Increasing your influence helps you strengthen your power in business. It is therefore an essential element for executives but not just them. When you take part or become involved in a project, you do not always have line management connections with the other members of your team. So you need to quickly expand your influence to work with people over whom you have no formal authority and to achieve your individual and collective goals. Here are our 4 simple tips for increasing your influence.

Strengthen your sources of power

To increase your influence you need to ensure that others want to “work for you”. It rarely comes naturally and, according to French and Raven, there are 5 sources of power in business:

• Coercion (forcing others to do what you want),
• rewards (financial or non-financial),
• legitimacy (formal authority),
• expertise (technical)
• charisma (your energy, your ability to naturally lead others).

No source is entirely foolproof. Learn what your different sources of corporate power are to help build credibility and inspire trust among your colleagues and employees.

Listen to others

When you are involved or take part in a project, you need to be able to build strong relationships with the people you work with to make up for the lack of line management connections. To do this, prioritise listening over talking about yourself. Be interested in all the project team members: ask questions and be interested in everyone’s answers without any prejudice.

Identify the opposition

In a company just as in life, some groups have opposing interests. When you lead a project within the company, it will benefit some and could disadvantage others. In order to avoid failure, talk to the different parties throughout the project to see how they perceive the progress of what you are doing and what you could do better. This will make it much easier for you to bring everyone on board with your project.

Cooperate

You will need the support and participation of lots of people to achieve your business goals. This is all the more true the more ambitious your project is.

To foster cooperation, you need to create relationships on two dimensions:

• An interpersonal dimension: firstly, give and cooperate to build a rapport and create trust.
• A contractual dimension: set the rules of the game and each person’s roles and deadlines to sustain the working relationship. 

Finally, at the end of the project, do not forget to share your success with everyone. This will make it easier for others to be on board with your future assignments and projects, and will strengthen your long-term influence.