Transcript #160 Boost Your Influence with Your Team

 

Host: Scott Weaver

Date June 1, 2022

Intro: Hello this is the Arise2Live Podcast, episode 160. Arise2Live’s mission includes improving business owners’ capacity to lead and run their company. Top leaders continuously work at being better bosses by boosting their influence inside their company. This episode shares 3 ways you can boost your influence with your team.

Let’s take a small step to be a better boss.

 Scott Weaver: 

Welcome to the Arise2Live podcast, episode #160. Thank you so much for listening in today. Your host today is me, myself, and I, Scott Weaver, the Arise2Live business coach, and I am excited about today’s topic. It’s about boosting your influence inside your company. I think today’s episode will help quite a few of you because, well, being a better boss is always a good thing. I’ll be coming to you from an approach that I wished I knew years and years ago. This approach is about the need for us to be intentional about providing a positive influence on your team. Knowing this and doing some of these things would have saved me from many difficult circumstances in the past,

Before we dive in, I would like to invite you to like and share this podcast with others, especially if you found it useful. I am so grateful that Arise2Live podcast has been growing, even getting a small following in Europe. It’s been good lately and exciting for my team and myself. Oh, don’t forget that the show notes and transcript are on the episode page on the Arise2Live.com/podcast site.

Okay, here we go.

This episode’s purpose is to reduce your frustration by reducing the trial-and-error process of becoming a better boss. I want you to be a better boss and to do so, requires learning and accepting a few laws of influence and leadership. Yes, those are the words used to describe the characteristics of a good boss. As the owner of a company, it is important that you create a positive influence on your team members that is not depended on your title or the fact you are the big boss, the owner. Influence goes beyond a title.

Many of you business owners started out as a rookie in your industry, learning the skills early on and becoming an expert. Maybe you started out on a construction crew right out of high-school or learning to run the equipment on your dad’s manufacturing floor. And today you are now running a company, a business with people on your team. Of course, your knowledge and skill to make quality products is invaluable and part of your unique advantage to success.

However, in the process probably nobody taught you to be a good boss, or even how to run a business. That is a problem. I’ve lived through overcoming that painful problem. We find everywhere this assumption that the person with exceptional skills will naturally make a good boss. This is not true. I’ve seen it in construction, manufacturing, teaching, and in my former profession, engineering.

There was a time when I was working in engineering. I got thrown into the fire when my company had gone through some downsizing. Stuff had to get done and they assigned me to lead a team of engineers in Malaysia. I was picked for my engineering skills and my team was picked because of their English skills. Not the best way to launch a new international team tasked to design circuits used in every product going out the door. And following industry norms, they did not provide me with any training on how to lead teams, leaving me pretty much left to fend for myself. It was a rough first year and a half in that position, and I learned a lot in that time through trial and error. I also developed a disdain for living in survival mode—we all can do better than that.

In the last episode, with the interview with D. Scott Smith, we talked about the power of the written word, communicating by writing things out and its ability to influence people when you’re not in the room. We talked about how important that was. We came up with a big picture of what influence is and it looks like this. When we are in a position of influence, we can make change acceptable. We can direct an idea to grow, or move a person towards something. We can encourage people to the right solution by presenting several alternatives and letting them choose to follow instead of being bossed around. This level of influence doesn’t come naturally to most people and relates to building leadership skills.

John C. Maxwell has a simple and direct statement of relating influence and leadership. He says “Leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less”. [page 17 from his book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership].

To be honest, it took me a few years to get comfortable that leadership is influencing. A lot of it was because of my background of coming up through the ranks and not being trained to lead. So I had to unlearn some things about myths that I was following that turned out not to be true. You see, I once thought that influence equals manipulation. It doesn’t.  I discovered as an engineer lead, I had to put pressure on my team to deliver on time with a correctly working product, but I wanted to do much more more than that. Everyone on the team would benefit from high-quality work if we did it consistently.  At that time, I was unknowingly influencing a certain can-do attitude at the time.

So how does one get more comfortable with the concept that leadership is influencing? Well, it’s practice and here are 3 practical things that you can do to boost your influence inside your company and on your team. I strongly feel that doing these things will help you be a better boss.

You Boost influence by Taking the Lead     6:55

This one may seem obvious, but there’s some underlying currents to watch out for. As a business owner, you have the position, the title, the power and that is not enough for your team to perform at the highest levels. You need to influence them so that they choose to perform at the high levels you want them to.

One of the biggest things you can do to reach those high levels is you taking the lead by taking responsibility of delivering the results that is coming out of the company’s effort. Taking ownership for the happy customers, quality service and products, financial stability, and providing a work environment that your team actually wants to be in.

At a high level, this is done by delegating the work to be done, but you take ownership and responsibility of the outcomes. The buck stops with you. Yes, I know this is a tight-rope to walk, this balancing by keeping the responsibility without micromanaging by letting your team members use their unique talents to come up with solutions that you couldn’t think of yourself.

You’ll be surprised on how well your company can perform when it can do this. This is where influence comes in. You can build influence on your team by taking the overall responsibility, but giving your team the credit for the win. Your efforts are not so much about how your team does things, but you influence them to achieve the desired outcomes and results you want. It is a subtle difference that many business owners overlook. You influence the top performance by showing the direction and the purpose of the company. This is a lot of times done by setting a clear vision and values for your team to follow.

For some of you business owners taking the lead, I mean really stepping up and taking the lead to accept total responsibility.  This is a hard thing to do and I have to admit, I was one of those business owners when I first started out and learned  that It’s about accepting that you have hung up your tool belt and no longer one of the team members, just another one of the guys out there. No, you are now the leader. When you step up big time, your team will step out with you. I’ve seen it so many times, over and over. I just love it when it happens. Your team sees you reaching your full potential and wants to be a part. So… take a deep breath and overcome those emotions and those voices inside your head that say, “You can’t do it.” You can! It’s worth it. Plus, you owe yourself and your team to be on the path to win.

