Influencing Skills
Do you require influencing skills to function well in your job role? This article provides a guide on how you can develop the skills and include them on your resume.
What are Influencing Skills?
Influencing skills are the capacity to persuade others to share your opinions while respecting theirs without resorting to coercion or force. Your ability to influence others will help you win their support for your plans and objectives. Leaders can use influencing abilities to inspire and boost team productivity. The capacity to persuade others is essential for success in any field. Being able to influence others is a crucial skill, whether you’re trying to persuade a customer to use your company’s goods or services, persuade your boss to give you a raise, or persuade your team to support your vision.
Importance of Influencing Skills
Having influencing skills can be of benefit to you in the following ways:
- Leads to a trust-based relationship:
Accomplishing organizational goals through solid, trustworthy relationships at work can help you succeed professionally. You can motivate and persuade colleagues to support your goals and ideas by honing your influencing skills.
- Improves one’s career
Your superiors won’t pass up the chance to observe you and other people’s influencing abilities. If you put in the time to develop your persuasive abilities, you might find that your efforts are rewarded because employers value strong communicators. Using persuasion will also give you the confidence you need to ask for a pay raise during a performance review.
- Have people hear your voice
If you have influencing skills, people will be eager to listen to what you have to say. However, if you don’t speak up often or you don’t have a good reputation for influencing, people might not pay attention to your viewpoint or outright disregard you.
- Improves leadership capability and facilitates Change in the organization:
Businesses may be reluctant to change how they operate, especially if they have been operating that way for a while. You can convince upper management to listen to your recommendations if you go about it in the right way and eventually accept the change that could have a long-term effect on the company. You have the self-assurance necessary to express your opinions because of your capacity to persuade others.
- Boosts your self-esteem and Performance:
You can do your job more successfully if you have good influencing skills. You might have to influence customers to purchase a particular good or service if you work in sales. Your team can be motivated and inspired by using your influence skills, which will help the company as a whole succeed.
- Become a vital contributor to your team:
You will become more well-known once people are aware of your influencing abilities, and it won’t take long for you to realize that you have been invited to participate in all group meetings and projects. When the other group members want you to be involved in anything group-related or perhaps even personal get-togethers and parties outside of work, you would be among the leaders because you have established yourself as a key member of the group due to your influencing skills.
How to Improve your Influencing Skills
The following tips can help you improve your ability to influence people:
- Gain the confidence of your coworkers:
The most typical method of influence is through trust. A trusted colleague is more likely to be receptive to your influence. Trust is essential for a fruitful and healthy working relationship. The simplest way to gain the confidence of your coworkers is through transparency and honesty. Be truthful when expressing your ideas, worries, and opinions. Although you can communicate demands or delegate tasks through a company hierarchy, true influence comes from free will.
- Create a trustworthy network of professionals:
Networking requires getting to know people in your business and developing relationships with them. A robust professional network can improve your reputation and get people to listen to what you have to offer. Depending on your level of competence, you might locate and go to networking events in your field. You might be able to attend a networking event for young professionals or real estate.
- Master the power of language:
The capacity to say the proper word at the right time is an amazing power when it comes to influencing others in the workplace or any environment you may find yourself in. Read more widely to increase your vocabulary, and look into Ted speeches and other resources to see examples of excellent speakers in action.
- Build self-awareness:
You can increase your influence at work by being aware of who you are and what you stand for. Although it takes practice, self-awareness is one of the most crucial abilities you can acquire. Self-aware individuals can actively minimize and manage their weaknesses while better understanding and concentrating on their strengths.
- Give Helpful Criticism:
If you give someone constructive feedback, they might think you have wonderful ideas and want to help. Accepting criticism is a necessary skill for both delivering and receiving constructive comments. Feedback is helpful in the workplace since it encourages growth on both a personal and professional level.
- Read the right books:
You can greatly improve your capacity to influence others by reading books. You can explore books on leadership, entrepreneurship, and success stories of others to enhance your influencing ability. Moreso, you can learn how to improve your ability to influence others by expanding your capacity for thought and broadening your perspective on particular issues. In addition to influencing, the right books can motivate you to advance other crucial workplace skills.
- Develop your communication abilities:
It’s important to be purposefully conscious of how you interact with people as you develop your interpersonal and professional communication skills. Look for chances to start a conversation or participate in one. Make an effort to participate in meetings at work and to contribute to group decisions. Any chance you get to improve your communication skills will help you become more influential.
- Make an emotional connection with your audience:
Anyone who can influence effectively must be able to read his audience’s emotional state and then act accordingly, whether that means repressing or enhancing their emotions.
- Embrace your instincts:
We all have intuition about how we think other people will act or react, even though sometimes we’ve been conditioned to disregard it. Paying attention to your intuition and determining its reliability will help you develop your influencing skills.
Jobs that Require Influencing Skills
The job roles listed below require influencing skills:
- Project Manager:
A project manager organizes and supervises teams to complete projects that touch on one or more business units. Their ability to motivate team members and maneuver through hierarchical structures makes the capacity for influence one of their core competencies.
