When it comes to influence the messenger often matters as much as the message. Suppose you need to influence a manager from another department, a team of distant software engineers, or the school board in your local community. Take a steely-eyed look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Do these people even know me?” and, “How much does my opinion really count to these people?” The honest answer to these questions will give you important insights into how to have the greatest influence.

I’d like to introduce you to work done by Jay Conger, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College. Conger is an incredibly brilliant and prolific author who publishes valuable books every couple of years. I want to draw your attention to a set of ideas he first developed in his book, Winning ‘Em Over: A new model for management in the age of persuasion, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Conger studies credibility—what makes some people more believable, trustworthy, and worth listening to than others. He argues that credibility contains two important dimensions: expertise and relationship. You need to have both to be seen as credible.

Expertise: Have you shown the person a track record of wise judgments in similar situations?
Relationship: Have you shown the person that you care about his or her interests?

Notice that it’s not your own judgment of your expertise and relationship that matters. It’s the other person’s judgment that determines whether they see you as credible.

Conger asks you to imagine you are the different people you are trying to influence, and to rate yourself on Expertise and Relationship the way each of the other people might.

If a person doesn’t know you very well, they would probably rate you as low in both Expertise and Relationship. You’d be in quadrant III in the matrix below. If a person knows you well and has a lot of trust in both your Expertise and Relationship, then you’d be in quadrant II.

Often we find ourselves in quadrants I, III, or IV. The person doesn’t see or doesn’t value our track record in Expertise, Relationship, or both. In these cases we can try to build our track record, but in the short term Conger recommends we find a partner who fills in what we are missing.

Recently, I was working with a management team that needed to influence a group of key executives several levels above them. Although these key executives seem to respect the managers’ expertise, they’ve also told them they are “too silo oriented” and “missing an enterprise-wide perspective”—code words for narrow-minded and self-serving. So these managers believe they are in quadrant I, at least as far as these executives are concerned.

They need a partner who can fill in what they are missing—a strong Relationship with the executives. They need a partner who is already in quadrant II or IV. They quickly identified two or three possible partners, and invited them to help craft the solution they’ll eventually take to the executives.

I think one of the key insights that comes from this approach is the idea of partnering. Most of us want to be the messenger, the person in the spotlight, but we can often be more effective as a part of a diverse team. If we can get the right people in the room—some who bring Expertise and others who bring Relationship—we are far more likely to reach our goals.

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Posted by David Maxfield on October 22, 2007 11:07:00 PM MDT #