Influencing up: Gain more influence with your leader by building trust

Influencing up is an important skill to master. While there is tons of literature on leadership, there is not a lot on followership. Followership can loosely be defined as the ability to understand a leader's vision and help them bring it to life. Followership differs from leadership in that, as a follower, you have less organizational power, fewer resources at your disposal, and competition for your leader's attention. In this article, we will explore followership and how you can gain more influence with your leader by focusing on building trust.

Executing is the ticket of entry when it comes to influencing leaders.

Leaders of organizations must deliver results. They are held responsible for achieving organizational goals over anything else and must make difficult decisions around people, processes, and resources to achieve goals.

Leaders know that they have blind spots, so they rely on the people around them to give them data and insights to help them understand how business is going and the type of changes they need to make to maintain current performance and strive for improvement. The people they choose to trust and listen to will directly influence their ability to reach organizational goals.

For this reason, leaders tend to rely on employees who have proven records of delivering results and are reliable sources of information, insights, perspectives, and solutions. You must start by executing your role at a high level to gain more influence with your leader. Once you can do this, your focus should also expand to include helping your leader achieve their goals.

How do you become a trusted source?

It takes time to build a trusting relationship with your boss. It starts with you making small investments around being on time for work, doing the tasks that you are assigned, and consistently being forthright about challenges and obstacles. By executing what you are asked to do, you establish credibility with your boss. Over time, this creditability can grow into trust, which will provide opportunities for you to share your opinions, thoughts, and ideas.

Whenever your boss comes to you with a problem, and you can provide a solution, you expand your influence with your boss. Think of delivering results as being like building a bridge of trust. Each time you help solve a problem, another brink is laid, strengthening your relationship with your boss.

When you disappoint, fail to deliver, or provide inaccurate or hard-to-understand information, you damage a brink on your bridge. If you have a lot of bricks, a minor mistake will not disrupt the integrity of your bridge. But if your bridge does not have a good foundation, you could find yourself on shaky ground.

Communication matters

Once you have established a strong trust bridge, you can begin the process of influencing your leader. Having a good relationship is the first step in the process. The next step in the influence process is communicating brief, clear, and compelling information to your leader.

• Being brief is important because the higher your leader is in an organization, the more people pull on their time and attention. Your ability to summarize complex ideas into a 5 to 10-minute conversation is essential to getting your leader's attention and getting them to care about the information you have to share.

• Being clear is important because your leader likely does not have time to help you flush out your ideas or help you refine your logic. That is time and work, which can be seen as an additional problem to be solved instead of the solution you want it to be. Test your ideas with a trusted peer and ask them to help you refine your thinking before presenting a new concept, idea, or solution to your boss.

• Being compelling is important because there are always competing priorities and perspectives. Your idea needs to be better than others your leader is presented with. If you want buy-in, you must present solutions that feel like no-brainers because they are easy to understand and can provide a qualifiable benefit to your leader.

Summary

Building your followership skills is essential in growing your capability as a leader. It may seem counterintuitive, but all great leaders started off as great followers. Being a great follower can give you more face-time opportunities with your leader, greater influence within your organization, and incremental opportunities to take on important, high-profile work.

Being a great follower starts with executing your role at a high level and then providing insight and perspective that helps your leader and organization perform at a higher level.

One word of caution: not all leaders deserve great followers. Do your due diligence in identifying leaders to follow that align with your ethics, values, and beliefs. If you are going to go all in on supporting someone else success, you want to be confident that it will be a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Thank you for reading this blog

I am a father, husband, executive coach, and former retail executive. My coaching expertise comes from 21 years of leading operation, sales, and marketing teams. I understand what it is like to feel stuck, undervalued, and underappreciated.

I also know what it takes to invest in professional development, climb the corporate ladder, and find fulfillment at work.

Your career path is a scavenger hunt. Each opportunity prepares you for the next. Allow me the opportunity to help you clarify your path and accelerate your professional development.

Grow your career

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Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

4 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged?

A recent gallop study shows that only 32% of U.S. employees are engaged with their employers. It is important to pause for a moment and consider what this truly means for organizations. When employees are not engaged, employees are not delivering their best work. Imagine how bad a baseball team would be if 6 out of 9 players on the field were not engaged. The team would have so many weaknesses that it would be hard for them to compete. In an environment where the norm is for employees not to be engaged, organizations that can drive high levels of employee engagement position themselves to have a competitive advantage. Solving your employee engagement issues requires understanding why employees are not engaged. Gaining this information is best done by having one on one conversations, but some of the most common reasons are

• poor clarity of expectations

• lack of connection between the company's mission and daily activities

• limited opportunities for learning and growth

• poor job fit

• employees not feeling cared for at work

All is not lost. In the next 30 days, you can implement steps to improve employee engagement within your organization. Those steps will require you to dedicate one-on-one time with employees, but that time can reengage employees currently going through the motions at work and only delivering a portion of what they are capable of.

Provide Opportunities for Professional Development:

One of the common complaints voiced by employees is that they are interested in advancing their careers, but they are unsure how. Managers of employees should talk with employees about career goals and help map out action plans to help employees develop the skills and competency necessary to advance their careers. Employees often struggle to identify which external training, education, books, podcasts, networking, and volunteer activity they should participate in to grow professionally. Holding meetings regularly where positive and developmental feedback is given is a great way to help employees develop professionally. Managers should assist employees in setting SMART goals around the skills they need to improve to excel in their current role and prepare themselves for advancement opportunities. This, along with connecting employees with mentors, is an effective way to help employees advance their careers.

