Colin Gautrey

How to Influence With Style

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The desire to influence other people is a natural part of being human. Your style of influence — how you act — has been established over the years by your experience and learning. Subconsciously, you will have found out what works for you. Yet each individual is different and different people will have found alternative styles of influence. Psychology suggests that, when it comes to being influenced, you will be more amenable when the other person is using the style you prefer to use. The implications of this are that, if you want to be more successful, you will need to learn how to be able to flex your style to match other people. This requires that you take a good, hard look at how you operate. There are many different aspects to consider and we’ve built up a comprehensive syllabus to develop people in their influencing and political capability. A key element of this is establishing your preferred style and then learning how to become more flexible. Read More

The Components of Power

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If you want to become more influential, understanding what power is can be extremely helpful. It is not complicated — it is simple. The concept is regularly spoken of, but rarely understood at a practical level. Jeffrey Pfeffer usually defines it as a capability to create influence. This definition combines skills, tactics and assets (see below). Most people focus on skills and tactics when they seek influence and fail to recognise the potency of the assets — many of which need to exist to create a strong foundation. Read More

Focus Your Personal Brand

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Corporations spend massive sums positioning their brand in the mind of their customers and the public. How much do you spend? Many people advocating the development of your Personal Brand will suggest you need to develop a catchy personal statement or tag line. Nothing wrong with that, except some can find it very difficult without marketing or wordsmithing skills. Instead, a quick and easy way to Read More

Investing in Your Network

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"I know I need to network, but I never seem to find the time" is a concern that many people share with me in the mentoring work I do. They have been sold on the benefits and have even made sure that they have the skills to do it effectively. Yet, somehow, life seems to push it to the bottom of the list of things to do. Often the reason is that they don't see an immediate payoff. Time is money and networking takes time — sometimes quite a lot of time. And it is true that most networking yields a payback in the medium to Read More

Women Want Influence

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Research into politics in the workplace has shown time and again that women are far more interested in politics than their male counterparts. Not only is the academic literature clearly demonstrating this, seminars and conferences that I have presented to over the years have had a significantly higher number of female attendees. Indeed, many have been women's networking groups, all keen to hear about politics in the workplace. However, it is wrong to conclude that this is a gender bias. In fact, my research has revealed that this extra interest is stimulated by membership of a minority group. Those in the minority have to focus much more on their Read More

Criticality of Political Skill

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We have learned a great deal about the criticality of political skill during our groundbreaking survey with practising managers. These lessons are now being factored into our work with clients as they develop their capability to influence with integrity and gain the results they need for their organisations and themselves. The purpose of this article is to summarise the key findings and discuss their implications and is based on a full academic article. Read More

Political Skills Are Critical

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Overall, the results have corroborated the integrity of this construct for political skill and demonstrated that all of the sub skills are critical to succeeding in a wide variety of roles. The survey asked participants to rate each item on a scale of 1 to 6, based on their view of how critical each item was to success in their role. The overall mean of all 55 items was 4.64 and the lowest item had a mean of 3.84. This was not a surprise to us, since many other researchers have established that political skill is important. For instance, a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 61% of HR managers believed influencing and political skill to be one of the most important Read More

Understanding vs. Influencing

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It came as a surprise to discover in this research that those skills which relate to developing greater understanding were deemed to be less critical than the actual act of influencing. Our construct of political skill defined seven dimensions, three of which related to developing understanding. These three were ranked lowest. The reason for our surprise was that, based on our experience and the literature review, much emphasis is placed on developing a keen insight into what is going on, understanding what makes people do the things they do, being able to understand how others interact, etc. This surprise was shared by all of our interviewees, with one quipping, "how can you influence with any degree of confidence if you don't first understand?" Read More

Men vs. Women

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A strong divergence of view was identified between men and women in our survey. Overall, women scored a mean of 4.90 compared to 4.50 for men (max. 5.0). This was not entirely unexpected, given the common notion that women tend to be more socially aware and concerned with relationships. However, the surprise came when probing more deeply into this factor, which forms a lesson for us all. It appears from the literature that there has been no successful attempt to find differences between the genders when it comes to Read More

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