How To Be More Influential By Negotiating Better and Reading Body Language

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Are you a small business leader or midlevel corporate manager that seeks to advance your business, or your career? Do you find your initiatives challenged by information and resource gaps by those that don’t “get you” at times?

If so, this article will be of value to you as it highlights ways to cast a greater level of influence, gives insight into how you can negotiate better, and raises your awareness per being able to read body language.

Let’s examine influence, how you acquire it, why you’re not influential at times, and how to use it once you have it.

What makes you comfortable? What makes those that you’d like to have influence with comfortable? How do they view you in comparison to those with whom they seek comfort when being around those people? All of these and more, are questions you need to pose to yourself to assess where you are in your mind per those questions, and where you might be perceived to be by others. Remember, people like people that are like themselves. Thus, the more you appear to be like those you wish to influence, the easier it will be to do so.

How do we acquire influence and what should we do with it once we have it? Influence is a state of mind whereby you’re able to get people to act on your behest. Take note of what just occurred! I gave you my definition of influence. It may be slightly or drastically different from yours or someone else’s. The point is, once you know how someone views a situation, or the definition they give to a word, you have insight into the way they think and the meaning they assign to aspects in their environment. Then, you need to couple that with their perspective of what value is for them. Once you’ve acquired that insight, genuinely match your request to a goal/quest that they wish to obtain. Let them feel the emotions of your sincerity while showing them the benefits of adopting/addressing your suggestions. That will lead to you becoming more influential and having others readily seeking to assist you in acquiring your goals and theirs.

How do we lose or not acquire influence?

With some people, no matter what you do, it will not be good enough to draw them closer to you. If you identify that you’re in such a situation get away from it, to the degree you can. There will be situations in which some people will not like you. That can be due to their unconscious biases or biases that they’re well aware of. In such situations, sometimes you have to leave an environment to have people appreciate you for the value you possess. The perception of your value is what will allow people to perceive you as being influential.

When it comes to negotiations, the way you set it up and the strategies you employ have a great impact on how successful you’ll be. Remember, you’re always negotiating. Thus, when setting up an official negotiation, take into account the activities you’ve engaged in with the person/people you’ll be negotiating with and the impact that past impressions will have on the current negotiation. As mentioned above with influence, in a negotiation, the more influential you appear to be the more trusting you’ll be perceived as being. Don’t squander that perception. In a negotiation trust is a major factor per how far someone is willing to believe in what you say, compared to what you’ll do. Thus, if you’re perceived as being trustworthy, the opposing negotiator may think that something might not work out, but they know they’ll be able to trust that you’ll make them whole. That one aspect will allow you to gain more from every negotiation than you otherwise would have been able to achieve. There are also negotiation tactics and strategies that go into ways to maneuver in a negotiation to reach more favorable outcomes (i.e. when to concede, how slowly to appear when doing so, etc.), but those purviews will be left for another article to explore.

Now let’s discuss a very small component of body language. Body language and nonverbal signals move us emotionally more than most people are aware. In general, watch for hand movements that are not aligned with the words being spoken (e.g. words-this is going to increase your sales, hand action-pointing downward), pace of speech (i.e. slowing down might indicate one being more reflective, speeding up might be a point of excitement), and when such occurs. In particular, take note of what you said that stimulated the person to perform the mentioned gestures. Therein will lie insight into how well their body language is synchronized with their words.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

About the Author

Greg WilliamsGreg Williams, known as, “The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert,” is the author of the newly released book Body Language Secrets to Win More Negotiations.

Self-promotion v. corporate branding: a dilemma for women CEOs?

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In today’s media-saturated business world, a company’s image is inextricably linked to the reputation of the CEO. Wall Street analysts, marketers and corporate communicators understand the importance of a CEO’s personal brand and how it affects demand for a company’s products or services and its market value.