Encourage Open Communication:

Employees who joined your organization because they believed you would be a good person to work for. Over time, how you interact with them will influence if they maintain that belief. When you invest time in developing a relationship with your employees, you increase the chances of them providing you with honest feedback. With this feedback, you can take actions to address their concerns. Sometimes resolutions can be found by giving a different perspective to the employees. Other times, employees will provide you with information that will result in you making changes. Occasionally a resolution will not be found, but you will have the benefit of awareness, and employees will know that their concerns were heard. As the boss, it is up to you to decide what you do with feedback, but it is critical that your employees feel comfortable communicating with you. Often employees leave jobs over problems that could be solved with open communication. As the leader, it is your responsibility to create open lines of communication.

Provide Incentives and Recognition:

Providing incentives is an excellent way to help to clarify expectations for employees. When you take the time to develop incentives that reward employee behavior, you can motivate employees to execute organizational values and strategy at a higher level. When incentives are linked to specific performance metrics, employees can work towards achieving those metrics. When incentives are around specific behaviors, employees can learn the desired values and actions and strive to bring them to life. Small steps like changes in titles, bonuses, and wage promotions can significantly boost employee self-worth, self-esteem, and happiness within an organization. As a manager, you should seek opportunities to recognize and reward employees for their good work. Your actions will create a culture of positivity that will aid in employee engagement.

Make Fairness a Priority:

As you make decisions in your company around compensation, benefits, employee development, assignments, and promotion, ensure that you do so fairly. Often time managers make decisions quickly without taking the time to consider how their actions will be perceived or the unintended consequence they could generate. Unfair treatment can create friction within an organization that demotivates employees. Particular attention should be spent considering how policies and procedures potentially disadvantage minorities and individuals of low status. Structural discrimination exists, and decisions influenced by unconscious biases frequently demotivate and alienate employees from under-represented groups.

Summary

As a manager, you can create a supportive environment that encourages employee engagement. How you engage with employees directly impacts their motivation and commitment. Improving employee engagement takes time and intentionality. It requires you to be purposeful about organizational culture, to listen, to use good judgment, and adjust how things are done to meet the changing needs of your employees. The pandemic shifted employee expectations, and there is no going backward. This, along with the natural transition of baby boomers retiring and generation z employees entering the workforce, is causing a shift in what employees want. They expect companies to be better stewards of their time and careers. The bottom line is that employees want to work for managers that care about them and their future. This can be done if you are willing to listen to your employees and provide them with the level of support they desire.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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Are You Ready for Performance Review Time

As we move into the 4th Quarter of the year, it is a great time to look at what you have accomplished so far this year and determine what action you want to take over the next 3 months to help you end 2022 strong. A lot of talent management decisions are made in the 4th quarter, so you want to finish the year strong to position yourself for opportunities in 2023. There is no time like the present to build some wins that can help your career advance. Locke & Latham (1991) state that three variables can impact an individual’s success achieving a goal, direction intensity and duration.

• Direction-the actions that are necessary to accomplish the goal

• Intensity-the amount of energy and resources required

• Duration-the time required

As you set your goals, it is important to be clear on what you are looking to accomplish, your current set of skills, the energy you must give, and the time you are willing to allocate. During my career the biggest variable that separated those that were successful from those that were not

• Was their clarity of goal

• Having realistic expectations

• Awareness of their strengths

• Willingness to solicit help

Before you define a goal to pursue, it is important to take inventory on your current skills, competencies, resources, time, and energy. By defining these, you are better able to set realistic goals. Research shows that establishing realistic goals is critical for maintaining motivation. For example, if you are a leader within an organization, and you are looking to improve employee retention in the 4th quarter, you want to start off with being clear about your goal. You can start with reviewing employee retention rates ytd. Next you can set a realistic target. It is helpful to bench market your performance compared to peers and competitors in the industry. Once you have this information, you can consider what skills, talent, time, and resources you can put towards improving employee retention.

As you determine your goal, it is important to identify what task you are currently doing that you can reduce or eliminate to make room for the future actions you will take. This is a critical step for preventing burnout, and ensuring you have the energy to accomplish your goal. Leaders often add new task, without eliminating previous task which is the first step to losing work-life balance. To move towards a new goal, we must move away from a previous one. Making this decision upfront will increase your odds of obtaining your goal.

Finally, think about who can help you in accomplishing your goal. Defining who will be involved in the pursuit of the goal, will help you to be realistic in what you can accomplish. Soliciting help, can aid you in accomplishing more, but will likely result in you moving slower at first. Consider whether you can accomplish the goal quickly on your own, or if you need assistance based on the complexity and scope of the goal. There is an old African saying that if you want to go fast, go by yourself, but if you want to go far, go with a group. In establishing your goal, know how far you want to go, how fast you want to get there, and who you want to bring along on the journey.

Once you have set your priority, benchmarked, established a goal, identified what resources you will shift towards your goal, and identified who you will partner with to accomplish the goal you are in a great position to start action planning. You have 3 months left in 2022 to make this a year to remember. Take a moment to reflect on what you have accomplished this year. Celebrate your wins, learn from losses, and establish a goal for ending 2022 strong.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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References

1. Locke, Edwin & Latham, Gary. (1991). A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance. The Academy of Management Review. 16. 10.2307/258875