How big are your powers of persuasion?
How easy is it for you to persuade people to move in the desired direction?
Can you say that people listen to you and actually hear and consider what you have to say?
If you doubt that you can score excellence with your persuasion skills, it is time for a quick lesson on how to build your persuasive management style.
Management Styles in Business
Management Styles in Business You can manage democratically or autocratically or adopt a more relaxed, easy-going management style.
You can spend more time consulting about your decisions, in which case you favor a consultative management style.
Collaboration and participation can be your work mottos to support a participatory management style.
Or, you can be a true bureaucrat and ask your employees to follow the rules by the book.
The types of management styles available to you come down to resourcefulness in using the most suitable techniques for you and the people involved when working on a common goal.
Whatever you choose as your management style, you cannot underestimate the advantages of working skillfully with your powers of persuasion.
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Having an impressive persuasive management style includes being a great negotiator and an even better influencer. As a subset of your emotional intelligence skills, persuasion skills require you to become an excellent communicator and, above all, know yourself and others.
How to Polish Your Persuasive Management Style
The definition of persuasion is presenting arguments in a way to move, motivate, or change people.
This explanation may make you think persuasion is all about arguments.
However, that is not true. As mentioned above, the persuasive management style encompasses strong debating and argumentations skills, tuning in to people’s emotions, and understanding others’ positions.
Persuader: Leader, Manager, or a Salesperson?
Many are managers and bosses, but few are leaders.
It doesn’t take plenty of wisdom to see the charisma of the word leader and fall for it.
However, the equal sign between a leader and a manager is not so straightforward.
One big difference can be assigned to the fact that the circumstances make managers while leaders are self-made. It takes a lot of self-investment and personal responsibility to enhance your leadership style.
Having excellent persuasion skills is more associated with being an effective salesperson than being a great leader. Again, if you think of persuasion as a sales quality, you lose the many advantages of a well-rounded persuasive management style that makes you a powerful negotiator and influencer.
Effective leaders manage, sell, persuade, negotiate, and influence.
Persuasion Skills You Need to Build for Effective Leadership
To become a persuader, you don’t want to sell arguments; you want to create an emotional rapport. In fact, persuasion, negotiation, and influencing are among the most prominent employability skills you can have as a solopreneur who wants to expand a business.
Persuasion
A simple example of persuasion is inspiring a potential client to sign up for an email list. Convincing employees to do a difficult task or asking supervisors to invest in the necessary job equipment are persuasive management situations you may have not even been aware of by now. A not so apparent example of using your persuasion skills is when you compliment a team member on a job well done.
Persuasion is beneficial for you as a leader and employees who need to bring lucrative projects aboard. You should encourage the development of this skill within your team and work on it yourself.
Negotiating
Negotiating skills are the capability to address conflict in a patient, empathetic manner so that you draw to a close a contract that didn’t stand a chance of successful completion. Hadn’t been for your intuitive negotiation skills to leverage the space between lines among the contract parties, many contracts would fail miserably.
Negotiation is a process requiring a willingness to cooperate despite obvious differences of stance. Good negotiating builds trust because it delivers mutually satisfying solutions.
Influencing
Dale Carnegie’s iconic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is among the all-time business management best-sellers because it focuses on the simple argument of building positive emotional relationships with people.
Influencing is a persuasion method for bringing people to your own way of thinking. When you influence, you transform others’ behavior without using coercion or having a hidden agenda.
To be a good influencer, you need to have clarity of purpose about your point of view and excellent communication skills to bring that point to others. It is an essential skill for leaders or people in authority.
Simple Methods for Improving Your Persuasive Management Skills
When you connect in the right way, it is easier to present your arguments appealingly, too. Here is how:
1. Ask the right questions.
The right questions are your passport to learning what creates the distance between you and other people. If you are unclear about what makes other people tick, then you can’t tweak your approach.
Changing your point of persuasion doesn’t mean taking a 180-degree position but making subtle alterations that will appeal to the other party.
Furthermore, questions produce knowledge, and knowledge is the basis of truth and building trust.
2. Show genuine interest in other people.
If you only take one tip today about building your persuasive management style, this is it. You cannot fake genuine interest for long. As you can only show genuine interest in people who are good for your team or as close as possible to your perfect clients, losing interest in someone is an indicator that you may not be able to persuade them, no matter how hard you try.
3. Empathize and listen.
Active listening is at the core of any effective sales and marketing strategy, even when it is not in the form of verbal communication. For example, social media observation is a way to become a good listener in an online business. Listening to others with empathy means that you understand the position they come from to bridge a gap, tackle a miscommunication, or solve a misunderstanding.
Empathy can be trained and practiced. An excellent way to practice your empathy skills is to assume that everyone comes from a position to collaborate with well-meaning intentions.
4. Be patient, do not be in a rush.
It takes time to build rapport with other people. Investing time in a relationship is a marker that you care for the well-being of that other person. Of course, you come from a position of healthy self-interest in business, but if you want to build a successful team or win loyal clients, there must be a genuine shared interest that requires time to develop.
5. Focus on the benefits for the other party.
Coming back to the benefits is an effective persuasion strategy whenever you come to a grind in communication with others.
The benefits are what brought you together in the first place, so if you want to entice people to a course of action or accept your opinion, always keep the benefits in mind.
6. Use positive, assertive language.
Negative language subconsciously sabotages your influence score. So does hesitation.
The most powerful motivators of influential speakers brim with positive energy. It is the emotion of enthusiasm backed up by positive language and strong arguments that is the winning persuasion approach.
7. Stay relaxed and confident.
Being forceful with your opinion doesn’t work. Persuasion only works if you are ready to accept a no but still remain firm with your position.
Watch the #ASKTHECEO video below for practical, immediately applicable tips about your leadership style:
Sharing a memorable story is a good start to establishing a common ground with a client online. An impactful story places your business in a position of emotional connection. Genuine interest in your team will always win you extra positive points in their golden books.
Tweaking your persuasive management style to induce change in other people is not always easy, but with the proper practice, anyone can get better.
Don’t underestimate your powers of persuasion.
Start empowering and supporting your team now to grow your business beyond your imaginary limits.
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