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    The Executive Guide to Influence
    The Executive Guide to Influence
    The Executive Guide to Influence
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    The Executive Guide to Influence

    By Tan Zhi Rong

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    About this ebook

    About a third of our lives are spent working. That is around 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. Yet, in school, we were not taught on the importance of influence in the workplace in order to succeed in our careers.

     

    Given the pace of today's world, we are instead fed a barrage of misinformation and other technical jargon. This book cuts through the noise and offers a complete and practical guide for fresh graduates, interns, and junior executives as they start out at work. The Executive Guide to Influence is the most important book you will ever read to prepare yourself in the modern workplace. Featuring six easy chapters and application questions to guide you through, readers will gain insight into:

     

    • Why it is that some people, despite being less experienced than you in the company, seem to exert this aura of influence that gets people to agree and endorse their ideas time after time.
    • Why focusing all your energies on your work presentation is not necessarily a good thing.
    • How influence is possible despite holding a junior position in the company.

    AND much more...

     

    Be heard. Be known. Be no longer ignored.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTan Zhi Rong
    Release dateJun 5, 2021
    ISBN9798201386573
    The Executive Guide to Influence
    Author

    Tan Zhi Rong

    Zhi Rong has a diverse management, business and technical background and works as a strategist in his day job. He has a voracious appetite for reading and research, and has always been curious about the study of human nature. His writing draws from scientific research, academic experience, coaching, and real-life experience. He is currently working on his next book, Start Slow.

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      Book preview

      The Executive Guide to Influence - Tan Zhi Rong

      This book is dedicated to my wife, who has been incredibly supportive in this journey; to my son, who is a constant source of inspiration and motivation in my life; and to my late father, who had been a powerful role model to me.

      Copyright @ 2021

      All Rights Reserved

      No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form including print, electronic, photocopying, scanning, mechanical, or recording, without prior written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Any perceived slight of any individual or organisation is purely unintentional. The resources in this book are provided for informational purposes only.

      Although each of the chapters in this book remains factual, some names have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of their families.

      Contents

      Foreword

      The Influence of Eunuchs in the Palace

      Influence as a Currency

      What This Book is not About

      Chapter 1: The Most Common Mistake

      What is Influence?

      Why is Having Influence so Important in the Workplace?

      Influence versus Capability

      People are Selfish

      What’s in it for me?

      Make it Convenient for Them

      Motivations of Other People

      Application Questions:

      Chapter 2: Understanding the True Motivations of Others

      The Game of Poker

      Observe and Listen

      Focus on their problems and make their problems yours

      Address the Fear Underlying Their Problems

      Rejecting Without Saying No

      Building Rapport

      Application Questions:

      Chapter 3: Inception 101

      Make Them Think it is Their Idea

      Ask Questions to Steer Them to Your Idea

      The Art of Framing Questions

      Yes/No Questions

      False Dilemmas

      The Use of Forced Empathy

      Application Questions

      Chapter 4: Othello

      Never Enter a Negotiation or a Meeting Blind

      Get the Lay of the Land

      Identify the Influencers

      Rule of the Majority

      Rule of Three

      The Psychology of Conformity

      Cindy Goes to the Meeting Again

      Work With Your Team

      Recap

      Application Questions

      Chapter 5: What if You Fail?

      Influence takes Patience and Persistence

      Always Strive to add Value

      Be an Expert in Your Area

      Be Consistent in Delivering Results

      Be the Change You Want to See

      Try Again

      Application Questions

      Chapter 6: Being a Leader

      The Milgram Experiment

      Types of Power that Bosses use to Influence Others

      What Sort of Power Should a Successful Leader Use?

      Servant Leadership

      You Gain More by Giving

      Influence Takes a Long Time to Earn and No Time to Burn

      Application Questions

      Conclusion

      Foreword

      Have you ever felt frustrated that your ideas and proposals are constantly being shot down, dismissed, or entertained in a condescending manner in the workplace?

      If you have, it is likely to have nothing to do with you. It is more to do with how successful you are at influencing people.

      In this book, I would like to share with you how to be great at influencing so you can excel at work and in your life. It doesn’t require high IQ, good looks, or charisma. It is really simple once we get the key principles. I will guide you through them so we can succeed together. 

