LA 051: How do you leverage your Influencing Style? The Trust/Respect Matrix

The 15 inch blade flew perilously close to my left ear and the Chef's knife thumped into the door behind me. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my days in his pastry kitchen were over. I couldn't possibly repeat the actual words, but if you think that Gordon Ramsey cusses, I can assure you that even he has a comparatively mild turn of phrase. Chef was right of course. I was useless in the pastry kitchen. I still am. My croissants could be used to break rocks in a quarry. My shortcrust could substitute for dumbell weights. It's simple biology. My hands are too warm. Heck, I didn't even want to be a pastry chef, but I had to master every part of cooking and I wanted to learn from this Chef. I had huge respect for his talent and would take almost anything for the chance to learn. But he wasn't very likeable. He was a conqueror style and a competent jerk. In the last Leadership AdvantEdge podcast I asked what your influencing style was - and if you missed that, you really ought to pop back and listen and do the influencing style inventory. This will identify your dominant influencing style and your least dominant style. Conqueror style influencers can be seen as aggressive, power hungry and controlling. It's not easy working for a conqueror, and their positive influence can be eradicated by the fear they can induce. So what do you do, if your style isn't working well with some, or even all of the people you need to influence? You need to leverage your style and gain agility. But first and foremost, you want to make it as easy as possible for others to trust you and respect you. In this episode, I shall share how you can leverage your style and more easily influence others and motivate them to do things that matter. Let me introduce you to the Trust Respect Matrix. On the vertical scale is how much you trust me and the horizontal represents how much you respect my competence. Someone with low trust and little respect for me would consider me to be a foolish jerk. And you're not likely to be easily swayed by someone you think is a foolish jerk. So, let's say that you still don't respect my competence, but you do trust me. I have proven myself to be trustworthy to you. Something of a loveable eejit. You would find it easier to accept my influence if you trusted me, even though you have little regard for my competence. How about you actually do respect me greatly, but you don;t find me trustworthy, heck perhaps you don't even like me. My Chef was here, I had huge respect for his talent but didn't trust him to care for me, certainly not after that knife incident. If that were me, I;d be a jerk, a competent one, but still a jerk. Then there's the situation where you respect my talents and find me utterly trustworthy. That would make me a loveable star. Someone who could readily and easily influence you. Where are you in your relationships with your people? And what matters here is not how genuinely trustworthy you are, or even how competent you truly are. It is how you are perceived to be. The question is, do they trust you and do they respect you? The more they both trust and respect you, the easier it is to influence them. So how do you win trust and gain respect? It's important to remember that both of these are perceptions. It's no use saying "well they should respect me.". Maybe they should, but if they don't that's not actually a failure of your competence, it's a judgement of it. And it's no use saying, "well they shouldn't judge" either. They do and they will. Just as you judge them and me. How do you feel, for example, when you meet someone to have a chat and they just talk about me, me, me, what about me? The entire conversation is them seeking affirmation from you. They don't ask after you. And if you do voice an opinion, you are swiftly cut off mid-sentence as they bring the dialogue back to the most important person in the room, i.e. them. As you heard that description I'm sure that someone came to mind and you have a