Hannah Busing via Unsplash

From the perspective of leading a team, our ability to influence others is essential. I’m a senior technical lead at a high tech Fortune 500 company and due to the nature of my role, I spend a lot of time interfacing with various groups. I lead my team through our development lifecycle, I work with silicon validators on previous generations, and architects on future ones. As you can imagine, there are often differing opinions (which is a good thing!) but at the end of the day we need some level of alignment to make progress as an organization. So let’s dive in!

As a team lead, we have the people, set the vision, and know what needs to be done. How do we ignite our team’s internal motivation to help make it happen? How do we break through stalemates? As a leader, developing our ability to influence others truly helps rally teams towards an aligned direction and helps in our ability to tackle problems and reach our goals. We will unpack three practical ways to build influence to effectively move teams forward and by the end you’ll be able to put some new techniques into practice. We’ll talk about…

• how to build influence through developing and maintain relationships
• how to build influence through earning the respect of others through preparation and
• how to build influence through how we resolve disagreements

Why is this Important?

Before we dive into the practicals, let’s explore why this is important. I’ll use my experience as an example to help illustrate. About 4 and half years ago I joined the team I’m on today and I didn’t know the team, who the players were, or where I fit. So I decided to focus on two things: being vulnerable by reaching out and getting to know new people and making sure I did the best job I could with the tasks that were given. Eventually people got to know me and I got to know them and I started to gain respect because of the good work I was doing. Then, opportunity to own more and lead followed. So when we build relationships and respect from those around us we can become effective leaders that will help our organizations go further.