How Do I Leverage My Influencing Style?

how do i leverage my influencing styleThe 15-inch blade flew perilously close to my left ear, and the Chef’s knife thumped into the door behind me. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my days in his pastry kitchen were over. I couldn’t possibly repeat the actual words, but if you think that Gordon Ramsey cusses, I can assure you that even he has a comparatively mild turn of phrase.

Chef was right of course. I was useless in the pastry kitchen.

I still am. My croissants could be used to break rocks in a quarry. My shortcrust could substitute for dumbell weights. It’s simple biology. My hands are too warm.

Heck, I didn’t even want to be a pastry chef, but I had to master every part of cooking, and I wanted to learn from this Chef. I had huge respect for his talent and would take almost anything for the chance to learn. But he wasn’t very likeable. He was a conqueror style and a competent jerk.

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What are values?

What are values?

Values are the motivational keys that cause people to choose to follow a particular person, path, goal, career.

Think for a moment of the value that brought you to the work you do now. Were you motivated by curiosity? Prestige? Success? Financial reward? Security? Enterprise? Community? Service? Advance? There are many other values that may be your personal drivers.

Edgar Schein identifies 10 key values that a people have and the sort of associated goal that helps us understand the value:

Value

Description

Power The motivational goal of power values is the attainment of social status and prestige, and the control or dominance over people and resources.
Achievement The primary goal of this type is personal success through demonstrated competence. Competence is evaluated in terms of what is valued by the system or organization in which the individual is located.
Hedonism The motivational goal of this type of value is pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself. This value type is derived from physical needs and the pleasure associated with satisfying them.
Stimulation The motivational goal of stimulation values is excitement, novelty, and challenge in life. This value type is derived from the need for variety and stimulation in order to maintain an optimal level of activation. Thrill seeking can be the result of strong stimulation needs.
Self-
Direction
The motivational goal of this value type is independent thought and action (for example, choosing, creating, exploring). Self-direction comes from the need for control and mastery along with the need for autonomy and independence.
Universalism The motivational goal of universalism is the understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare for all people and for nature.
Benevolence The motivational goal of benevolent values is to preserve and enhance the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact. This is a concern for the welfare of others that is more narrowly defined than Universalism.
Tradition The motivational goal of tradition values is respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s culture or religion imposes on the individual. A traditional mode of behaviour becomes a symbol of the group’s solidarity and an expression of its unique worth and, hopefully, its survival.
Conformity The motivational goal of this type is restraint of action, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms. It is derived from the requirement that individuals inhibit inclinations that might be socially disruptive in order for personal interaction and group functioning to run smoothly.
Security The motivational goal of this type is safety, harmony, and stability of society or relationships, and of self.

You will use the words that best describe your values for you – each will fall into one of Schein’s key values but you may not like the word

  • “I do this for fun” for example – would come under “Hedonism” – though I have yet to meet anyone who tells me, “well I do it because I’m a hedonist”.
  • “I like a challenge” could be about several: “Power”, “Achievement”, “Self-direction” or “Stimulation” – it would be what you mean by “challenge”.

What about money?

A great many people will consider that “money” is valuable to them, but in and of itself, money does not have value. Strictly speaking, any form of “money” is simply a promissory note or coin (or just a number on a bank statement). “Money” is a means of exchanging it for other things that are valuable.

Each of us further has our own hierarchy of values. Values that are more important to us than other values.

Our order of values is our order of values. Just because I consider self-direction to be more important than universalism (for example) does not make my hierarchy wrong or right. We are not judging anyone’s values here. We just want to understand them.

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Better experiences, better stories, better brand

Three years ago, I had a conversation with one of our internal recruiters around the TVP (talent value proposition – like an EVP for a particular talent segment) for his area. He was recruiting IT people for an engineering firm, and attrition was high in that team. People weren’t staying for more than 6 months, and we were looking for a solution.

We sat down and read the ads that had been used in the past, looking for clues. They were pretty standard ads – list of skills, what you’ll be doing here, the usual jazz. There wasn’t much to inspire there, not a lot of cultural discussion. So we started writing new copy for all the ads to talk about the team from a human perspective.

And we hit a snag.

We were looking at recruiting into a team with an obvious problem around staff performance and culture. We were looking at recruiting into a team that suffered such quick turnover that only the staff who didn’t leave became the culture. We were recruiting fast moving fish into a stagnant pond, and watching them jump out straight away.

via Blog post: Better experiences, better stories, better brand | All articles.

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Blog post: How to figure out which managers are net positive to your culture in one question…

There’s lots of talk about how to build the best culture possible at your company. Regardless of how you define your culture, you can figure out what your team members really think, and what they want culturally by asking the following question:

“If you could pick any manager (other than the one you’re working for) in the company to work for (regardless of functional area), who would it be and why?”

via Blog post: How to figure out which managers are net positive to your culture in one question… | All articles.

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