The “personal brand” of Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com or Tesla’s Elon Musk is an extension of the company. And there are any number of other high-profile male CEOs, who are recognized as industry leaders. How many similarly high-profile women CEOs are there? After HP’s Meg Whitman, who ran for public office, and a handful of others, it is hard to come up with names. Granted, unfortunately there are simply not as many women as men in the C-suite. However, perhaps the lack of women CEOs with well-defined personal brands is an issue that goes deeper than their respective numbers.

During my 25 years in corporate communications, I have observed many women CEOs that do not eagerly embrace communications tools and strategies to build a powerful personal brand. They are often more reluctant to express their personal values, beliefs and business philosophy than their male counterparts, and frequently, I see successful women leaders who want to stay on “safe” ground, sticking to unassailable fact-based positions.

What’s behind their reticence? I have a theory: On the way up, women CEOs worked incredibly hard just to prove they were as competent (and more so) as men. They had to show they were good team players in order to win the support of colleagues. Advocating a point of view, stretching the boundaries and sharing a bigger “vision” are leadership traits that are subjective, individual and highly visible. Given history, it’s not surprising that women CEOs may err on the side of staying low profile for fear of being criticized as “self-promotional” or grandstanding.

For example, we see women leaders who are press-shy, avoiding media engagement except in the most controlled situations. They seem reluctant to step outside what they see as the confines of their professional roles. One client refused to discuss her accomplishments in building a major data business from the ground up: “I’ll only talk about our product, not myself.” I call this “The Hillary Problem”: Feeling more secure in the role of competent project manager instead of inspirational, but potentially controversial, leader.

While the term personal brand may sound ego-centric, developing an authentic personal brand can add tremendous value to your organization. As a woman leader, what is your personal brand? I believe it is all about becoming known for what you stand for in addition to what you do in your job. Your brand is the “why” behind decisions, choices and results. Inevitably, the “why” involves some subjectivity – and this is where I see women reluctant to capitalize on the credibility that they have earned as CEOS and leaders. Yet I argue that it is absolutely mission critical: It might well be an essential, if unwritten, part of your job description.

Where to start developing a personal brand and leveraging it for the greater good of your company? By working closely with your in-house communications team and public relations advisors, you can develop a strategic plan that will establish and grow your personal brand. It’s not necessary to undergo a personality transplant and become a “celebrity” CEO or another Sheryl Sandberg. Rather, with the right advice and collaboration with professionals, select the issues, forums and communications channels that mesh with your core values and support your organization’s agenda.

“Leaning in” to build and maintain your personal CEO brand isn’t about self-promotion: it’s about advancing your own agenda and that of your company – to step out of your personal comfort zone for the greater good.

About the Author

Pat HardenPatricia (Pat) Harden founded Harden Partners to help companies be heard, known and valued. Pat brings clients the benefits of a lifelong passion for communication and the desire to help organizations take their game to new levels. Under her leadership, Harden Partners has grown steadily from a one-person consultancy in her guest room to an award-winning, mid-sized agency serving the financial, healthcare and professional services sectors – and the amazing technologies that support them.

Listening Biases: How Influencers Unwittingly Restrict Possibilities

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Do you enter conversations with a goal, or set of expectations? Do you assume you’ll have solutions for your Communication Partners (CPs)? Do you listen carefully to pose the best questions to enable you to fulfill your expectations? Do you assume the responses to your questions provide an accurate representation of the full fact pattern – ‘good’ data – to base your follow-on questions on? Do you assume your history of similar topics provides a route to an optimal outcome?

If any of the above are true, you’re biasing your conversation.

  • By entering conversations with assumptions and personal goals,
  • and listening according to historic, unconscious, self-directed filters,
  • you unwittingly direct conversations
  • to your range of expectations and familiarity
  • and potentially miss a more optimal outcome.

In other words, your unconscious inhibits and biases optimal results. But it’s not your fault.

Our Brains Cause a Gap Between What’s Said and What’s Heard

The most surprising takeaway from my year of research for my book on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard was learning how little of what we think we hear is unbiased, or even accurate. Indeed, it’s pretty rare for us to hear precisely what another intends us to hear. Yet that doesn’t stop us from translating what’s said into what we want to hear.

