Persuading and Influencing

Why teams run this

It usually gets written off as bad luck, or as proof that the organisation is political. What actually happened is that a good proposal quietly died. Nobody rejected it. It went to the wrong forum, or to the right forum in the wrong order, and the two people who could have blocked it were never in the room to be persuaded. Six weeks later a weaker version of the same idea arrives from somewhere else and sails through, because that time the groundwork had been done. The lesson most people take from this is that they should try harder next time, using exactly the same approach.

Underneath that is a structural problem. Most senior work now depends on people who do not report to you: other departments, external partners, a client’s procurement team, a steering group that meets once a month. Formal authority is not available, so the tools that remain are the quality of the case, the sequence in which people hear it, and the relationships that decide whether anyone reads it at all. Very few professionals have been taught those explicitly. They rely on being right and on escalating when being right is not enough, and escalation costs something every time it is used.

What happens in the room

Everyone brings a live case: a decision they need in the next few months, a stakeholder who has gone quiet, an internal proposal that has stalled. That case is the material for the whole day. Participants work on it in stages, and by the afternoon each person is rehearsing the actual conversation they will have to hold, with a colleague from the group playing the stakeholder as accurately as the case owner can brief them.

Louisa Savva runs the day and works with each case directly. The room is small enough that nobody sits and watches. The day includes:

• A stakeholder map for your own case, drawn on the wall: who decides, who advises, who can block, and who has never been asked
• A short DISC profile, used to read how the people on your map prefer to be approached and where your default style will grate
• A case-building session that reduces your argument to one ask, three reasons and the evidence that survives a hostile reading
• Two observed practice rounds against a resistant stakeholder, replayed with feedback on what shifted the conversation and what closed it down
• A negotiation exercise on trading and conceding, run with peers rather than in a buyer and seller set-up
• An objections round, including the polite no that means something else and the stakeholder who agrees in the meeting and does nothing afterwards

What people leave with

By the end of the day the case has moved. Participants leave with a plan they can execute in their own diary the following week, not a model to apply at some point in the future.

• A completed stakeholder map for their live case, with a named order of conversations
• A one-page influence plan: the ask, the reasons, the evidence, the likely objections and the fallback
• Their DISC profile and a short read on the two stakeholders they find hardest
• A framing template for written proposals and pre-reads
• Where an intact team attends together, agreed rules for how they will handle internal escalation

Making it stick

An influence plan has a timeline built into it, and most of that timeline runs after the workshop. The 60-day check-in from Pursue Your Potential lands roughly where the first real test does. People come back having worked through the order of conversations they set themselves, and report which stakeholder behaved as predicted and which did not, which is where the plan gets corrected. Anyone walking into the single conversation that decides their whole case can take that one to one beforehand and prepare it properly. The managers of participants are briefed as well, for a narrow reason: the quickest way to undo this work is for a manager to escalate on somebody’s behalf the moment a stakeholder hesitates.