The New Influencing Toolkit: Capabilities for Communicating With Influence

This book will make you more aware of how you're influencing people, how you're perceived, and how others would like to be led. It will also make you reflect on how people are leading and influencing you.

So keep listening to find out how to deploy different kinds of power, how channeling a famous leader can increase your influence, and how a values charter might motivate your team.

"The New Influencing Toolkit" is split into four parts, with 28 chapters in total. Each chapter has a generous number of case studies, which illustrate the points discussed and showcase influence in action. The first three parts conclude with a list of the Top Ten Key Points covered in the section.

The book begins with Baker's definition of influence as "the power to make people agree with your opinions or get them to do what you want, willingly and ethically," and he stresses it's not about being cunning, manipulative or underhanded. This sets the tone for the advice in the rest of the book. Baker encourages leaders to be positive, empathetic, patient, and generous toward their teams.

He examines the types of power that can be drawn upon to influence people, hinting at some of the ideas put forward in the well-known Five Forms of Power, developed by social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven in the 1950s.

Baker points out that impressive job titles no longer command the respect they once did. In today's workforce, power is gained from being well connected, having expert knowledge, being able to access new information, or having the ability to offer rewards for good performance. These areas are explained in depth and are followed by nine tools for building personal power. From here, Baker introduces his influencing strategy framework.

This lies at the heart of Baker's approach. Imagine a quadrant representing four key influencing strategies. These are: investigation, calculation, motivation, and collaboration. Each strategy has four characteristics. For example, the four characteristics of collaboration are an ability to build trust, share ownership, communicate openly, and listen actively.

The framework also separates the four strategies into logical and emotional approaches, and distinguishes between styles that pull and styles that push.

Pull styles use a direct and assertive approach. Push styles use an indirect and less assertive approach. So, investigation's a logical approach with a push style, while motivation's also a push style, but it's an emotional approach. Collaboration's an emotional approach, but has a pull style. And lastly, calculation has a pull style with a logical approach.

After laying out the theory, the author encourages you to engage in a few quick and simple practical exercises that allow you to reflect on your own influencing style. The first and most significant of these is a questionnaire in Part Two.

By answering 64 questions you can create your own "influencing capabilities profile." This reveals your influencing style's strengths or preferences, and highlights where you need to develop your influencing skills.

This arms the reader with a helpful self-profile, as well as a vested interest in reading on, to discover answers to such questions as, "How can I work on my less developed skills?" "What will I gain if I do?" "When would this approach benefit me?" And, "Are my favored approaches doing me or my team justice?"

In Part Three, Baker devotes a chapter to each of four well-known figures, whose leadership styles exemplify his four leading influencing strategies of investigation, calculation, motivation, and collaboration. So, let's briefly summarize the approach each figure represents.

Al Gore, former US vice-president and climate campaigner, fits the profile of an investigator. He arms himself with facts and figures, and deploys them to killer effect when debating. His approach is logical with a push style.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a calculator. This logical, pull-style approach is favored by salespeople, teachers and animal trainers, among others. Calculators exert pressure and state the rewards of taking certain courses of action – and the drawbacks of not taking that action.

Then there are the emotional approaches of motivation and collaboration. It was motivational power and a push style that made Dr Martin Luther King Jnr such a beloved leader. His dream gave people a positive vision of how the future could be. It was a dream others could share passionately and feel emotionally compelled to follow.

Mother Theresa's power lay in her collaborative approach. She made people feel valued by listening to them and showing she cared. Baker identifies choreographers, orchestra conductors, and stage and film directors as examples of leadership roles where collaboration, and an encouraging pull style, must play a key part.

Baker acknowledges that this is a reductive and simplified assessment of what made these individuals strong leaders – and we agree. But this section is still valuable, because it conjures up images that help us remember the four influencing strategies. So, in any given situation, you can ask yourself: Whose style or styles would prove the most influential here – Gore's, Thatcher's, Luther King's or Mother Theresa's?

Having thoroughly introduced the four influencing strategies, Baker's next step is to explain the limitations and flaws of relying too heavily on any one of them.

He argues that if you combine the right elements of these strategies, at the right time, you'll maximize your influencing potential. There isn't time to explain this in full, but the chapters that follow are dedicated to describing how the four approaches – and their 16 capabilities – can be combined to maximum effect.

