Decision Making

Many of us serve in roles where we are not commander in chief, but lieutenants, captains, or even sergeants in terms of where we serve on the hierarchy of the organization chart. If you find yourself in such a role, I want to provide you some wisdom through six influence tactics to help you succeed in leading from second chair (or third, fourth, or fifth).

Here are 6 Ways You Can Better Lead and Influence from Second Chair

I have spent most of my professional life teaching how to grow your influence. I am all for increasing your influence; however, there are people who seek to influence you that might be detrimental to your progress or even disastrous to your well-being. It is important we are able to dissect these influence attempts, and Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is a great resource.

Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor), having taught previously at Yale, NYU, and Columbia University. He continues teaching graduate students at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and at the Naval Post Graduate School (Monterey).

How Do You, the Influencer, Assess and Resist Negative Influence Yourself?

Here are the first 10 tips of Dr. Zimbardo’s 20 ways to avoid negative influence with my take on each point.

You have a great idea which you know will be successful. Now you need to get buy in from others to bring it to reality. While everyone possesses the ability to influence others to some degree, you may be sabotaging your own idea before it even gets off the ground.

You already know that launching and developing a good idea takes massive amounts of influence. Many fantastic ideas lie on the ash heap of history merely because someone couldn’t influence others to adopt the idea. But you may not know that you might be sabotaging your own idea and influence. Here are some of the worst ways to sabotage your influence.

When you’re accountable to no one, it’s very easy to listen to your gut instincts and do what they are telling you.  It becomes an entirely different situation when you have to explain your intuition to your employees or your bosses.

 You’re hard wired to do what’s best for you in most situations; all you need to do is learn to follow your gut instincts. Animals do it day in and day out and it works fairly well for them. They do what comes naturally and typically they do more than stay alive; they thrive!