Boost Your Influence & Power Instantly

Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and I want to give you a really quick tip to help boost your power and influence inside your organization. Okay, so the thing you have to know is that whenever you're pitching something, an initiative, a new project, a proposal, whatever the thing is that you're trying to get influence and power for, there are generally going to be, you know, roughly 3 groups of people, right? Right? There are your champions. They're your supporters. Your antagonists, those are the people that are gonna be anti whatever it is you're pitching. And then there's all the people in the middle. Now you can see, yeah, we've got our antagonists, our fence-sitters, and then our champions. But in reality, that's not how the distribution actually looks. This is more how the distribution looks in real life. The reality is there usually are a pretty small number of antagonists, and then there's maybe an equally small, maybe slightly bigger, group of champions, but the majority of people are going to be somewhere in the middle. They're going to be undecided. They may not know enough yet about whatever it is you're pitching or know enough about your ideas to really give you the support you're looking for. So what do you do? Well, the thing you don't want to do is the mistake that everybody makes, which is to go after and try and convince the antagonists Here's why you should support me. This is the single biggest mistake that people make. They make it in change efforts. They make it when they're trying to get influence and power. They go to the people that are antagonists to them, the people that do not support them, that are kind of hardwired to be anti-whatever it is they're pitching and say, yeah, come on board. The problem is that when you put all of your time and effort on trying to convince the antagonists, what happens is The people in the middle, the fence sitters, see that that's where your attention is going, and they start to think, oh well, I guess it's the non-supporters that are the ones who are getting all the time and energy and attention. That must be where I should be focusing my energy because that's where all of the attention seems to be going, so I'm going to focus everything there. The problem is that you have a group of supporters, people that are, you know, kind of ready and willing and able to get behind you and give you the power and influence you need to make your initiative a success. But if we put our time and energy on the negative people, the antagonists, that sucks over the people in the middle and it only grows the antagonists. By contrast, the thing you should do is build from a position of strength. Go first and foremost to the people that already support you. And some people think, well, you know, they already support me, I don't have to do anything to shore them up. Uh, absolutely wrong. We have to continue to grow and shore them up because the more time and energy and attention we give them, the more they serve as outreach to the people in the middle. See, we can only go so far so fast when we're trying to pitch a new initiative. We need helpers. Listen, if you're one person trying to influence 50, how many conversations can you reasonably have in a day or even a week or a month? There's only so much time in the day. So you need others to help you grow and build build your strength, build your power and your influence. Those are your champions. Those are the green people there. They're the people that already support you. You want to build them up, give them even more time and attention, and they will help you draw in all of the fence-sitters. And interestingly, that will diminish both in numbers and in influence the antagonists, the people that are against whatever you're pitching. Hope you like this little tip. If you're interested in learning more, talk to us about the onsite training we do, or our library of leadership masterclasses, or even our 4 and 6-week courses. Reach out to us, hit the contact us form on leadershipiq.com.