Technical Influence

Getting Their Attention

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Welcome to this training and development module called "Getting Their Attention". It's part of the growing library of skills modules available at www.technicalinfluence.com. We help you to develop the additional abilities that will make the difference to your career and wellbeing. You develop new skills that will give you the edge over other technically-oriented collegues and organisations.

Whenever you interact with people at work, you are marketing yourself, whether you want to or not.

You leave associates with an impression of the sort of person you are - your character, abilities, ambition and skills. Their opinions count, because the view that they have will influence how people work with you. If you have something to say, then you will want to find ways of helping people to listen to you. If you have little to say, you can at least leave the impression that you are competent and making a contribution to the good of the company.

1. Why would I want to learn about Getting Their Attention?

• You have some great ideas to share.
• Other people need to know what you think, and appreciate the contribution that you make.
• They need to listen.
• And to help them listen, you must answer the questions that they habitually ask.
• Unless you answer these questions, some people will switch off, or get frustrated; your message will be lost and your reputation dimmed.
• Luckily, you can engage most people by covering four key questions.
• Add a magical 5th question, and you can get anybody to to listen.

Communicating with non-technical collegues is very important.
Often these are influential people, such as financiers, account managers, business directors, and executives.
Convince them that your work is valuable and worthwhile, and you increase your chances of being listened to, supported, financed, employed, etc.

If these things are important to you, then read on...

2. How are we going to do this?

First, we'll introduce the classic four questions. Most people are asking one these questions as they listen to any conversation or presentation.

The concept can be applied in many ways - including reports, training programmes and presentations. In this preview module, we'll show you how it could work in discussions and conversations.

We'll then discuss how you can put the concept to work for you right away.

Then it's your turn - to convert the ideas into results for yourself.

3. What's it all about?

It's a systematic way of connecting with a wide range of people, from techies to administrators, to businessmen and innovators.

Other people tend to have different interests and outlooks on life compared with your science and technology associates. Because of this, they like to look at work from from different angles. If you miss out their angle, there is a danger that they will lose interest, tune out and miss your message.

You have the best chance of getting their attention and getting your message across if you acknowledge these different angles on your subject. This is not brown-nosing or telling them what they want to hear, it's telling what you have to say in a way that they are capable of hearing.

Let's take a look at four classic questions that cover the majority of people that you work with - they are:
Why?  What?  How? and If? Most people have these question types as their top priorities. They are not able to concentrate on other content of a discussion until their question is answered, or at least they have some assurance that it will be answered.

You yourself may have had the experience of listening to a presentation which seemed to miss the key point. It was full of waffle and blather but didn't nail the most important questions. It would have been a frustrating experience. You would have taken in little of the presentation's content. The question of interest to you is determined by the sort of person you are and the role that you're in.For now we'll speak of four different groups of people. Of course this is a massive generalisation. Nobody is rigidly "Why" or "How", but many of us have a favoured starting questioned, which may be influenced by our job. 

So let' s see how it works...