Just WHO are you influencing, exactly? | IMPROVING HR

THE BIG IDEA

At the back end of 2023, I ran a short research project to understand the influencing challenges that are currently being faced by colleagues in HR

(if you responded, THANK YOU!)

I’m still cutting, slicing and dicing the data

(there’s so much rich input here)

but for now, I just want to pick up on something qualitative that’s clear in the responses I’ve already analyzed.

And that boils down to who, exactly, are we influencing.

You see, as I’ve written about previously, I’ve found that most everything in HR comes down to the critical skill of influencing, which we’ll define simply as:

Influencing: Engaging a person (or people) in such a way that they make a decision or take an action that we want them to

Which is as good a definition as any.

But here’s the thing: the data was about 50:50 split on the question of who, exactly, we are influencing.

First, let’s understand the question I asked:

When it comes to having the influence to move important work forward in your organization, what’s the single biggest challenge or obstacle you’ve been dealing with?

In other words, a large, free-text box in which people could tell me anything they want – no leading the witness with pick-lists here!

First let’s cover the obvious – there were many responses about:

Time (so being too busy)
Under-resourced (so being too busy)
Lack of strategic vision

But there was a more general response set that I want to speak to here:

“They don’t get why it’s important”

Now, I’ve been hearing this theme since I first moved to HR

(though it was called Personnel at the time)

so it’s nothing new, but what was interesting in this data set is the 50:50 split I mentioned a moment ago.

About half my respondents named a specific person/role that didn’t “get it”.

Many pointed to the CEO and/or COO. Some pointed to the CHRO

(which, by the way, we need to talk about in a future article, which will very likely be titled: When CHROs turn toxic…)

all of which is good because, for these respondents, it’s clear just WHO needs to be influenced.

But it was the second half of my pool that made my eyebrow lift.

Almost to a person, these respondents didn’t name specific people/roles, instead referring obliquely to generic groups: leadership, culture, employees, and on.

As I read the responses, it was clear to me that I was seeing what I’ve come to describe as either the eye-roll, or shoulder-shrug, of HR.

“Want to know why it didn’t work as well as we hoped? Leadership just don’t get it…” (shrugs shoulders)

“If employees understood, they wouldn’t have such a problem with the process…” (rolls eyes)

Another way of describing this is that working in HR, over time, can often result in a sense of learned helplessness; sometimes even verging on victimhood.

“Things are shitty in HR,” this thinking goes, “might as well get used to it.”

This really got me wondering : is the abstraction of influencing challenges to generic populations is actually a subtle form of Denial/Avoidance?

Said differently, if we can’t identify, exactly, who to influence, how can we be expected to make change happen?

And that, I believe, is a key part of why the stodgy status quo prevails.

TRY THIS

Before we go any further, I want to be really clear: I see you, I hear you, and I understand why this is a valid defense mechanism for surviving in HR. Things can get pretty difficult when the pressure cooker is on. So, if you don’t want to shift the status quo, feel free to move on and do something else other than reading this article.

Still here? OK, let’s dive in.

When I trained as a Strategic Intervention coach with Robbins-Madanes, the bed-rock of creating lasting change was a simple phrase:

To influence someone, you have to know what’s already influencing them

In that coaching modality, understanding your target’s needs, beliefs, values and expectations comes before anything else.

And so it goes with influencing for HR. The moment we consider ourselves, or our intent, to be “done unto” the business, we are immediately breaking nearly all of our opportunity to influence. And so, we end up with generic, faceless large groups of people who don’t “get it”.

USE THIS

I mentioned earlier that I’d heard this denial/avoidance since I first ever joined HR. Even then, it didn’t ring true.

You see, the leaders I met with, the employees I worked with, they all seemed to “get it”.

For example, I’ve yet to meet a leader who doesn’t want to recruit better people, faster, and at lower cost – all things that improvements/changes to our recruitment process should be trying to achieve. Yet, to hear it from our HR colleagues – it’s not a problem with our process changes or how we’re communicating them, it’s because the leaders in question “don’t get it”.

It was only over time that I realized that was largely because I wasn’t trying to impose something upon them, and instead starting from a position of “what do you want to get done right now?”

That was partly me being me, of course, but it was also due to the mentoring I received early in my career, particularly from Ted, Simon and Dermott.

In fact, I remember a long drive with Dermott to a business meeting in North London, where we talked about many things. I was talking about my writing and music-making

(for a long time)

and Dermott – who had an amazing way of taking conversation into deep tangents of insight – stopped me dead with a simple question:

“Where’s the audience, Vince? You don’t talk about the audience!”

That one has stuck with me every day.

While this is now foundational stuff for me, here’s a simple trick that can really help…

The next time you’re working on an influencing challenge, stop thinking of what you want to make happen and, instead, identify a specific change target and then ask this question:

What problem does my target have, and how is what I want to do a solution to that problem?

Quite often, the answer will be clear. Sometimes not so much – and in these cases, you have to end up asking if it really is as important as you believe it to be!

By first identifying who, exactly, you want to influence, and then asking this question – walking in their shoes – you exponentially increase your chances of influencing for positive outcomes.

Easy to say, easy to understand – bloody difficult to do without practice!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

“No matter how much you love the person, you cannot change them. You may influence them; but at the end of the day, they must decide for themselves.” ~ Robert E Baines Jr.