Influence without authority is often one of the key skills sought in job descriptions for health and safety managers. We sit outside the operational management line and so have to provide advice and then work on getting that advice accepted.
This seems to be unnecessarily adversarial. It’s setting the scene to say, “They’re not gonna like it, so you have to persuade ’em.”
I don’t think this is a very helpful place to be.
People often say they don’t like selling and wouldn’t enjoy a sales role. But this assumes that you’re trying to force someone to buy something they don’t really want. The best salespeople understand what their client needs and then provide them with a product or service that meets that need. Think about your safety influence in the same way. If you’re making suggestions that make sense to the operations manager (or whoever you’re talking to) and will help them fulfil their needs, then there will be no need for any sort of hard sell.
So, first rule of influencing – offer them something that they like so much you won’t need any ‘influencing skills.’ Think about your current message from their perspective and see if it’s something they will want to adopt without persuasion.
To do this, you’re going to have to put yourselves in their position to understand their needs and wants. To do it well means building a relationship with them. Influencing starts long before the actual decision point. Build your solution around those needs and build your message to make it appealing to your audience.
Oh, and don’t do this in a manipulative, spin doctor way. If you are meeting their needs, crafting the message is just helpful communication, not Machiavellian mischief. A good solution will meet the needs of many different stakeholders, but they will all have a different perspective, so you need to highlight which part is particularly beneficial to them. A director on your board will place the highest value on a different part of the solution to your CFO. You need to emphasise the right parts to the right people. Think carefully about how to highlight multiple benefits if you have diverse roles in your audience.
Of course, the reality is that you can’t please all the people all of the time. There will still be some need for a slight push from you to get everyone on board. But, if you have invested the time in understanding their needs, you will have set the right groundwork for that, too, because you also need a degree of trust. You may have noticed in every employee survey ever, there is a general trend (outside of individual dysfunctional teams) for people to say, “My team is great, the teams I work with are ok, and those teams over there that I don’t interface with much get in the way and put up barriers.” We have a bias towards those with whom we have working relationships. So, build some.
You also need some credibility in the technical space to back up your message. If you are lacking in this area, you need to borrow someone else’s – a colleague, an external expert, case studies from high-performing organisations etc.
Pull all these things together and you stand a better chance. I’m not going to go into more detail as I’m running a workshop on this next week and don’t want to give spoilers to those smart people that have signed up to come along!
To sum up – put in the legwork and don’t wait until you’re asking for a decision to try to change minds.
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