- Sales Personnel:
One essential skill for salespeople is influencing prospective and existing clients. They must influence clients, coworkers, and others to sell the company’s goods or services and achieve their goals.
- Customers service specialist:
Building rapport and strong customer relationships, recognizing the client’s perspective, and projecting confidence for maximum impact are all influencing skills required for this position.
- Investment Manager:
They are the individuals or businesses in charge of managing a client’s portfolio and aspects of financial planning and investing. They need persuasive communication skills to persuade boards and associates about investment opportunities and strategies.
- Entrepreneurs:
To convince others to invest resources (time, money, etc.) in one’s projects or businesses, they need skills.
- Telemarketers:
Telemarketers are phone line sales agents who are employed by either internal call centers or external call center businesses. They require influencing skills to close deals and pitch company products and services to prospects.
- Chief Executive Officers (CEO):
All chief executives develop strategies and policies to ensure that organizations achieve their objectives. The operational activities of businesses and public or private sector organizations are planned, directed, and coordinated by them. CEOs must have strong leadership qualities and the ability to influence and gain the respect of their workforce to promote a great workplace culture and climate.
- Real Estate Agent:
An individual who helps customers buy or sell real estate is known as a real estate agent. This could include affordable starter homes, little lots of land, far-off islands, and luxurious mansions. One of the needed skills for real estate agents is influencing skills. This will help them negotiate and convince people to buy properties.
How to Include Influencing Skills on Your Resume
To include influencing skills on your resume, follow the steps listed below:
- When requesting letters of recommendation from previous employers, try to emphasize your influencing skills.
- Include influencing skills in your Skills section and support them with examples from your Job Experience and Achievements sections.
- Showcase your track record of accomplishment by presenting numbers and data that attest to your efficiency.
- Emphasize using trustworthy facts and your concern for staff morale while trying to influence others.
- List the psychology, consumer behavior, and negotiation courses you have taken.
- Emphasize your persuasiveness.
Examples of How to Include Influencing Skills on Your Resume
Example 1: Show your Persuasion skills in your experience in bullet points
Sales Manager
Deluxe Limited
- Helped customers choose and make decisions about products.
- Increased upsells by $500,000.
- Built a network of 20 new business contacts, and 25% of those contacts became paying clients.
- Opened, ran, and successfully sold three businesses in the last fifteen years.
Example 2: Demonstrate Influencing Skills in your resume summary:
Summary
- A lead salesperson with expertise in the industry and experience in deal creation, sales, and upselling. Goal-oriented and dynamic. Outstanding track record of building highly effective, nationally acclaimed sales teams.
Example 3: Make a point by mentioning your successes:
Achievement
- Successfully opened, managed, and sold three successful businesses over the last fifteen years.
How to Demonstrate Influencing Skills in an Interview
- Be positive:
Be careful not to criticize the views or individuals who initially opposed your deeds, ideas, or arguments. Instead, focus on your techniques to get people to aid in or contribute to your objectives or ideas.
- Use the STAR Method:
You can use the STAR method in an interview to show off your influencing abilities. This approach is an administrative tactic created to assist you in telling a compelling story about your influencing abilities. Each letter represents a distinct step and includes:
Situation:
Describe the background in great detail so that the situation’s context is clear. Choose two to three crucial details that will enable your interviewer to comprehend the circumstances surrounding the example you are about to give.
Task:
Describe what needed to be done, the difficulties you encountered, and your role or objective to the circumstance. For instance, you might have led a team or had a big project to finish.
Actions:
Describe the steps you took to influence the opposing parties to agree with you and how you controlled the situation or accomplished the goal. The action part of your response should take up most of your time so that the interviewer can assess your work ethic, problem-solving ability, and capacity for goal accomplishment.
Results:
Emphasize the outcome and what it enabled you to achieve. Describe the results of your actions, and explain how your contributions or expertise resulted in quantifiable or data-driven changes.
Examples of Interview Questions to Test Influencing Skills
- When is it acceptable to exert psychological pressure to change another person’s behavior?
The interviewer can gauge your capacity for effective influence by asking you this question. Give examples of times in the past when you applied psychological pressure to change someone’s behavior or achieve a goal.
- Could you give me some instances of how you’ve influenced the actions of your team members in the past?
This question is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate your capacity to persuade people to agree with your viewpoints. Giving specific examples of how you influenced someone’s behavior or assisted them in achieving their goals can be useful when responding to this question.
- What are some typical tactics people use when attempting to influence others?
The interviewer can learn more about your understanding of influencing and potential applications for it in your job by asking you this question. You can respond to this query by mentioning typical techniques people employ to influence others, such as making emotional appeals or presenting rational justifications.
- What, in your opinion, distinguishes manipulation from persuasion?
How you respond to this question will show the interviewer your moral standards and ability to discriminate between positive and negative influence. You must show in your response that you know when to use persuasion and avoid manipulation.
- What are some strategies for enhancing influencing abilities?
The interviewer can gauge your capacity for growth and improvement by asking you this question. By providing examples of how you’ve used influencing techniques in the past, you can demonstrate to them that you’re eager to learn more about them.