Baker discusses the strengths and limitations of each combination, and explains when it is, and isn't, the best approach to adopt. He also shares case studies that show how they've been put into action successfully. Put briefly, the aim of a good leader is to be malleable and multidimensional by drawing on all four influencing strategies.

We like that "The New Influencing Toolkit" provides so many tips for dealing with everyday leadership challenges, rather than focusing on big-picture, strategic goals.

Part Four, the concluding section, provides a wealth of helpful tools. These come in one-page, bite-sized chunks. As elsewhere in the book, Baker draws on other people's research and business models. For example, he shares the ideas of two great American figureheads of management theory, Frederick Herzberg and Steven Covey.

So let's look in detail at two of the 48 tools discussed in this part of the book. They're found in a section about gaining an emotional connection with your team and maximizing its motivational potential. Like many others Baker chooses, they're both quite well known.

Tool 39 introduces the idea of a Team Values Charter. This is a quick and insightful way to help a team work together toward a common goal. Here's how it works: each team member and the leader must answer five questions. These are: "What one value is important to you when functioning in this team in order to achieve our goal?" "What does this value mean to you?" "Why is this value important to you?" "What type of behaviors would violate this value?" And lastly, "What type of behaviors would be consistent with this value?"

To set a positive tone, the leader should begin by sharing his or her answers. All the team members should then give their answers in turn, and they should also be encouraged to question what their co-workers say along the way. This shouldn't be a passive exercise.

These answers will provide a set of values and a defining statement for each value. Each team member might have his own unique value, and some values may be shared. The key point is that all the team members, regardless of whether they're usually withdrawn or confident in meetings, will have contributed values to a shared charter.

When everyone has agreed on the wording, the charter can be drawn up and put on display. Your Team Values Charter is an agreement between yourself and each member of your team that states: these are our shared values.

If someone leaves the team, Baker suggests that it's best practice to keep that person's value in the charter. This sends a clear message that the contribution of all the team members continues to be of importance and worth, even when they've moved on. In the same way, it's important that new members of the team are invited to add their own value to the charter as quickly as possible after joining. This reinforces their sense of belonging and value to the team.

Tool 43 outlines Herzberg's time-honored GROW coaching model. If this isn't already familiar to you, GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and What next? This is a pull-style process that works well when a team member comes to you with a problem that you know she can resolve.

Rather than listen passively to a long description of the problem, you start by asking her what she's hoping to achieve as a goal. What would she like the end result to be? From here, you move to asking about how the situation is at the moment – in other words, the reality as it currently stands. Ask what problems are stopping her from achieving the desired end goal. For example, is it people, systems or something else?

Now it's time to consider the options available for overcoming these obstacles. The final stage of the process looks for a solution by asking your team member, "What next?" She can then decide the steps she needs to take to resolve the issue.

The GROW model is a time-efficient approach to a problem. It empowers your team member by making him think about how best to resolve his issue, and giving him the opportunity to do so. This in turn promotes confidence and independence.

Baker's book is also full of advice on how to win over and enthuse your team through various periods of structural change. For example, if you're dealing with change that you have the power to shape, Baker recommends a collaborative approach. This shares your power to influence with your team members, and gives them a sense of ownership over the change. They'll have a vested and emotional interest in its successful implementation as a result.

On the other hand, a motivational approach is best when you want your team to feel an emotional connection to a new strategic plan or direction.

In these sections, as elsewhere in the book, Baker promotes communication which is open and honest, and as positive as possible.

So what's our last word on "The New Influencing Toolkit"?

We think this is a rewarding book, well-organized and packed with the user-friendly advice Baker promises in his introduction. Some of the content may feel obvious or repetitious, and Baker's explanations leave nothing to chance. And, as you've heard, he includes several tried and tested models that may well be familiar. But despite covering some well-worn ground, a lot of the content comes over as fresh and new. We think there's something here for every leader to reflect upon, learn from, and put into practice.

This book also lives up to its title's promise and serves as a toolkit. We think you'll want to keep it readily to hand, for a regular flick through. Baker's especially strong on his guidance for approaching new or challenging situations, or if you ever feel your team's spirit is lagging and you want to do something about it.

All in all, we have no trouble recommending this book to new and aspiring leaders, as well as seasoned veterans who want to reassess the way they approach their role and get better at influencing people. We believe it'll make you see yourself, your team and your organization in a new light.

"The New Influencing Toolkit: Capabilities For Communicating With Influence," by Tim Baker, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.