Influence without Authority, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Strategies for Making Mutually Profitable Trades

When people feel appreciated, they will help you. You can storm things through once, but never get help again. You definitely catch more flies with honey. Being collaborative takes more time sometimes, but if I'm living here in the company, there's a good chance I will encounter them again, have to live with them sometime in the future.

—Mary Garrett, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Global Services

We have examined the steps that lead up to the trading process, which include knowing your ally's world, being clear on your own objectives and resources, building trusting relationships, and matching your resources with your ally's desired currencies. In preceding chapters, we included some examples of the process of exchange. In this chapter, we address in detail the actual strategies to follow in producing a win-win outcome.

Exchanges can take many forms and become complicated because there are many ways to "pay back." The payment can be a simple agreement to go along with a request that is not burdensome and is within job expectations, or it can involve considerable costs in time and resources. Many, if not most, transactions take place in a series, over time, so an exchange is not just one request in return for one payment.

The exchange begins to take place before trading is declared to have started. In fact, it has been going on throughout the previous steps, and it is only because we can't discuss everything at once that we ...