How to Improve Your Communicating and Influencing Skills
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly reshaped the modern business world and changed the way we communicate on a daily basis. Collaboration, communication, workflow, consistency, all of these and communicating and influencing skills have become challenges nowadays, especially for companies that were unprepared.
Now that brands are forced to adopt a remote work model, the challenge of maintaining efficiency can seem insurmountable. To survive and even thrive during a crisis, your remote teams need a true leader. Not only that, but you also need to improve team cohesion, manage workflow without wasting resources, and communicate more effectively. Otherwise, your remote operation can quickly dissolve into a disorganised mess. Luckily, though, there’s plenty you can do, like improving your communicating and influencing skills, and using the right tech.
Today, we’ll be taking a close look at the best practices you can use to manage your remote teams efficiently. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Start by Integrating a Collaboration Tool for Your Communicating and Influencing
Your first order of business is to make sure all of your projects are running smoothly. This might be easy when you’re in your office, but in this case, it can be a nightmare. Communicating with your team members is essential, but you also need a good project management tool. This is a centralised cloud-based platform that allows all of your teams to collaborate seamlessly and in real-time. Plus, it comes with various handy features to help you retain control and monitor progress with ease.
That said, choosing a reliable tool is kind of a chore that requires the old trial and error approach. Be sure to sign up for the free trial to see if the tool and its features fit nicely into your business model. This software should accommodate all your needs, so take your time to test it out and ask for employee feedback. The key objectives are to:
- Improve productivity.
- Facilitate real-time collaboration.
- Assign tasks and projects easily.
- Monitor performance and key metrics.
- Create comprehensive reports through onboard analytics.
- Track time spent on tasks and get detailed logs for each project.
When you have all these features, you can easily stay on top of every project, and all without relying on lengthy email threads.
2. Build a Powerful Communicating and Influencing Hierarchy
Speaking of lengthy email communication, a big part of improving your communication and influencing skills as a leader is knowing how to create a good communication hierarchy. Simply put, a communication hierarchy ensures that everyone knows exactly whom they report to and should communicate with daily. It also ensures that the right information and files reach the right person instead of getting lost in the noise.
If you don’t make a communication hierarchy though, you can expect to wake up every morning to a pile of emails. Needless to say, this is not the best way to maintain productivity or improve written communication in a remote team. Instead of wasting time forwarding emails to the right people, simply create a communication hierarchy, send it to your team members, and make sure they stick to it.
3. Efficient Communicating and Influencing With VoIP
Of course, effective and efficient communication is not just about the communication hierarchy, it’s also about the tools you use. Technology has allowed small businesses and global enterprises to run remote operations with ease – one of the leading technologies being VoIP. Voice over internet protocol is a cloud-based phone system that replaces legacy systems, bringing various digital features to your company.
There are many VoIP providers out there, so you need to take your time searching for the best VoIP service provider that is affordable and offers all of the features you need. Ideally, this should include a low-cost phone system for national and international calls. Additional features should include:
- Mobile optimisation and a dedicated app.
- Conferencing tools.
- Collaboration tools.
- Built-in analytics and reporting.
- Call forwarding.
- Speech-to-text functionalities.
- Virtual assistants.
- Scheduling tools.
- And more.
With the right VoIP system, you can communicate with your team members seamlessly and affordably no matter where they are.
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4. Master Your Soft and Verbal Skills
Now that you have the right tech and hierarchy, you can start working on your soft and verbal skills to further enhance your remote communicating and influence. The former refers to your demeanour and body language, the latter to how you talk to your employees. Both are easy to improve when working in an office, but in the online world, things tend to get complicated. That said, one of the leadership traits you need to possess is the ability to adapt to a new work environment.
Always keep in mind that your employees can only see the part of you that fits on the screen. Sometimes, they won’t be able to see you at all. This is why you need to learn to communicate more clearly and efficiently online.
You can start by turning your camera on and practising your hand gestures and facial expressions. Remember that people will want to see a smiling face but a professional and authoritative figure if you’re the leader. What’s more, practice keeping your hand gestures inside the camera frame.
Next, focus on your verbal communication. To understand you clearly, your employees need you to annunciate and talk just a tad slower than you’re used to. Remember that you’re not talking face-to-face, after all.
Aside from speaking more slowly, give ample time for people to jump in, write stuff down, and take frequent pauses. These pauses will ensure that everyone is keeping up and will allow them to catch up if they need to.
5. Be the Organiser Your Employees Need
Remote work can be hard for managers and employees alike in many ways. One of the common problems is that remote teams tend to become disorganised as time goes by. To prevent this, you as their leader need to step up and help your employees organise their work and their time in the digital office.
You can do this easily with a workflow management tool, like the one in your project management software. You also need to monitor your employees to discover any pain points they might have and help them overcome the challenge.
Be sure to organise everything neatly in your project management tool, send out daily reports and work overviews, and schedule morning emails. This will help with communicating and influencing mission-critical tasks and your teams. The morning emails should contain short bullet points of the work ahead, and it works wonderfully well for small teams.
6. Communicating and Influencing Examples
Use the Power of Because
‘Because’ is one of the most influencing words you can use. A study in the 1980s proved the power of this word. The research is worth reading because you will understand why this word is so powerful in influencing peopel.
The Shark Trust – Ask a Question
The Shark Trust struggled with donations because sharks were seen as ‘not nice’. To persuade the public they showed asked the public a question, ‘Which animal <a picture of two animals was shown> kills more people each year?’.
People chose the shark, and when they did the answer was revealed to show that deers kill more people.
Pull More than You Push
This effective influencing model – push and pull, will help you to choose whether to push, tell them more, or pull, ask them more. It is one of the most effective methods of getting people to do what you need them to do.
The UK Civil Service Communication and Influencing
The government published their own set of competencies for their staff and communication and influencing were on of the competencies. They called them ‘Definitions of Behaviours’, and there are 9 of these behaviours for the civil service on communicating and influencing:
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Changing and Improving
- Making Effective Decisions
- Leadership
- Communicating and Influencing
- Working Together
- Developing Self and Others
- Managing a Quality Service
- Delivering at Pace
The definition of communicating and influencing is ‘Communicate purpose and direction with clarity, integrity and enthusiasm. Respect the needs, responses and opinions of others.’
At the lowest level of the Civil Service 6 levels you are required to achieve the following in communicating and influencing:
‘Put forward your views in a clear, constructive and considerate manner. Use an appropriate method of communication for each person such as an email, telephone call or face-to-face, taking into consideration their individual needs. Use plain and simple language, being careful to check written work for errors. Consider the impact of language used on different groups of stakeholders. Remain honest and truthful when explaining opinions. Listen and ask questions to ensure your understanding.’ And at the top level you are required to:
‘Demonstrate and promote communicating with honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity. Ensure there is the infrastructure to support varied communication methods which are cost-effective and keep up with advances in digital technology. Develop a culture where colleagues consider the individual needs of people when deciding how to communicate and understand the impacts of the chosen methods. Communicate purpose and direction with respect, clarity and enthusiasm. Overcome objections to gain acceptance of the vision and purpose of the Department. Use your influence to make a positive difference across the Civil Service and externally.’
Wrapping Up
Communicating and influencing are two important processes every leader should improve in order for remote teams to thrive. To achieve this, you need to combine good leadership skills with the right tools, so be sure to use these tips to elevate efficiency and productivity in your remote teams.
Action: For even more useful content on communication, check out our ultimate guide on communication skills.
