Self Leadership and
The New Leadership Playbook
Blog by Andrew Bryant

In a previous post, I spoke about how not to get passed over for promotion, and one of those steps was to speak up. Regardless of your seniority your business or your career, there’s a lot of noise out there and if you are not heard, you cannot influence, and if you can’t influence you can’t be successful.

Many people have the mindset that it’s best to fly under the radar, but successful people know that.

"if you don’t want to be part of the herd, you must be heard"

In this post, I’m going to share with you 5 strategies to get heard and pave your way to be heard and be more influential.

Some of these strategies might seem counter-intuitive and earlier in my career, I struggled to apply them, sometimes missing opportunities because I didn’t get my message heard.

I don’t want you to miss out – so listen up!

Strategy 1: Bad News First

The evening news, on TV, does not start with a cute story about a baby animal being born at...

To succeed in any organization, you must understand 'office politics'. The first rule is to be visible, doing good work is not enough if you're not associated with it. You must learn to shine.

Let me tell you about Chris who's an experienced pharmaceutical Healthcare Executive. He delivered results as a sales head early in his career and had been moved to head office in Europe in an administrative role.

Chris made everything run smoothly. However, he did it in an under-the-radar manner, so when he wanted to step up to a country manager role he was not deemed ready.

Chris had not followed the first rule of office politics:  

BE VISIBLE!

The Visibility Rule

How could Chris have gained visibility instead of just quietly making things efficient?

1. He could have first alerted Senior Management to the cost of the inefficiencies
2. He could have let people know that he was going to resolve the issues
3. He could have socialized the benefits of the Improvement in addition
4. He could have been...

in a previous post, "How to Influence Your Boss", I explored how to influence upwards, but just as important is how to influence laterally.

When I teach programs on influence or influence without authority, I ask participants to create a circle of influence like this diagram:

I then ask them to put ticks or crosses, representing ability or inability to influence, against each circle.  Obviously, some circles will need sub-circles to represent individual key people. This is a useful exercise to map out where you need to develop or strengthen your influence.

Influence in Organizations

In a modern matrix-style organization, your success will be determined not just by what you do, but by what you can influence others to do. The effective manager/leader learns to find out what is important to the people in their circle of influence and communicates to them in terms of what matters to them rather than directly stating their own needs.

The "How to Influence Your Boss" post...

Research has shown that the inability to build a successful relationship with the boss is a significant reason for managers failing or not reaching their full potential.

When I approach this topic, I encounter several mindsets that lead to an inability to influence effectively, these include:

• My boss is autocratic
• My boss doesn't listen to me
• I don't want to jeopardize my career
• I have no power in the relationship
• My boss doesn't give me time

Do any of these, sound familiar?

The problem with blaming the boss is that you have created an external locus of control which is the exact opposite of self-leadership. To influence you must ask yourself, “what can I do that will make a difference?” The purpose of this blog is to provide some ideas to get you started:

Influence Your Boss

1. Create an Ally

Allies have open and honest conversations; they may not always agree but they will listen to what each other wants and assertively communicate their own needs. "But my boss...