Influencing can be seen as one of the most important forms of leadership behavior in all areas of our lives, especially in our professional development. As social beings we cannot not influence. But most managers never reflect on their influencing styles.
The Seven Styles of Influencing have been designed to change that. My dear colleague Ulf Schäfer from the European School of Management and Technology and I have worked together on this book. Our objective is to help managers
- systematically reflect upon preferred influencing styles;
- explore the effectiveness in using certain styles;
- expand the behavioral repertoire to successfully include a variety of styles.
The overall purpose is to increase your personal effectiveness and resilience in dealing with others in the working environment.
The Seven Styles of Influencing are based on the empirically validated I2 model of influencing. This model distinguishes between seven fundamentally different styles that have been identified by research to cover and reflect human influencing behavior. As a result of several years of testing, Ulf and I have developed two different questionnaires to help identify the preferred influencing behavior as well as the effctiveness in using certain styles.
The book contains the two questionnaires including instructive scoresheets to help readers identify their own influencing behavior. There is an extensive collection of practical excercises to reflect upon personal strengths and challenges and train new styles. To encourage intensive work, the look and feel of the workbook as been designed with care and love for visual details including illustrations by visual artist Rinah Lang.
The workbook is especially suited for the use as self-explanatory teaching material in MBA leadership classes or executive leadership training.
Copies can be ordered here.
