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One of the biggest challenges I find in leadership coaching is people building trust at a senior level and getting access to the right senior people to get their input. I’ve been working with a person recently to start them on this journey. If you’re wanting to lift your influence with senior people, I’m going to share a framework that I use with him.
The Challenge
The challenge with the senior level is having a discipline to understand what’s important to them. And the framework that I spoke with this client about was something that they could use to track their level of awareness around what was important at the senior level within their organisation. If you get this right, you’re able to talk a language that means that you can have credibility in a senior room. If you get this wrong, you walk in and they automatically assume that what you’re talking about is not relevant.
Credibility At The Senior Room
What we did so that they could have their credibility at the senior room, is over time, to map out who were the stakeholders, or three or four or five stakeholders that were really important to their role. And then pick two timeframes – what was important to them now and what was important to them in the future. And that’s usually at 90 days or at 12 months. And then map two things:
- What are the things that they really care about, that are keeping them awake at night? Problems in the business, challenges that they want something done about. But not what they kind of tell you when you first meet with them, but what are the real things that are keeping them awake at night? And I would want you to map that out for those stakeholders. That’ll give you a sense of, what are the real focus areas?
- The second thing is, what results in 90 days or 12 months are really important to those people? If you cannot speak their language when you walk in the room, and you can’t be relevant because you’re speaking to stuff that they care about, then it’s really hard to have influence. Leverage and influence comes from understanding.
If you want influence with your senior stakeholders, do something similar. If you need help as a group, a group of leaders, or as an individual leader, you want to talk about leadership development, book in a time to chat. I hope this has been useful. Talk to you soon in The Reason and The Road.
