Convincing our top management, our colleagues and their teams to follow us requires one crucial skill – influence.

Martin Orlov, the new CIO of a Fortune 500 retail company, was in a very tough situation. The company spent 10% of the overall expenditures year after year on the company’s legacy IT system. The company’s new ambition to expand the business into online retail would even double the budget. The IT team believed in the legacy system they have developed for more than 15 years. They did not attempt to replace it with a new platform.

Martin was confident that the legacy system could not be transformed into an ecommerce platform with mobile capabilities, social integration and global localized versions. During his first month he formed a committee comprised of the company’s senior management and business unit managers to propose a plan for the required ecommerce expansion while decreasing the technology expenditures.

Martin knew that the only way to reduce costs while enabling a new ecommerce technology was to eliminate the legacy system and move all the various platforms to an integrated one. The problem was that this proposal would increase the short term capital investment, but pretty quickly the company would see additional revenue from online sales and long term the company would see a drop in operational expenses.

Martin knew that he would step on the toes of many executives that would be affected. Most of them treated the legacy platform like it was their baby. He neither had the power to force any of them to accept his plan nor did he have rapport with the business unit managers. He did not know them well enough and they did not know him either.

Martin was not a person who would be discouraged by a challenge. He knew the problem before he joined the company but was determined to make a difference.

Martin started Meeting all the systems programmers and analysts. He shared his ideas, found points of resentment and provided solutions to objections. When he reached agreement he asked for a sign-offs on the proposal. When he faced resentments he moved the people who objected to the bottom of the list and decided to address them later on when he would be ready with more supporters.

The process was exhausting and time consuming but Martin was persistent to receive full support through one-on-one meetings. He avoided “herd” meetings where some people follow other people because of politics or reporting lines. Martin scheduled second and third meetings with people that had objections and showed them the wide support he had received on the signed-off document using the power of social acceptance to support the plan.

Martin expected to complete this process in one month but it took him 2 months even before presenting it to the committee. The committee members were surprised when the presentation was done by the Vice President of Technology who was previously the most vocal supporter of the legacy platform.

The plan was approved on the first committee meeting because Martin addressed all objections and made sure that all resentments would be brought to the table, discussed and documented.

After this success most of us would probably take it immediately to the Executive Committee or even to the Board. Right?

Not Martin.

Martin repeated the same process with higher management. He met them one-on-one, explained the plan, showed the signed-off documents and add more supporters at the top management. He left objections to be addressed again in second and third rounds of Personal meetings. This process was shorter because the top management did not deal with the technical details and focused on the business impact and the cost.

Martin customized every presentation to the specific needs of the people he met. He ended up with more than 10 presentation versions but those versions were varied to address the specific goals of Stake Holders from their point of view.

The Executive Committee who included all C-Level executives and some board members resolved to implement the plan and bring it for a Board approval.

After this success most of us would probably take it immediately to the Board. Right?

Not Martin.

Martin met every Board member one-by-one and eventually ended up meeting some of their advisors to ensure that they were not influenced by Informal Stake Holders. Powerful advisors, even though are not part of the Board or the executive team, still have a strong circle of influence.

Martin even asked for the Chairman’s support before the Board meeting. The Chairman was very influential with the public directors. Martin has seen too many times supportive directors change their mind without shame on the spot and reverse their support just to follow their political cycle of influence. There was too much on stake to let it happen this time. Martin wanted to avoid surprises because failure meant the end of his short tenure with the company.

Two more weeks of personal meetings and calls with the Board of Directors resulted in full support. The Board resolved to eliminate the legacy system and invest $3 million in an integrated ecommerce platform which ultimately would have lower operational cost. Within 3 months since Martin had joined the company, he achieved what looked impossible.

Influential Competence is the single most important skill that will take us to the top. It is the ability to influence peers and top management to undertake crucial decisions.

Martin’s tough situation is a common one for new and experienced leaders. Most decisions are taken collaboratively by committees, boards and teams. The informal decision making process is more powerful than the formal decision making process.

How can we develop influential competence? To answer this question, let’s look again at the methods Martin used to convince his peers to take on tough and potentially divisive challenges and solve them through consensus.

Informal power

Identify all stake holders and make sure that they support the plans. It is surprising how many informal circles of influence exist within an organization. Some call it politics and decide to rise above the game. Ignoring the game guarantees failure. The informal stake holders are in most organizations more powerful than the formal decision makers.

One –On-One

Large meetings should be to seal decisions, not reach them. Meetings are proven to be the toughest platform to make decisions on controversial issues, innovative strategies, disruptive technologies or turning points. We are never sure of the various support groups that have been formed over years. The most time consuming but most effective way to dissolve objections or controversy is the one-on-one meeting. In this way we customize our presentation to the point of view of our audience. Rushing to bring a decision to the group is exciting but not an effective process.

Personal Agendas

Check-out our personal agenda at the door but check-in the personal agenda of the person we want to influence. Everyone has a personal agenda. Revealing Personal Agendas benefits the persuasion process. Personal agendas are not necessarily negative. They are directions that people and their teams have already engaged with or committed to. Personal agendas might also be out of the scope of the business as well. Whether personal agendas are legitimate or not, the more we reveal the better we can handle objections. This process requires trust and good relationships to remove barriers of sharing personal information. Understanding what drives people and show them “what there is for them” is still a powerful influential interaction.

Influential Competence is not something we were born with. It can be developed by following the process of identifying the informal and informal stake holders from all corporate hierarchies and outside the corporation, meet them one-on-one as many times as needed to handle objections and address stake holders’ personal agendas without pushing our personal agendas.