Employing biases, assumptions, triggers, memory tricks, and habit (filters that act as information sieves) our brains take a habitual route when listening to others, alter and omit at will, and don’t even tell us what’s been transformed, regardless of our desire to be neutral. So the Other might say ABC and our brains actually tell us they said ABL. I once lost a business partner because he ‘heard’ me say X when three of us confirmed I said Y. “I was right here! Why are you all lying to me! I KNOW she said that!” And he walked out in a self-generated rage.

Indeed, as outsiders, we cannot ever know the full range of givens within our CPs innermost thinking. Every person, every situation, every conversation is unique. And given variances in our beliefs/values, background, identity, etc., our inability to accurately hear exactly what is intended causes us to unintentionally end up working with data of unknowable accuracy, causing a restricted, speculative route to understanding or success.

Net net, we unwittingly base our conversation, goals, questions, intuitive responses and offerings on an assumption of what we think has been said, and we fully succeed only with those whose biases match our own. [Note: for those who want to manage this problem, I’ve developed a work-around in Chapter 6 of What?)

Entering Conversations Without Bias

The problem is compounded when we enter and continue conversations with unconscious biases that further restrict possibility. Because of the potential constraints, we must take extra care to enter and guide conversations without bias. But our natural listening habits make that difficult:

  1. by biasing the framework of the conversation to the goals we wish to achieve, we overlook alternative, congruent outcomes. Sellers, coaches, leaders, and managers often enter conversations with expectations and goals rather than collaboratively setting a viable frame and together discovering possibility.
  2. by listening only for what we’re (consciously or unconsciously) focused on hearing, we overlook a broader range of possible outcomes. Sellers, negotiators, leaders, help desk professionals, and coaches often listen for what they want to hear so they can say what they want/are trained to say, or pose biased questions, and possibly miss real opportunities to promote agreement.

Once we have expectations, success is restricted to the overlap between our needs and the CPs; the real problems and solutions lie outside. Here are some ideas to help you create conversations that avoid restriction:

  1. Shift your goal as an influencer to facilitating the route to change. You’ll never have the full fact pattern, or the weight and implications of each element that has created and maintains the status quo. But you can lead a route to change using systems thinking and enabling your CP to engage their own change, congruently.
  2. Enter each conversation with a willingness to serve the greater good within the bounds of what you have to offer, rather than meet a specific outcome. Any expectations or goals limit outcomes. The Other’s outcome will become obvious to them.
  3. Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, change facilitator.
  4. Trust that your CP has her own answers. Your job is to help her find them. This is particularly hard for coaches and leaders who believe they must influence the outcome toward a goal, or use their expertise to help the person change the way the influencer believes they should. (And yes, all influencers, sellers, leaders, negotiators, and coaches are guilty of this.)
  5. Stay away from data gathering. Stick to understanding how the status quo became established, and directing systemic change from there. Your biased questions will only extract biased answers. Use questions focused on change because you’ll never gather the full fact pattern anyway. Neutral questions like “What has stopped you from making the change before now?” is an example of a question addressed to systemic change. [Note: I’ve developed Facilitative Questions that eschew information gathering and lead systemic change through unconscious thinking patterns.]
  6. Make ‘discovery of a route to congruent change’ your goal, not a specific behavior.
  7. Get rid of your ego, your need to be right or smart or have the answers. Until your CP finds a way to recognize their own unconscious issues, and design congruent change that matches their idiosyncratic ‘givens’, you aren’t helpful regardless of how much you think you know.

Here are the steps everyone goes down to discover their own answers:

  1. What is the complete landscape of the status quo? The hidden elements that caused, and perpetuate, the current state?
  2. How has the person attempted to fix the problem until now? What caused her to fail? How has she continued to maintain her current behaviors? Why isn’t this still working now (regardless of success or failure, all systems create and maintain their status quo for Systems Congruence)?
  3. What internal capabilities does he have, but may be used for other actions, to substitute more helpful choices? What has stopped him from making this substitution until now?
  4. What does the client think he’s missing to get him to success, and how might he use you to help?