When I was the engineering team lead, I stumbled across this principle with my team in Malaysia. About a year into my leadership, we were assigned a very challenging project on a very short timeline. It took like two weeks of 14-hour days to get it out the door. It was not surprising that under that pressure, one of the team members failed to deliver an important part of the solution and we had to go back and fix it. In my report to my bosses two levels up, I gave lots of credit to the team and the work they did and getting things out the door and I took responsibility on myself for the failure. Plus, I didn’t tell any of the managers in Malaysia who the person was who failed. Yes, I took a lot of heat for it, but you know what? Something good happened to the team. Even today, it’s hard to describe, but our team gelled after this. It became a high-performing team that was not afraid to perform, not afraid to step up. Looking back, I can say that at the time, my stepping up to take responsibility, to take the full lead, that was the best thing I could do create positive influence on my team.

And this example goes in to the second thing about boosting your influence that is Increasing trust.

You Boost Influence by Increasing Trust      11:30

 Good relationships with your team members are based on the principle of trust. When you have a high level of trust, your influence to direct your team becomes very high. You trust them to make decisions that you are not able to immediately verify. You know that they will do the right thing when you are not around.

Developing this two-way trust takes time and effort. A good way to start is being consistent in the elements of trust, things like:

• Taking the time to build connections and bridges with your team members.
• Communicate your intentions in a clear manner.
• Display integrity in your decisions and keep your promises.
• Keep your ego in check.
• Stepping up to deliver the results, which you can do consistently.
• Show loyalty to your team.

Now, this list is just some things that you can do to build up the trust in your team. I could go on and on about talking about trust. In fact, there’s a whole bunch of books written on this topic and it’s just too much to cover in a single podcast. So let’s go on to the third way to boost your influence.

Boost influence by Your Interaction with your Team     13:00

People run businesses, and these people act in certain ways. One of the unpopular truths is that your team will act the way you act. If you yell and create fear among your managers, they will yell and create fear with their team and when that happens, your influence for high-performance in your company will be reduced. It’s reduced by the do-as-I-say, not-do-as-I-do attitude, and that just doesn’t work in the long run. However, if you hold yourself up to higher standards, then your team will strive to those higher standards and research and investigations have shown over and over that when a company has higher standards, it shows up on the bottom line.

To achieve this, the principle generally goes like this: if you want others to follow your lead and build trust in your company, then you need to be developing your own character and behavior at the same time you are building up your team’s character. There’s an interaction between how you are doing, your being, your attitude, your character that will be reflected inside your company. And in developing that character, here are some behavior things that you can start with today.

1) Use your body language to communicate confidence. Stand straight, have your head up, and have a few smiles. Yes, it is okay for a business owner to smile.

2) Listen first, even to the point (Maybe) of tilting your head a little bit to show that you’re actively listening. Ask follow-up questions and engage with the phrase something like, “What I hear you say is this…” and then repeat what they just said to you.

3) Use connecting & emotional phrases when you talk with your team members. Here is a small list and it’s already like ten. But. But these are just ideas to get you thinking on how you can engage and connect with your team members.

• Thank you!
• I’m proud of you!
• I would like to see this happen because (Give them the reason)
• I need you to step up. This is important because….
• We will get through this adversity because….
• Great job for doing this and this
• I love your effort (for the more junior members of the team)
• I appreciate your attitude…

These are just a small list of ideas to get you going on how you can be very positive to your teammates. These phrases will smooth out a lot of difficult talk in challenging times. Times when you have to be frank and get to the truth, even though some people may not like it. But, you know, having a little emotion, you know, a little understanding, a little connecting phrases goes a long ways. In good times, these phrases build up lot of good rapport with your team, and it leads to building up relationships of trust so that when the challenging times come, the relationships are strong.

Okay, let’s recap the major points.     16:57

To be a better boss, you need influence and that starts with you and your actions. Not somebody else, but you. The three areas that was covered in this episode are:

• Boosting your influence by taking the lead and being fully responsible
• Boost your influence by increasing trust with your team and your employees
• Boosting your influence by having better interactions on a daily basis with your team.

Yes, there are a lot of soft skills in this episode, but influencing your team so that they can reach your vision. That is a soft skill that can’t be ignored. I wish I could go more detailed into a lot of the action steps, but there are so many different styles and company environments that I just really can’t do that unless you want to listen to a ten or 12 hour podcast, which very few people want to do that.

Anyway, with that said, please take these guidelines and see how you can apply them in your own company and to yourself.

Action Steps     18:09

To get things moving in the right direction on being a better boss, well, it starts out with selecting one of the three topics: Taking the Lead, Building Trust, or Improving your Interactions.

Picking one of those three, which one of these that you want to start investing time and effort to increase your influence? So I’m just asking you to get started this week on being a better boss. .

It is key to create influence beyond your title so that you can grow your company. So you can reach the vision that you are reaching for. I want you to reduce the trial-and-error process of becoming a better boss. When you build up your influence in your company, you also Arise2Live.

Sponsor:   This year has brought a lot of changes, but many business owners struggle to find focused time to update their future business destinations and so start to drift off course. Your future business, your future company, and your employees are so important. You must have a solid vision to where you are leading your company. Scott has a vision story coaching package that speeds up the process and provides accountability on your focused time. If you know that you need to update your vision and where you are going. Don’t delay anymore. Please reach out to Scott at arise2live.com/vision and get your company on the right path.