Here’s What Happens When Leaders Try To Be Influential Across Their Business

Over the past year I’ve been working with smart, engaging leaders who are operating in an environment of relentless change, ambiguity, and commercial pace. They have a lot to do; work across multiple teams and complexities and have little time in which to do it. They are technical experts, hard-working, run teams, may operate in multiple languages and all are certainly passionate about what they do.

So, what’s the problem? In essence:

• We don’t make the time to think through exactly what we’re trying to say to persuade others and be influential.
• We believe we don’t need to really think about it (always a mistake).
• We rely on our natural ability to be articulate (which tends towards talking too much and with the wrong focus).
• We fall back on in-depth technical expertise (which is almost never persuasive of itself).
• We ignore the reality that we go slower as a result, we make life harder for ourselves and our teams as a result, and we may not achieve the expected performance, as a result.
• We blame others, or circumstances (rather exercise sufficient curiosity to hone our own skills).

Being influential is a rich set of technical communication skills which require deliberate consideration and relentless practice to get it right.

And we help leaders around the world with that.

To find out more contact Sarah at sarah@sarahbrummitt.com