By assuming your client has his own answers hidden in his unconscious that just need to be found, by acting merely as a facilitator, by eschewing information gathering questions and pitches, you can help Others design their own fix, avoid bias, stop wasting time on those who will never buy-in, and truly serve another. You won’t have the type of control you’re used to, but thinking with a systems brain, you’ll have a much more powerful control: you’ll be facilitating real change.

About the Author

Sharon Drew MorgenSharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Five Secrets Fulfilled People Use Everyday

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Are there real tricks to becoming fulfilled in life? You bet. My research and that of others suggests that there are key street-smart actions that those who are most fulfilled use every day. I interviewed over 100 successful people – some who were fulfilled and others who were not – to understand why success does not always bring about fulfillment. There was amazing convergence around several things that fulfilled people do. Here are the top five:

  1. Have strong values – and stick with them. Does your work environment, family and friends allow you to behave consistent with your values? Having to behave contrary with your values can be debilitating.
  2. Practice resilience. The ability to face adversity and bounce back. One part of resilience is having grit, a firmness of character, or as psychologist Angela Duckworth describes it based on her studies, the “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” It was a rare person who could pursue their long-term goals without setbacks in their lives – divorces, failed promotions, cancer, family members coming off the rails. Many people who I knew to be successful in their professional lives had many hidden stories of failures and bounce backs. They used a variety of approaches to get around those adversities that you can borrow in your own life, such as building a great support network of friends, or family that can support you as you plough through challenges. Those who had developed mentors found them particularly helpful. Some dug deep into their long-term vision or spirituality to help them overcome setbacks. We all have setbacks, it’s how you get up that makes the difference.
  3. Take risks. A really interesting finding in my research is the quantity of people who either took risks and vouched that those risks stretched them and enabled them to reach new heights, or those who regretted not taking more risks. It appears that wisdom brings with it perspective. What appeared to be huge risks to many when they were young, now seems insignificant in hindsight. Although hindsight is often 20-20, it would be too easy to dismiss this advice simply as sages looking through the rear view mirror. Instead, many felt so strongly about this that they have gone overboard in encouraging their children to take more risks. This is one of the most difficult lessons in the art of fulfillment, but you can help yourself by have a longer term vision, with many intermediate lighthouse goals along the way – stepping stones – that allow you to see the big picture. Imminent risks are often much less threatening when viewing the big picture. Another key is talking to those who have faced those risks before, often providing sage advice that allows one to reduce the fear and anxiety that comes with perceived risk.
  4. Find a good network. One of the most frequent pieces of advice among our sages was taking time to build networks. One out-of-work pharmaceutical executive told me that the only time he networks is when he is out of work, lamenting that he has not learned from past mistakes. It takes so much longer to reconnect with people and build trust, he shared. This is an increasing challenge to those who are overloaded at work today. Many interviewees commented that time pressures reduced their attendance at meetings outside work, limited hobby and family time, and reduced the time to simply keep up with friends and professional colleagues on Facebook or Linked-In. Most realized that having a good network is a key skill, particularly in the world we live in where networks and connections are increasing key to scoring the next great job, or finding a life partner or getting into the right school. If you are not building your network continuously, you are falling behind.
  5. Give back. An often forgotten element that brought fulfillment to many was giving back. Sharing your skills and experiences with others can bring an incredible sense of fulfillment when you see what it can do for others. I began volunteering for not-for-profits later in life and I can attest that it has been one of the most rewarding experiences. One group I encountered during my investigations was Rosie’s kids—a program to help inner city kids go ahead in life by teaching them stage skills – dancing and singings their hearts away. I first heard the backstory of so many of the disadvantaged kids – crack houses, abusive parent, abandoned, homeless – and then I saw these kids performing with huge smiles on their faces—and one child summed it up for me when I spoke with him at the end. He said that he was excited about his future – his chances. And with a tear in my eye, I realized that one of our greatest sources of fulfillment is enabled others to become fulfilled.

