Day 1
Session One - Introduction
This session introduces the course and includes:
- Course overview
- Introductions and personal objectives
- Administrative arrangements
Session Two - Influencing Styles and Successful Influencing
An exercise enables participants to identify their current style and approach to influencing. We then explore the components of effective influencing through syndicate work, facilitator input and discussions. A structured approach to influencing is introduced that will identify the key stages in the influencing process and which will act as a framework for the course. Participants identify the specific areas they will work on to improve their ability to influence.
Session Three - Communicating Influentially
Effective communication is an essential foundation for successful influencing. This session explores how we take in and process information and how misunderstandings and miscommunication arise. Participants learn how they can elicit primary filters others use to interpret the world. We explore how personality, beliefs and values can affect communication. They then use this information to align our communication with the people they wish to influence.
Session Four - Defining Outcomes for Success
People who are successful and who achieve what they want are clear about, and focused on, their goals. In this session we introduce a process for defining outcomes which enables participants to plan for success. Participants go on to learn a technique for identifying the next step needed to achieve their outcome, the action that turns dreams into realities. A practical session gives individuals an opportunity to practise using the process to define their outcome and next steps for a situation where they want to influence others.
Day 2
Session Five - Review Day One
Session Six - Developing and Maintaining Rapport
Being able to build and maintain good rapport is essential for effective influencing. Rapport is something that often happens naturally - we may know we have it - but not know exactly how we have achieved it. This session explores how we can use our natural abilities with more purpose and integrity, to create and maintain relationships when influencing. In particular the session allows participants to tune in to others’ physiology, voice, and language. Participants also develop skills for understanding others’ thought processes. They then practise presenting their case in line with their audience’s preferences. The varied exercises in this session enhance the participant’s ability to build and maintain rapport in various situations.
Session Seven - Gathering Information
In order to influence we need to understand others. We can then devise the most appropriate communication and influencing strategy, targeted at those we want to persuade. Participants learn how we delete, distort and generalise our experience, both in our memories and our descriptions of ‘reality’. This session explores how we can use specific questioning techniques to recover and restore others’ experience. Participants then go on to explore representational systems, the software of our experience. They discover how each of us processes our experience differently. They learn to perceive others’ preferences and so tailor their communication to suit their audience’s thinking.
Session Eight - Making Your Case
There can be a temptation in business to rely on logic alone to win the day. It rarely does. This session provides an approach that will enable participants to prepare and deliver their case using logic whilst appealing to the motivators of the people they are influencing. Participants practise preparing and making a business case using the suggested structure.
Session Nine - Closing Session
The closing session will review the course and give participants an opportunity to complete action plans to assist them in transferring what they have learned back to their work situations. Evaluation and the closing of the course will then follow.
