Credibility Is the Key to Influence at Work

 

Do you need to be influential or persuasive? Are you striving to convince people at work, only to find it’s often an uphill battle? The problem might not lie in the quality of your argument but in something more fundamental: your credibility with those you’re trying to influence.

Building on Credibility

When we have to persuade someone, sell our idea, or get somebody to agree to go along with something, most of us focus heavily on the strength of our argument. We want it to be very logical. We want it to be supported by robust evidence and perhaps infused with an emotional story for why it’s the only way to go.

Logic and emotion are important parts of an effective influence strategy, but they’re things that we build on top of our foundation of credibility. If that foundation is shaky, our entire argument could crumble.

Assessing Your Credibility

I want you to reflect on your credibility with the stakeholders that you’re seeking to sway. What do you think it is? Do you ask this question often enough? While you might sense your credibility intuitively at times, have you thought about it more clinically, or from a more objective standpoint?

Understanding Credibility

Credibility is interesting. We talk about people having it or not, like a fixed trait—an inherent characteristic. For instance, I may have it or not as an expert with a YouTube channel. I may think that my PhD in Organizational Psychology makes me credible. And this is a great example because it makes me credible in certain circles, like with bankers and scientists who are quick to ensure that PhD is after my name. They value it. It means something to them. It gives me credibility. But this isn’t true in many audiences.

I recently spoke to a big organization from the trucking industry, for instance. Now, walking up onto the stage to address people who work in the fleet long-haul trucking industry and touting my PhD and a bunch of lab research I did 25 years ago doesn’t bolster my credibility. It actually erodes it, and that’s a painful, but important reminder that credibility is not a static, objective characteristic. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Your credibility is different in every relationship you have.

Evaluating Your Influence

I want you to do exactly what I just did, think about the key people that you need to influence, and ask two questions:

What gives me credibility with these people?What detracts from my credibility?

It can be hard to realize that something in the asset column with one stakeholder is in the liability column with another, but it’s important. It’s important to know what enhances and detracts from your credibility with each stakeholder, to understand which aspects of yourself to highlight and which to downplay, and what work you need to do to socialize your background and expertise beforehand so that it fits with the expectations of your audience.

Nurturing Credibility

Imagine credibility as the quality of soil for planting seeds of influence. Have you done what you need to do in advance to make sure when you plant that seed, it’s ready to grow? Some relationships may resemble planting the seed in clay. There’s nothing. They aren’t budging. There’s no support, no opportunity for that idea to sprout. This is what makes thinking about your credibility and how it varies among different people so important.

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In my next post, How to Ask For Help at Work, I dive into strategies for influencing when credibility is lacking.

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