      I began writing this book after almost a decade of applying the principles herein, wishing that I’d learnt this earlier, when I started working after school. When I was in middle management, I watched the struggles of many of my junior colleagues who felt frustrated that their proposals were met with rejections from their co-workers and their bosses. Some of them blamed the company for having a culture resistant to new ideas and change. Some blamed their bosses for being myopic and hard to deal with. Some blamed their colleagues for being lazy, unwilling to make a change to improve processes that will obviously benefit the company. They would complain that work was not going smoothly for them because their managers or their supervisors were not being cooperative and agreeing with what they had to say. This was despite the amount of effort and time they put behind the wonderful charts, diagrams, and tables to justify their proposal.

      While it may certainly be the fault of their bosses or the company they worked in for not being receptive to their ideas, more often than not, the issue lies in how the ideas are delivered. We all went through school and were taught to present our ideas in a coherent and logical fashion. We are somehow conditioned to believe that as long as something is logical and supported with facts, everybody should endorse it.  Those who are not supportive are either blind, stubborn, or stupid (or we think a combination of all three). But the reality is not so binary. Your colleagues/bosses may be resisting you due to reasons other than logic.

      If logic, data, and results are the only things needed to get buy-in and influence, ask yourself this: Why is it that some people, despite being less experienced than you in the company, seem to exert this aura of influence that gets people to agree and endorse their ideas time and time again? What is their secret?

      The Influence of Eunuchs in the Palace

      Junior executives often believe that because of their low hierarchy in the organization, no one wants to listen to them. Influence seems to go hand-in-hand with position. This is true, and I will touch on this in the last chapter. But position is not the only means to gain influence. In this book, I want to debunk the myth that influence can only be achieved through position (i.e., if you are new or junior in the workplace, you are unable to have any influence). There are also examples of people who lack influence despite working for years in the company. My goal is therefore to teach you how to gain influence in the workplace without relying solely on your position.

      To give an example of a group of people that are of low positions but able to exert a large amount of influence, we can look at the eunuchs serving in the Imperial Palace in ancient China.

      Eunuchs were first documented mostly as emasculated slaves by Chinese kings in the eighth century BC, before making an appearance in royal courts in AD 146 -147. Usually acquired from poor families, the boys were castrated before reaching the age of puberty and brought to serve the emperor and the royal household. Their duties mainly revolved around menial tasks such as water fetching, food serving, and food tasting in case of assassination attempts. Higher-ranking eunuchs might be brought in to serve as butlers, maids, and bodyguards to the harem of women under the emperor.

      While the eunuchs were trusted to be unable to seduce women in the palace or to father heirs that could usurp the dynasty, the ruling class typically viewed them with disdain, and the general public viewed them as the lowest class of servants in the palace. It didn’t help that the process of emasculation affected their bladder control as well, and young eunuchs typically soiled their bed and clothes, giving rise to the negative Chinese expression as smelly as a eunuch. The expression holds a double meaning; the literal one coming from the whiff of urine stench from their clothes, and the other hinting at the general sentiment of their corrupt nature, avarice, viciousness, and scheming within the palace.

      Many of the eunuchs lived a life of hardship, forced into a life that they could not control and had little escape, since escape from palace life was often punishable by death. Nonetheless, there were some that exploited their positions within the palace to gain political influence, often acting behind the scenes to pull strings in the court. Armed with information, such as the daily habits and the whims and fancies of the emperor and the members of the royal family, those eunuchs traded secrets, conspired, and held influence that could sway even the emperor. The emperor, like most of the royal family, may have also viewed them with more trust than other officials and nobles in the court, given their disarming demeanour and their lack of power and base outside of the court, combined with the fact that most eunuchs usually served and knew the royal family all their lives.

      At the height of their political power, there were as many as ten thousand court eunuchs in the imperial court, and as many as seventy to a hundred thousand of them outside of the court throughout China. While the emperor was busy with his harem of concubines, those highest in the pecking order gained enormous wealth through stealing, bribery, and even assassinations. They spread rumours of both the inner court and

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