Influencing Goals are a critical element of the overall stakeholder influence process that I advocate here. Many people when they begin to focus on their influence will stay too long having a vague aim about what they want to influence. This is okay, but is not as powerful has developing an extremely clear focus on exactly what you want people to be doing, thinking, feeling or saying differently as a result of your influence.
Influence goals are usually the final step in the realisation of your main business goal or target. By developing a clear influence goal, you are actually answering the question: “What do you need people to do in order for you to achieve your main goal?”
Another very practical aspect of developing influencing goals is that the mere definition of the goal will automatically move you significantly towards it, and it will quickly highlight where you are wasting your time and allow you to invest your time and energy in the most effective way.
The purpose of this guide is to collect together the various resources here in the library that will help you to develop your influencing goals, and will stretch your thinking further.
- Exploring Influencing Goals. This takes a deeper look at the concept of Influencing Goals.
- Focus Influencing Goals on Influence. It is useful to be able to distinguish between ordinary business goals and influencing goals. This should help you make that distinction.
- Choosing the Right Influencing Goal. Some goals are highly suited to the influence process, others not so. This should help to direct you towards the best ones to focus on.
- Example Influencing Goals. To give you a better idea of what we mean by an influencing goal, take a look at some of these examples.
- Exercise: Finalising Your Influencing Goal. This will help you to refine your goal and settle on what it is you want to influence.
- Deepening Influence Goal Specification. Sometimes you need to add further clarity beyond the specification of your goal. This introduces the simple idea of evidence criteria.
- Pressure Testing Your Influencing Goal. Either do it yourself, or get a friend to really challenge your thinking, and particularly your evidence criteria.
Once you have worked through these resources, you should have a pretty good idea about exactly what you want to achieve with your influence. With this it becomes much easier to start to identify whom you need to influence, or rather, who your stakeholders are.