Take a moment to think about your own fulfillment. Do you have a vision, are you taking enough risks, have you built the networks to help you during difficult setbacks, and are you giving back to others more in need? Try it. I think you will find yourself more fulfilled.

About the Author

William A. SchiemannWilliam A. Schiemann, Ph.D. is CEO of Metrus Group. He is a thought leader in human resources, employee engagement, and fulfillment and author of Fulfilled! Critical Choices: Work, Home, Life, scheduled to be released October 1, 2016. For more information follow Dr. Schiemann on Twitter, @wschiemann and connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/wmschiemann.

Strategize Your Way to Success

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Strategy and execution are essential to be successful long-term. They require thinking and action. Most people know Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Few people know what Aristotle said later, “The unplanned life is not worth examining.” It’s important to set aside think-time to take a bird’s eye view of where you are at and where you want to go. But if you fail to plan how to get there, all that thinking will be a waste of time. Here are three critical components to proper examining and planning for a business and life of authentic joy.

Think-time and Proper Delegation

Do you have a set time either daily or weekly where you simply think? This is an essential practice in order to prevent getting caught up in the day-to-day projects and tasks. Properly delegating all the tasks and projects that can be completed well by someone else lets you focus on what you do best.

I work with one executive who gauges how successful his day is by how long it takes before someone interrupts him with a question after he begins his workday. If he is interrupted, he analyzes why and strategizes how to prevent it from happening again. His primary talent is innovation. The better he delegates, the more time he has to think. The more time he thinks, the more he innovates.

Willpower

When many people think of willpower, the first thing that comes to mind is food. According to a recent study we make well over 200 food-related decisions each day! But these are not the only willpower battles we wage. We need willpower or we simply won’t execute. Here are three tips to increase your daily willpower reserves:

1. The first battle of the will is your alarm clock. It seems silly, but it’s true. We know from research that willpower is like a muscle. It can become fatigued with heavy use. Many successful people (Jobs, Einstein) wore the same thing every day because it was one less decision to make.
2. Plan your day the day before. Do so preferably by the hour. If you decide on the spur of the moment or let the day push you where it will, you will likely end up far from where you wanted to be.
3. Calendar it. If it’s not on your calendar, it’s not going to get done. Period. Whether it’s time to meditate, time to think or time to make positive strides in a project, get it in ink on your calendar. Treat that appointment like you would any other that can’t be missed. No willpower required. Simply do what’s on your calendar.

Virtue

In order to be happy in business and in life it’s not simply a matter of making more money or beating the competition. It’s not only the “what” of strategy and execution and the “why” of purpose and mission. The “how” is just as critical. Aristotle said happiness is excellence in virtue.

Most of us have read about executives who have cheated to win by misrepresenting revenues. Sure, the returns were there on paper, but the lack of integrity eventually caught up with them. The most important virtue is love. Contrary to what most people say, love is not an emotion. Love can be influenced by emotion but it is primarily an act of the will. A decision. It’s about willing the good of another person.

At work, this translates into strategizing on how to help those around you to excel. What further education or skill development do they need? What are their goals? How can you best mentor them to reach their potential? What objective surveys have you administered to determine what their innate talents are? Are you playing to their strengths? Ultimately, to succeed, the first step is to truly love the people around you by putting their needs and goals above your own. You succeed when others succeed.

The key to living an authentically joyful life is to set aside time to think, use your willpower to execute and don’t forget that the “how” is every bit as important as the “what” or the “why.”

About the Author

Doug KisgenDoug Kisgen is a serial entrepreneur, organizational consultant, and author of Rethink Happy. Doug’s current company, Kisgen Group, works with entrepreneurs and executives to help them get what they want through the use of a short survey that validly measures seven work-related traits. His former company, Daydream Senior Care, dba Home Instead Senior Care, was a two-time Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company. Follow Doug on Twitter @dougkisgen.