Essential Influence Skills for Entrepreneurs

1: The Rules of Engagement

As a leader of your venture your most precious commodity is your time. You need to be able to set frames and tasks for your people effectively, efficiently and in a single interaction.

Too often leaders encounter the following problems when leading others:

• they find themselves having to make the same request to the same person multiple times
• there are misunderstandings by the employee about the scope, timeframe, details, intention and evidence for the requested task or project
• some employees do not know how to get clarification, lack resources or do not know how to ask for required resources for the task
• employees maybe incongruent about the task or project but do not voice their concerns
• founders need to be able but may not not know how to frame a task or a project to get buy-in and engagement from staff

Master the Rules of Engagement

This one day program transfers the necessary and sufficient communication skills for:

• preparing the outcome for framing a request or project
• establishing rapport with the other person
• using the intention/s of the outcome to frame a request
• using a simple two question linguistic model for gaining clarification during task discussions
• gaining evidence that the employee actually understands the request
• testing for congruence that the employee will carry out the task to the specified parameters (time, quality, budget)

Reap the Benefits

Recognise when you have and do not have rapport which means you can determine whether or not the other person is receptive to your communication therefore having a foundation for effectively influencing another through your words and non-verbal communication

• Establish rapport using state (interest) thus freeing up your conscious attention to focus on the outcome and intention for the interaction. This results in better quality communication focusing on getting your outcome and intention of the request fulfilled
• You will learn how to Frame a request using the Intentions for your outcome which means a greater likelihood of the other person having buy-in with the big picture for the request therefore you are more likely to have engagement and intrinsic motivation from your employee in fulfilling the request in a way that meets the parameters of onetime, on budget and good quality
• You will be trained in using a linguistic tool called the two Specifier questions which means you will be able to get higher grade information from others on a need to know basis therefore reducing the risk of misunderstanding or missing distinctions critical to the project
• Elicit a summary from the other person in a form for testing that they really do understand the request that you are making which means that the employee has a full brief for the request or project that they understand therefore increasing the probability that the employee can deliver on the request onetime and on budget
• You will learn how conduct a Congruence Check which means you know when you get a yes that means a yes and being able to recognise and deal with any incongruent communication from the employee or whoever you are communicating with.