Influencing Skills

Who Should Attend

This workshop is for you if you want to enhance your abilities to influence others in a range of contexts - influencing colleagues, stakeholders, your organisation, or groups you work with in the wider sector.

You will gain value from this workshop if you:

• Need the support of others to do your work
• Believe that greater value can be gained from engaging with others with diverse views and experience
• Have a cross-organisation role, or are often part of projects
• Want to work in a more collaborative and interdependent way
• Find your environment complex, making it hard to gain agreement on actions needing to be taken
• Face challenges gaining support from others to ideas and new ways of working
• Experience conflict in engaging with others with a different role or perspective
• Have no formal authority in getting work done or reaching a decision to act.

Course Content

The focus of Influencing Skills is to increase your awareness of what's happening in your environment and provide practical tools and techniques you can use to influence and make progress:

• The foundations underpinning effectiveness in influencing
• Understanding and working with the dynamics of your organisation and your wider sector
• Developing stakeholder understanding
• Establishing credibility with key stakeholders
• Practicing strategic listening to understand, engage and connect 
• Applying a framework to guide successful influencing
• Preparing an influencing strategy, tailored to the situation
• Clarifying compelling and persuasive messages

Learning Outcomes

The workshop will achieve:

• Insight of your influencing practice
• More confidence in the strategies, tools and techniques that can be applied
• Greater likelihood that “your idea looks like their solution”
• Model for reaching a sustainable commitment from others
• Enhanced skills for influencing others

Pre-workshop

• Context - describe how your organisation works
• Your skills - what you think works and doesn’t work for you

Follow-up

We offer a follow-up session after 6 weeks to explore how you have used the skills, tools and techniques in your work and to discuss remaining issues.