How to Improve influence at work

Last month, the Microsoft Women's Staff Association Shanghai Branch held the first professional development-themed forum in FY 2010, six senior managers were invited to share their experiences and suggestions on improving their influence at work. As a very successful manager at Microsoft, Ms. Pan zhenglei first shared her unique insights on this topic with her staff in Shanghai over a decade in combination with her career at Microsoft. Below are the texts of Ms. Pan zhenglei's opening speech.

Returning to my hometown that has been away for more than a decade-I am excited by the vitality of this city. It is also exciting to cultivate talent, especially to provide career guidance and consulting for Chinese and female employees. Over the past few years, this has been part of my job at the U. S. Headquarters. I am often touched by their efforts and proud of their success, which makes me feel more fulfilled. I'm glad that I can continue this job three months after I return to Shanghai.

Today, our topic is how to improve our influence in our work. I would like to summarize my thoughts on this topic in three sentences.

 

Know yourself and know himSelf Awareness & interpersonal awareness

Before entering the first topic "know yourself and know yourself", I will first share my experiences as Visual InterDev development director. At that time, our team came to a newly promoted development manager. I reported to him directly with several other development directors. Naturally, we will have regular one-to-one meetings with him, communicate with each other about their work progress. Almost every time I finish presenting a problem, he can't wait to propose his solution. My response at the time was "I came here not because I didn't have my own solution, but to tell you what I was doing ." In my opinion, the two are completely different.

After a long time, he still habitually suggested how to solve the problem. Through observation on weekdays, I also found that he prefers to spend time in-depth discussions on technologies and products, rather than team management. So a few months later, I took the opportunity to tell him, "I think you may be more interesting as a software architect ." He also thinks this suggestion is good. A few weeks later, he really moved to work as an architect. Our team also welcomed a new development manager.

I think this is a typical example of influence. Without a doubt, I cannot decide whether my boss is a development manager or an architect. I just think that he is more suitable and gives him a new understanding of his own advantages. At the same time, I also made other supervisors realize that they are more enthusiastic about the architect's work. The entire process reflects the influence of subordinates to a certain extent.

Any Microsoft executive will listen to the feedback and suggestions from relevant personnel before making every important decision to ensure that he has considered all aspects of the problem. If we want to convey our information to these decision makers, we certainly need to find the key people who will hear their opinions and use them to extend our influence. Therefore, when we want to propose a solution to another person or another team to complete a job, we need to carefully consider the following questions:

1) what help or benefits does this solution provide to the other party? Why does it take the other party time and energy to consider or participate in our solutions? How important is this solution for them?

2) Have we found a suitable person to propose our solution? Can he/she make decisions for his/her team?

3) does the other party fully understand our ideas? Are we providing enough information?

4) Do policy makers fully understand our requirements and background?

In short, it is very important to improve your influence to know yourself and what you need. More importantly, you need to know what the other party needs.

 

Consistent words and deedsCredibility-say what you do; do what you say!

In the beginning, we often only have to influence some very small things. After we succeed in these small things, our credibility will be slightly improved, and then we will be able to influence a little bigger things. As our personal credibility continues to increase, we will be able to influence more and more. Therefore, in the process of increasing influence, another important factor is personal reputation.

So how can we improve my credibility? The answer is the same words and deeds. What you say is what you do, and what you do is what you say. Do not make more promises, or make more promises.

Why is consistency so important? The reason is that our personal credibility comes from our past work. The vast majority of new companies start with zero credibility. No matter how good we are in the interview, no matter how positive the interviewer gives us a comment, for the team we join, we are still new people, our credibility has to grow from scratch. Only when we are well-known, for example, in the eyes of others, we are experts in software development or testing, can someone take the initiative to listen to our suggestions and ideas.

To improve our reputation in the company, the first step is to establish our credibility in our own team, which is related to the time to join the team, contributions to the team, and personal career background. When we are a newbie, we should first communicate with our superiors if we want to make suggestions for a large project. If he/she appreciates our ideas, he/she will continue to communicate with his/her superiors and give us suggestions through their superiors. This is because they have a higher personal reputation and greater influence. Although we did not directly propose our own suggestions at the end, it is worth thinking about how we can expand our influence or facilitate the completion of a project.

 

Problem is not equal to solution is not equal to result!Problem! = Solution! = Results!

This is one of my favorite topics at Microsoft. Although the problems, solutions, and results are completely different, every day I can find engineers confuse the problems with the solutions, or the solutions with the results.

Share a story between the Visual Studio team in Shanghai last year and the SQL Server team in India. The two teams still cannot reach an agreement on a specific issue after 10 rounds of email exchange, so the Shanghai team pulled me into the email discussion. So I read the email from the beginning and read the fourth mail. I roughly learned that the root cause of the disagreement is that what the two teams communicate is not the same thing.

The Indian team believes that they have developed a very good SQL compact tool to meet customers' important needs, therefore, we need to add this function to Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 (the first public beta version of Visual Studio 2010). The Shanghai team believes that the release date of the beta version is approaching, considering the series of release processes that must be followed before the function is added to the product, it may be too late. In the subsequent emails, the Indian team had always stressed how great this feature was. It should be released (that is, a solution) in the beta version, but never explained what issues they were about to solve; the Shanghai team repeatedly reiterated that the process was required to add the function, which showed that the communication between them was totally out of order. In this typical case, the Indian team tried to promote a solution, but did not figure out why the problem was important to the Shanghai team. Later, we found that there was indeed a user scenario that needed the SQL compact tool. So we asked if the new tool could help this scenario and be compatible with other new features... ... Once we can clarify the nature of this problem, it is not difficult to find a solution that both parties accept. For example, join the first test version immediately or join the second test version later, or even adding a service pack.

Therefore, when we recommend our suggestions or solutions to others, we must provide the other party with detailed background information so that both parties can reach an agreement on the problem, otherwise, we will not be able to reach consensus on the solution.

Sometimes, we may not need to clarify the problem and simply take action. However, we do not necessarily know whether the results of each action can actually solve our problems. A few years ago, one of my priorities was to recruit employees of different levels for the team, which is what we said here. The problem is that we have many ways to achieve this, such as campus recruitment, social recruitment, and internal company transfer. Each method has its own problems and solutions. Different solutions have different results. For example, in social recruitment, it is difficult to find excellent candidates efficiently through regular resume screening. To solve this problem, we found that it is an effective method to recommend people by excellent employees. Therefore, we are also engaged in social recruitment. When we adopt different methods, the results will be different.

The above are three important points in my opinion in the Process of influencing others: Know yourself, know yourself and know yourself, share your words and deeds, and question is not equal to method is not equal to result!

Thank you!