Developing Political Skills for Leaders – 5 essential skills for influencing others
Early in my career I thought political skills were just for business leaders. I also viewed political skills as skills employed by those that manipulate, that use others success as their own and who were looking after themselves, not the wider team. As I headed into middle management ranks, I learnt I was wrong and learnt the hard way that political skills for leaders are positive skills to have and essential to be more effective in delivering results and value for the company I worked for.
Unsurprisingly, most of us develop political skills by learning from our mistakes, or watching what others do in the workplace and trying to copy them. I can’t remember at any point in my career a manager sitting me down and explaining what political skills for leaders are or why they become so important to be effective.
Developing Political Skills for Leaders – 5 essential skills for influencing others
- Personal Skills & Emotional Intelligence
- Interpersonal Influence – 5 skills to practice
- Reading People and Situations – 3 actions to take
- Building alignment and alliances
- Understanding strategic direction
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Leverage Your Personal Skills & Emotional Intelligence
There are a lot of skills that go into Personal Skills – I am going to talk about three
- Self-Awareness
- Exerting self-control
- Being proactive
Being self-aware is such an important skill when dealing with other. If you don’t know about your emotions and how they are influencing you and how your experience colours your views and ideas, how are you going to manage yourself. So pay attention to what makes you angry, what excites you, what frustrates you and learn how you best manage your emotions at work.
Knowing how you are reacting to situations and others, gives you the ability to exert self-control over your own reactions. Before you can effectively influence others, you need to be able to influence yourself or manage yourself. When you experience negative emotions, work on mechanisms that allow you to keep control of your negative emotions and channel them constructively. How you do this is very personal – what works for one person, doesn’t work for another. Try different approaches out.
Being proactive is critical to influencing others. You can’t be reactive to what others are doing. You have to lead, formulate what you are wanting to achieve and then proactively influence others to help you achieve your goal or activity. So decide what you want first, and then work on proactively achieving it.
5 Interpersonal Skills To Practice to build political skills for leaders
1 – Active Listening
Listening is such an underrated skill and so important for influencing others. If you don’t properly listen to others, they are not going to listen to you. When you really listen to someone, you can find out lots about their interests, motivations, concerns and so on. All great information to help you influence them.
2 – Think Before Speaking
Be careful how you phrase what you say. Keep in mind how the other person will react to what you say and feel afterwards. Being diplomatic and considerate goes a long way to building trusting relationships. With a relationship, you can influence.
3 – Being Honest
Being honest and sincere in how you deal with others is huge. Humans are very good at spotting fakes, and nothing destroys trust quicker than trying to be something you are not. Be open, honest, and sincere in how you deal with others and the trust you get back will only increase.
4 – Be Interested In Other People
Be interested in other people, be curious about what they think, feel, and do. If you are genuinely interested in them, they will think a lot more positively towards you and your ability to influence will increase.
5 – Manage Upwards Well
And lastly, make sure that you manage upwards well. Keep your manager proactively informed about what you are doing and why and ask for their input. A supportive manager helps you massively and to get a supportive manager, you must proactively help them.
Third – For Leaders to build political skills, work at Reading People and Situations
1 – Put Yourself In Their Shoes
The first is seeing the perspective of others. Put yourself into others’ shoes and think about their values, motives, agendas, and goals. What do they care about in the workplace and why? How can you align their goals with yours?
2 – Understand The Business Goals & Power Structures
Be aware of the business goals and work to understand the power structures – who influences who and how – in the leadership team and management layers. Observe the body language and interactions between different members of staff. Less than 10% of communication is via the actual works said. How the words are said, and the body language clues are very important to consciously work at reading.
3 – Check for Threats
Third, think through how your agenda could cause others to feel threaten. An example could be a new system implementation could reduce certain individual’s influence and thus they may oppose its implementation even though it is in the best interests of the company. Work out how you are going to overcome their self-interest or reduce the treat to them.
The fourth skill group to build political skills – Building alignment and alliances
Networking is at the heart of this. If people don’t know you and you don’t know them, then how can you build alignment and alliances within the organisation. Network with your peers, those above and below you. Get to know them on a personal and professional level.
Then you can work out who will be easy to work with and who will be more difficult. The more your interests are aligned and the better the relationship you have with the individual, the easier you will find it to influence. You may also need to exclude individuals to achieve certain goals if they will be blockers.
Take time to Understand each person’s goals & agendas. The more you understand what they need, the better positioned you will be to show them that by helping you achieve x,y,z goals, the more this will help them achieve their goals and thus create win-win solutions. This is great way to create alliances and align goals and effort.
Understanding Strategic direction – The fifth skill group to build political skills for leaders
Building influence usually takes time and maintaining it takes effort. Keeping a sense of purpose and direction and being able to articulate this clearly is very important in keeping people on-side. If you keep chopping and changing your direction or message, you lose the confidence of others.
We a clear sense of strategic direction and your goals, choosing which battles to fight and when is a lot easier. Give ground on the battles which will not significantly impact you reaching your goals, and fight hard, pulling in favours in the battles which really matter to reaching your goals. The timing is also important – choosing favourable timing can mean avoiding a battle in the first place.
And lastly, keep your awareness of the company, the wider team and your supporters and the detractors. This is really important as things change. Like when driving a car, if you want to keep the car on the road, you will need to steer round corners, hazards, and other obstacles. Be on a constant watch out for hazards and obstacles internally and externally to the company.
in summary
So, there you have five skills sets to work on to build your political skills to help you influence decisions and outcomes by getting more people aligned to your direction of travel. Develop your political skills in management so you become a more effective leader – a person who instigates and implements value adding change. You can be a leader regardless of your actual job title and deliver even more value for the company you work for, which in turn will speed up your career progress.
Enjoy building your influence within your company and getting more achieved.
Political skills are the ability to navigate power struggles, tussles for limited resources, and create influence within a business without annoying, upsetting or damaging relationships. Those with better social navigation and persuasion skills are often a lot more effective in their jobs, have more and deeper relationships and rise quicker in organisations.
Working to improve how you interact at all levels, help and support others and to build influence – become more and more essential as you progress through the management ranks. Keep working on improving your skills!
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