The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How You Can Influence the Influencers John C. Maxwell Style | Foundations Friday #106

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Providing practical considerations to the John Maxwell Company, list 7 Factors that Influence Influence (or Influencers)Read the original list at https://www.johnmaxwell.com/blog/7-factors-that-influence-influence/Get John C. Maxwell's book Good Leaders Ask Great Questions at https://www.amazon.com/Good-Leaders-Ask-Great-Questions/dp/145554809X

Thank you for tuning in to the KevTalks podcast. This is the place where you'll hear people's compelling stories, you'll learn industry-leading best practice processes, and you'll find ways to make progress in your personal and professional life. Now, let's get logged in and get locked on to this episode of the KevTalks podcast. Seven factors that influence influence. Character, relationships, knowledge, intuition, experience, past success, and ability. These are seven factors that influence influence from the John Maxwell Company. I got interested in John Maxwell when my wife gave me the book,

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions, Your Foundation for Successful Leadership, when I was recently promoted. And I'm already loving it. I'm about a third of the way through it. And it reinforces and gives me new tools to ask my team and my colleagues and other folks questions more than I am giving them solutions, coaching, feedback, etc. It's a great mindset. But these influence factors are very helpful to consider. And so how do we action them or more so? I just listed off the seven factors, but what does that mean? Let's run through it real quick on this Foundations Friday 106. Are you influencing the influencers? So coming to the top of the list, character. Who are they? Who are we as leaders? Who are our team members? Do they hold up?

Do they do the right thing? Are they kind of managing for us in project management the meeting? Making sure that folks are talking to each other like adults, with good manners, all that kind of stuff, not cutting each other off. And then how do they represent themselves, even outside of work if you see them? The second thing, relationships. Who do they know, right? How can we leverage who they know? But also, do they work? Do we work to build new relationships, to strengthen them, to foster them, and not burn those bridges? Relationships are huge. Networking

is huge in business. Third knowledge, what do they know? Who are the people that can solve this problem? How can I help solve the problem? Or how can I help enable you to solve the problem? But who you know that has the expertise or the knowledge or maybe a different perspective is very important and helpful. So that was the third factor. Intuition, what do they feel? That's number four. Intuition is very helpful, particularly in project management or if you're planning special events in public safety of knowing, hey, we've kind of done this thing before. I have this feeling that we should escalate now. We should say that our project is a little worse off

than we've been reporting it to give folks ahead of time and kind of understand what's less obvious that maybe other folks can't pick out or see coming, that we have that intuition to predict maybe behaviors of people on our team or the environment that we're in. Number five is experience. Where have they been? So who's done this work before that we can pull in to help give us influence? Have I done this work before? Do I feel like I should give some input because I have a unique perspective? That all matters,

right? And six, past success. So of that experience from number five, who's been successful in this area? Who has done work in a similar area? Or who's been successful in maybe an area they're not familiar with, but they're successful in jumping into a situation they don't know about, getting the information together using those foundational five, right? Can they capture that leader's intent, the objectives, the organization, the resources and communication, and then move the whole team forward with that based on past success that could be specific to a topic or not. And number seven, the ability. What can they do? Does this person, do we ourselves,

as we're self-evaluating and evaluating our team, do they need a templated plan where they have to go step-by-step? Or are they more free thinking, where they can just make it up as they go? Or are we in the middle, where we kind of like some prompts, but then I can take it from there? And so again, this is a very short thing. I'm going to do a much longer episode on good leaders ask great questions and John Maxwell. But again, think of these seven factors that influence influence, or as we relate to people, how we can influence the influencers. That's through character, through relationships, through knowledge, intuition, experience, past success, and ability. Thank you for your success and hitting play on the

KevTalks podcast, for coming back to Foundations Friday, number 106. Hope you enjoyed my previous episode, full episode with Larry Hagner from the dad edge. Check out more stuff, more helpful tips at kevtalkspot.com. I am at Penel KG on Instagram and Twitter. I've actually just renamed to do a garage gym fit YouTube channel, mostly shorts, but go check that out. Get some workout ideas, a little cold plunge, yoga weights, all that kind of stuff. I hope you are putting in the work. I hope you are influencing yourself to do better every day and others around you to do better for themselves and for your teams. Hope is not a plan, everybody, but a good plan can bring people hope. Stay safe out there. Godspeed, y'all.