I heard organizational psychologist Edgar Papke speak last week. His ideas were brilliant, and like other successful leaders he interacted with extreme interpersonal respect.

Perhaps his most powerful idea was this: When starting a conversation, explain your intention first, before asking questions of the other person.

Example: (Intention) I want everyone’s input on the new sales process so we can make it better. (Inquiry) Can you see anything that should be changed?

Example: (Intention) I want to make sure I didn’t offend you earlier. (Inquiry) How did I come across to you?

A question by itself, “How did I come across to you?” leaves the other person guessing why you are asking. Often he or she will fill in the blank with a fear or insecurity of their own. “Maybe I didn’t respond well earlier. I wonder why he wants to know. Did I miss something?”

Explaining intention first communicates caring, it relieves the listener of distracting guesswork, and it provides a guideline to determine if/when the conversation has been effective.

Lately I’m thinking a lot about influence. As a prelude to charting a course of intentional influence with the rest of my life, I’ve been thinking about what types of influence exist. What are my options, basically.

Here’s a stab at a rough taxonomy of influence:

Influence Everyone Has

Self Influence: You are the person you have the most influence on. We all have a huge opportunity to make a difference by changing ourselves.

Individual Task Influence: This is contributing as a member of a team to make an organization run, or accomplish specific tasks on your own. These contributions are often unsung, but the collective results can be world-changing.

Individual Interpersonal Influence: This is parenting, coaching, managing, mentoring one-on-one. Everyone has huge opportunity to make a difference by positively impacting the people they are involved with. (A sub-type is Professional Individual Interpersonal Influence, like the influence that a professional therapist or professional coach has.)

Influence Everyone Can Have if They Choose To

Individual Giving Influence: This is donating to a cause or project. This can range in scale from a quarter in the bucket to establishing a multi-billion-dollar charitable foundation.

Individual Creative Influence: This is bringing something into the world that didn’t exist before. An individual researcher who finds a cure, or an inventor who solves a quality-of-life problem are examples of high-impact individual creative influence.

Influence Given to Some People by Other People

Organizational Leadership Influence: This is influence in a group of people through leadership (strategy, vision, decision-making, etc). This covers groups ranging in size from a small club to a large nation. CEO’s, ministers, managers, board members and elected officials, are some examples of people with this kind of influence.

Public Thought Influence: This is speaking to a mass audience through a platform such as a book, popular media, or the Internet. It’s hard to be heard through all the noise, but voices that resonate can make big change.

Viral Thought Influence: This is individual interpersonal influence that may start small but spreads exponentially, like influencing two people who each influence two people, and so on. Some worldwide religions started this way.

Circles of Influence

Generally faithful and successful activity in the “smaller” circles of influence leads to increased opportunity for influence in the larger circles. So in a loose sense, there is a progression of influence in each person’s life.

What Am I Missing?

I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list. Can you think of major types of influence I haven’t included here? Maybe an example of someone who had a big impact on a small or large scale? Contact me and let me know.

P.S. As part of re-calibrating my avenues of influence, I’ll be writing less often on this blog, at least for a while, but no less than once a week.

Setting prices for your product or service is an inexact science. I think the guesswork that goes into setting prices also makes it tempting to leave prices unchanged for too long. But leave them too high and you lose customers. Leave them too low and you lose margin. Two questions to ask when prices might be out of date:

1. Have my costs changed? This changes your minimum profitable price.

2. Have my customers’ alternatives changed? This changes your maximum marketable price.

In a typical business, prices should probably be evaluated once or twice a year.

We are most likely to change when:

• There is a problem…
• That we care too much about to just tolerate…
• That we can’t get away from…
• And is challenging but not overwhelming.

These “optimal” conditions remind me of some of life’s most difficult and painful circumstances. Apparently optimal change comes through experiences that feel extremely sub-optimal.

If you want to change, reach out for the resources you need, then face into the difficulty as honestly as you can.

As a training exercise, I’ve been taking a look at proposals before our sales reps send them out to customers.

Before I even look at the proposal I ask the sales rep “What’s important to this customer?” It might be lead time, price, color matching, control of a specific frequency, you name it. I can’t evaluate the job we did preparing our proposal until I know what’s important to the customer who will receive it.

This implies another truth: Effective sales involves listening a lot, not talking a lot. If you listen, customers will tell you all about what’s important to them. You don’t even need to ask, they’ll start telling you from the minute you answer the phone. Once you know, you can make a relevant and genuinely helpful proposal.