Influencing Conversation for Agility

Agile always prefer face-to-face communication and collaboration among team members and seniors and juniors. This direct communication helps in building better relationships and trust. When it comes to human contact, one thing that can show extreme effect making a large difference is ‘Influence’. There are some people whose influence itself helps to complete half of the work. In business, there are various ways conversations are used like marketing, sales, negotiation, team collaboration, and work assignment. If we see the impact of influence, from any individual’s perspective it will surely affect all mentioned ways.

If you are better at influencing others, your negotiation, communication, work assignment, and even marketing and sale will become easy bringing agility to your tasks. Influence not only affects the agility of tasks but when you want to convince management to transform to agility, having influence can also help in making work easy. For product owners, agile coaches, and executives their influence on subordinates, decides what result they can derive from their teams. When it comes to marketing and sales influence not only affects actions but also affects the way how others feel, think, and talk.

We can say influence or persuasion is an art of manipulation in businesses; it even can make people do what they did not want to do. It can be used as a weapon that can be used as offensive as well as defensive both. By using it for the right tasks agile businesses can use persuasion for bringing more agility in processes and benefits to an organization. If you want to learn how to have an impact of influence and improve your agility in conversation in whatever situation it is, with the below tips you can achieve the desired outcomes.

Three Elements of Persuasion

Persuasion carries three main elements, a mechanism that kicks persuasion second that triggers the persuasion power third understanding and utilizing the power of persuasion. By using all three elements anyone can understand the base of persuasion and can use it.

Moral Standard as a Tool

If you require someone to agree with you this can be achieved with an easy trick, which is appealing to their moral standard. People always tend to live up to their standards and are ready to compromise on their decisions to maintain their standards. Maintaining their standards make people feel good.

Fear makes Unreasonable Decisions

Creating fear or a certain amount of urgency makes people make unreasonable decisions. Like screaming to some level that it’s running out, once gone it will never be back etcetera, the tactics used in the sale of some products. When certain urgency or scarcity of things are created people tend more towards buying them even if they don’t need them for the time being

Provide Purpose

Peoples always want to know why they are doing, what they are doing. They require purpose they love having a purpose. So whenever you want a favor from others, be ready to provide them with a reason for the actions they are doing for you. Whenever you ask, by giving them purpose you are likely to get a positive response.

Authority Influence is a Choice

If someone uses an authoritative voice or their authority over you to ask you to do something you are likely to do it. Not only do those who are in authority like product owners or agile coaches, use this tactic on team members but some who are not even in authority over, like team members or colleagues can also use this method and make you do things. Always ask a question to yourself if the person is an authority to you and do you need to do the said thing. Authority influence is a choice you select if you are going to obey them or not.

As we have seen some ways to use have an impact of influence over others we will also see some small tips to avoid the influence or persuasion tactics of others.

·       If anyone asks you for something then, first of all, ask yourself a question do you need it?

·       Don’t let any shortfall change your choice, be firm with your decisions without getting affected psychologically.

·       Never feel obliged to return favor especially, in situations where you don’t like the idea of the thing they are asking for.

·       When it comes to marketing or sales know one thing, companies want your money so be aware of what you spend for.

In an agile important aspect of using the impact of influence is always to be clear with your conscious of doing the right thing when you are using your impact of influence as agile never supports wrongdoings. By using the above tips and tactics of influencing you can bring agility to your work as almost every action asks for communication in agile.

 About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.