4 Actions For Being More Persuasive At Work – How to Convince Colleagues
Being more persuasive at work gives you a ton of personal benefits plus can make you a lot better at your job. Being more persuasive means you get a lot more done at work, have a lot more people helping you achieve your goals and spend a lot less time organising others and persuading them to do what you want.
Anyone can become more persuasive using 4 specific actions without needing to be a smooth talking extrovert or a born salesman. I am neither, yet I became very effective as a manager and leader at work by persuading a massive range of people to help me achieve goals that I had been set.
4 actions for being more persuasive at work
- Understand the other person’s position
- Show empathy and demonstrate you understand them
- Create a solution for what the other person wants and needs
- Building the trust shortcut
Improving how you use any of these vital actions will make you more persuasive. Remember, people want to help themselves, not really you. At work, being more persuasive is often about getting the other person to take action that will benefit them as well as benefit you. This is easier than you think, and you will increase your persuasiveness quickly by using each action.
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Podcast
understand the other person’s position – The first action for being more persuasive at work
Persuasion starts with knowing and understanding the person you want to persuade. The more you know, the more persuasive you can be as a result.
To learn about them, get them talking. Ask them questions about:
- what they are working and their day job or
- the projects they are working on, or
- their opinions and viewpoints about work issues relevant to them
- their ambitions, goals and what they love about their job
Listen carefully to what they tell you.
Seeking to understand them first makes it tens times more likely they will be willing to understand you in return. You cannot skip this step nor do it half-heartedly and still be consistently persuasive at work. Persuading without knowing your audience just doesn’t work.
Some of the questions I suggest you get answers to include:
- What is taking up a lot of the other person’s time right now?
- What goals are they focused on reaching?
- What roadblocks, problems, or obstacles do they have to navigate to reach their goals?
- What resources would help them towards their goals – that I could organise or influence?
- In what way does achieving what I want help them?
- What do they fear or have concerns over right now?
- What can I offer them to get what I want?
When you understand the other person’s point of view and position, you are in a great place to adapt and position what you want as a way of helping the other person as well as you.
show empathy and demonstrate you understand them – The second action for being more persuasive
Demonstrating that you understand the other person and have put yourself in their shoes and thought about their challenges, feelings, fears and desires will make them a lot more receptive to you and what you might want. Create a good connection with the other person. This step alone will make you a lot more persuasive at work.
3 of best ways to demonstrate your understanding of the other person’s position include:
Firstly, summarise what they have told you, focusing on the key points and their likely emotions because of their situation.
Secondly, share a quick story about a time when you were in their shoes and what you thought and felt at the time.
Thirdly, talk about how you resolved some of their key issues when you were in their position. This demonstrates you understand their problems and offers help to them to solve their problems.
An example of summarising might be:
“I sympathise with you being asked to update a reporting pack that few people are really going to look at. I’ve had to do similar in the past. I felt it was a big waste of my time, plus it really increased the pressure on me to hit my other deadlines. It made me feel quite angry. The steps I took that worked really well for me at the time were …”
Make the time think about and demonstrate you understand their position. This small step makes you a lot more persuasive because they will be much more receptive to you.
Create a solution for what the other person wants and needs – The third action for being more persuasive at work
Being persuasive is about compromising and showing that you are compromising. When you are very persuasive you can take small steps to towards their position while getting them to take much larger steps towards your position.
Good persuasion aims for a win-win situation. They feel they are getting something from the agreement as do you.
The work you have put into understanding their position will help you create a proposal or a position that will move the other person towards their goals or reduce their fears or barriers. This gives them an incentive to say yes to doing what you ask or moving towards your position.
Being persuasive is understanding what the other person wants and then flexing what you want – to give the other person as least something of what they want.
Great Persuasion
Great persuasion is identifying the areas that are important to them but not that important to you and being flexible in these areas. You can then ask them to move towards what you want in the areas that are really important to you.
Getting a yes is pointless unless the other person will follow through and deliver what they have agreed to do. Getting their commitment to the action you want from them is so much more valuable than a reluctant and resistant agreement.
Remember, people will do what will help them either directly or indirectly, for immediate benefits or delayed benefits. Use their wants, desires and needs to persuade them to help you and in the process help themselves. If they don’t get any benefit, persuading them is going to be incredibly hard and a yes may result in no action.
Always aim for a win-win solution or position to be more persuasive at work.
The Trust Shortcut
Being trusted is huge for increasing your persuasiveness at work. We are much more open and receptive to being persuaded by people we trust. When we are asked to do something by a person we don’t trust- we instantly have our guard up and don’t easily say yes.
When you are trusted, the other person assumes that you won’t do anything to disadvantage them or if what you were asking for would, you would tell them in advance. In practice, this means you spend a lot less time persuading them to take an action that will help you. They will prioritise your request over those from people they don’t trust as much and they will commit to doing what you have persuaded them to do a lot more easily and quickly.
Working on being trustworthy and being perceived as trustable, in my view, gives you a ton of benefits at work and with clients. Being a lot more persuasive at work is one of those key benefits as well as saving a lot of time and getting a lot more help from across the business. All these will make you a lot more effective in any role and in particular in management.
Actions to Take
Some of the actions to take to build trust from a persuasion perspective are:
- When you commit to a decision, action, activity or project, you deliver what you have committed to consistently week in week out. i.e. don’t let others down.
- Before you make decisions and take actions, think about the impact on those around you and those on whom you rely – and minimise the downsides to others as much as practical.
- Be good at your job, or at least above average, so others can rely on you doing your part for overall team success
- Helping others when you are able to so you build up goodwill towards you and favours owed. Both help you be more persuasive when you need others to help you.
- Build relationships on a personal level as well as a professional level. This creates greater connection and trust – both very valuable when persuading others.
Be trustworthy through your actions and decisions, and you will slash the time needed to persuade others to do what you want. Building trust is an extremely important persuasion shortcut that you should practice at work.
In summary
Being more persuasive at work comes from working to understand the person you are trying to persuade, then demonstrating that you have taken the time to understand them, what they want and need. Then take steps to give them at least some of what they want in the process of helping you or moving towards your position.
Finally, you can save a huge amount of time and effort persuading others at work by building the amount of trust other people have in you. This takes a bit of work, but you get ton of benefits, one of which is the ability to be a lot more persuasive at work.
If you have any questions on being more persuasive at work, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Being more persuasive at work gives you a ton of benefits. I was a shy socially average person when I started at EY as a trainee. I worked at my communication skills and how to persuade others effectively, becoming a go to person to get things done in my jobs as I got more senior.
Anyone can learn to be persuasive. The approaches I have shared in this article at the most effective elements that I have found to increase persuasiveness quickly.
Jess