action plan for one (or more) of their stakeholders identified in the previous session.

Day 2

Rapport – Create It, Sustain It

  • Participants learn that rapport is an important condition for successful communication and building trust. They will practise with a range of tools to use their natural rapport-building abilities with more purpose and integrity, to create and maintain relationships when communicating with key stakeholders. They will also practise techniques for ‘tuning in’ to others’ physiology, voice, and language and learn how to make an impactful first impression with someone new.

An Influencing Strategy for Stakeholders

  • In order to influence, we need to understand where others are coming from. This session focusses on how participants can use subtle questioning techniques to gain insights into others’ experiences, preferences, drivers and motivators. Participants will be guided in how to use these deeper personal insights to further develop their stakeholder influencing plans. 

Handling Difficult People & Situations

  • In this final session we investigate the thought processes that lead to conflict situations with “difficult people” in the workplace. Participants will first reflect on their own default style in a conflict situation and its impacts. They will then be introduced to techniques to handle a confrontation influentially, through managing their own personal state, defusing the emotion and steering the conversation to a successful conclusion.

Review & Close

  • The final session will provide a review of the learning, confirm that all objectives have been met and provide participants with an opportunity to complete their personal Learning Action Plans.

Presenters for this course

Skills Shift logo
Skills Shift