Skillbuilding For Leaders

Influencing and negotiation are two of the most important skills for leaders. If you're asking yourself why….establishing credibility, gaining commitment and building trust are all critical in creating a positive work culture. They lead to a more engaged team that's more motivated and performs at a higher level. As a result, there are four negotiating and influencing tips that leaders should keep in mind:

Establish Credibility

Building credibility is critical for a leader in developing trust and influencing others. Thinking about your own habits, you wouldn’t say yes to someone who walked up to you on the street with zero credentials.

So how does one build credibility in a corporate world? With honesty, authenticity and caring for the interests of others.

According to a recent PwC study, consumers, employees and business executives believe data protection and cybersecurity, treating employees well, ethical business practices and admitting mistakes are at the top of the list for establishing credibility and trust.

Employees don’t always want to hear about company updates, how well the company is doing this quarter, etc. Of course, those are important updates to communicate, but it doesn’t express your trustworthiness.

Instead, consider touching on points such as loyal customer following, what the organization is doing to support its values or topics that your team will care about such as return-to-work policies.

Another way to establish credibility is to support your claims with objective data. If you have relevant statistics about the company from recent performance reviews or public sentiment, it's important to include those.

For example, simply stating that “a lot” of employees are satisfied with the hybrid work policy sounds weaker than sharing the details “82% of employees are satisfied with the hybrid work policy which supports our low employee turnover rate of 2%.”

Influence Others Through Emotion Rather Than Logic

Our emotions guide us in our decision-making every day, and often, without us even realizing it.

We all have primal instincts that influence our choices. When we feel hungry, we seek out something to eat. When we're tired, we sleep or find another cup of coffee. These are examples of instincts in action - emotional responses that affect our choices without much extra thought.

Emotions are what give color to our daily lives: happy, sad, angry, the list goes on. Each of these affects how we feel, what we do and the choices we make. And the emotions we feel when we make a decision will impact if we make that choice again.

Countless advertising research studies show that our purchasing decisions are influenced more by our emotional responses than the ad content itself – sometimes two to three times as much. We know we use our emotions more than information, including facts, to make buying choices. But how can leaders tap into emotional influence?

Take a page out of the marketers’ handbook. Smart marketers appeal to your emotions by giving companies a personality. Rather than just stating facts about a product or brand, infusing a personality gives the brand life and will attract employees that align with those traits. These traits can be expressed in everything from company presentations to office walls to company ads. 

Create a persona for your company that employees can understand and support. Tap into your culture. Give employees a voice to speak up. Appeal to your employees by engaging their emotions.

Last but not least, connect with your people and create working relationships that help to progress the organization. Show a genuine interest in their wellbeing.

Probe

In this stage, your focus should remain on asking questions and learning from your team or employees to gather information and build rapport. This is a fantastic opportunity to exchange information with the other parties involved, with the intent of understanding and building relationships.

Building a relationship is key to influencing and negotiating, as you want the opposing party to form respect and trust in you and the negotiation process. This stage can help you establish any possible common ground as well as build up trust and credibility.

One of the biggest transitions for leaders since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has been going from “knowing it all” to taking a step back and “learning it all.” Leaders are expected to listen, learn, understand and make decisions with employee well-being in mind. By considering what your employees want, you’ll establish yourself as a trustworthy leader.

Don’t Make Assumptions!

The last tip is to never make assumptions about how your team or employees feel. Practice empathy instead. Empathy is a component of social awareness that is critical to successful communication or negotiation.

Empathy can go a long way, especially when the goal is to reach a mutually beneficial agreement such as return to work policies, hybrid and/or flexible schedules, etc. By being empathetic, you cultivate trust, improve your persuasion’s efficacy and develop a more amicable, sustainable relationship.

Overall, when we think of leaders, we never think of them as people who always need to negotiate. We often believe their position of power enables them to issue directives without discussion, spend more time talking than listening, and easily tamp down any troublesome conflict. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In order for leaders to influence and therefore negotiate, they need to establish credibility, listen and connect with their employees and practice empathy.