Using Influence to Maintain
or Build Relationships

INTRODUCTION

Positive power and influence skills can help you meet personal objectives and maintain or build positive working relationships-simultaneously. Your challenge as an influencer is to pursue your objectives while fostering the stability and growth of your working relationships. High-impact influence skills, Style flexibility, and disciplined planning will help you achieve this balance between objectives and relationships in most situations.

Achieving a balance between objectives and relationships may be difficult when you and the target have strong personal differences. Balancing task objectives with relationships is difficult enough when you and another person have competing objectives-a common occurrence. Maintaining this balance can be even more delicate when you and the other person have a history of personality clashes or deep interpersonal conflicts. Some working relationships may be so ruptured and disagreeable that no amount of influence can heal them.

Relationship problems may make you reluctant to use some influence styles. For example, if you frequently disagree with the target's logic, you may be reluctant to use persuading. You do not want to hear the target's proposals and reasons because you typically find fault with the underlying facts or data. You may not want to use asserting with a person you view as needy or controlling. A needy person may insist on more incentives than you can give and a controlling person may refuse to agree to your expectations under any circumstances. If you distrust the target, you may avoid listening or making yourself vulnerable for fear of losing control of the situation or being taken advantage of.

Relationship problems may make you reluctant to engage in any influence attempt with the target. You and the target may lack sufficient positive motive for a successful outcome to occur. The potential costs of trying to influence the target may outweigh the potential benefits. You may feel so exploited by the target that taking steps to improve the relationship may not seem worth the risk. You may have difficulty even imagining what an effective influence approach might be. On the other hand, the influence target may have trouble working with you! Your awareness of this makes you unwilling to awaken his or her anger.

Relationship problems can disrupt the climate for positive influence. If the relationship
seems irreparable, you may find yourself forcing. If the target's resistance is so strong that you do not wish to challenge it, you may find yourself avoiding. Forcing or Avoiding can occur whether you are the victim of another person's grievance, the perpetrator of the problem, or a third party to a disagreement between others that affects your work.

Relationship problems make it hard to determine a clear influence objective. Such
problems make it difficult to see beyond the incompatibility issue.

Often, the relationship must improve before you and the other person can take any
concrete next steps. Mutual respect and acceptance is necessary to ensure genuine
agreements and commitments.

The hardest part of dealing with a relationship problem can be getting the other person's commitment to resolve it. The person may have no interest in getting along with you and may even enjoy or derive power from causing you pain. Fortunately, you are not powerless in this situation. You can use positive power and influence to engage the person's interest in getting on board with you to solve the interpersonal problem. You may have no choice, if your job requires you to interact with this person! Project assignments, business priorities, or other situational factors may drive you and the target together despite your best efforts to stay away from each other. By focusing on this joint work-the task- you will increase your chances of improving the relationship.

A procedure for setting Influence Objectives by thinking through task and relationship problems

• Try to picture an ideal working relationship with the target. What would it look like if you and the target could align your goals, roles, and procedures? What would your boundaries be for such a relationship? Be honest with yourself. You may not want anything more than a positive functional relationship with a minimum of contact and just enough civility. On the other hand, you may wish for a thoroughly friendly and thriving collaboration with the target. While it is hard to predict what the exact outcome will be, it is useful to think about the best possible scenario for the future of the relationship.



• Define the overall task or mission. Resist the impulse to address the interpersonal issue first. Confine the definition of task to external goals and results rather than internal, personal ones. Focus on the job you have to do together and how best to do it. Concentrate on the organizational or project-related results you wish to achieve at the end of your joint effort. These results should relate to the business or work at hand and should not be political, social, or emotional. Do not focus on what you feel about the other person or what you think are his or her problems. Having a good relationship at the end of influence attempt but is independent of completing the task successfully.



• Translate the task into goal statements. Divide the task into incremental parts. Write out all your goals-and the goals you think the target may have. Be inclusive. Do not worry about aligning your goals at this point. If some goals conflict, note them and move on. This will require personal discipline and empathy-do not mentally argue with your target. Remember, you are not yet committing yourself to any form of action. This is only a planning step!



• Align both sets of goals. Identify specific goals you and the target might agree on. Elaborate on these goals in sufficient detail so you can discuss them with the target at length. This material may be useful in resolving impasses caused by other conflicting goals. If some goals are seriously out of sync, consider setting them aside or gaining clarity on them from those who assigned them to you in the first place. Remember, you and the target cannot go further until you have resolved the differences between your goals.



• Clarify or negotiate roles. When your goals-both common and conflicting- are as clear as possible, focus on roles. Consider past interactions. Is there a history of how you and the target have divided tasks? If so, has the division of labor been satisfactory to you? What would you like your role to be this time? How will the target want to define roles? Will the target's desired role conflict with yours? If so, what are you willing to do to get the role you want? Determine what the potential points of conflict might be.



• Assess the effectiveness of current procedures. Procedural problems are often the first symptom of a breakdown in interpersonal relationships. Your work in defining goals and roles will help you to develop procedures that will support a positive working relationship. Think about what you and the target may want the procedures to be. You may have to wait to develop the specifics until after you and the target have fully aligned your goals and roles. General procedural wishes and needs may be as far as you can go at this point.



• Review interpersonal issues. When you have finished defining goals, roles, and procedures, consider the interpersonal issue itself. By this time you may already have changed your view of the relationship problem. You may have discovered that a system problem-defects in goals, roles, or procedures- is the real cause of the behavioral problem. Write down your thoughts on this.