Kent Blumberg

"Influencer" - Making change happen in your organization

Are you frustrated at your inability to persuade people to make the changes needed in your organization?  Are you tired of talking, cajoling, pleading, and ordering people around?  Are you in search of a completely different approach to change?

If so, you will want to pick up a copy of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything (Patterson, K., Grenny, J., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switsler. (2008). New York: McGraw-Hill.

The authors, all of VitalSmarts, previously collaborated on bestsellers about Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High and Crucial Confrontations and now turn their talents to change leadership.  The book is in two parts, the first covering the basics of change leadership and the second setting out the details of six influencing strategies.

Knowing what drives you and others increases your effectiveness

Knowing what's important to you makes it easier to decide "what's next" for you.  Knowing what's important to others makes it easier to persuade them to do what you need them to do, to give them meaningful recognition, and to communicate your ideas in a way they will understand.

I often work with executives who are confused about which of many possible next steps makes the most sense for them.  As long as they are looking only at the next step it's often impossible to decide which to choose.  Once we sort out what's really important to that person, however, the choice becomes clearer.  My job is to periodically remind them of the core motivators we have discovered and ask them which next step seems to most honor those motivators.

On the other hand, my business owner clients sometimes encounter an employee with whom they just can't seem to connect.  Rather than fire that person and try to find someone else for the job, a bit of understanding about values and motivations might be just what the doctor ordered.

Here are a few tools to help you sort out what's important.

Invest in all areas of your life for enhanced effectiveness

I work with business owners and entrepreneurs, helping them achieve their business goals.  Inevitably, that means we work on other areas of life, too.  You see, we bring all of ourselves to our work.  If we are dissatisfied with any other area of life, it will inevitably impact our ability to meet our business goals.

The Wheel of Life (see the picture to the left) is a great tool for exploring our level of satisfaction with eight areas of life and deciding where to increase our investment of time, energy and money.

Here's how you can use the wheel in your life.

Change your response to events in order to increase your personal effectiveness

In their book, Play to Win!, Revised Edition: Choosing Growth Over Fear in Work and Life, Larry and Hersch Wilson offer a simple formula for changing how we respond to events around us:  Stop-Challenge-Choose.  Here's how to use it to reduce your stress and improve your results.

Join Toastmasters and hone your speaking and leadership skills

[Update:  Corrected author name on Toastmasters blog at bottom of post.}

Looking to improve your public speaking skills?  Need to learn how to think faster on your feet?  Hoping for some leadership practice, too?  Consider joining Toastmasters.

Attracting Opportunities to You

More than a year ago, I wrote an impassioned rant against the Law of Attraction. I was on my scientist/engineer better-than-though high horse, and railed on about pseudo-science and the like.  Attraction still isn't science, in my opinion, but I have come to believe that the ideas of attraction work powerfully for me and I'd like to hope they might help you achieve your goals, too.

Here's what prompted me to recant my rant.