The Executive Guide to Influence

By Tan Zhi Rong

About a third of our lives are spent working. That is around 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. Yet, in school, we were not taught on the importance of influence in the workplace in order to succeed in our careers.
Given the pace of today's world, we are instead fed a barrage of misinformation and other technical jargon. This book cuts through the noise and offers a complete and practical guide for fresh graduates, interns, and junior executives as they start out at work. The Executive Guide to Influence is the most important book you will ever read to prepare yourself in the modern workplace. Featuring six easy chapters and application questions to guide you through, readers will gain insight into:

Why it is that some people, despite being less experienced than you in the company, seem to exert this aura of influence that gets people to agree and endorse their ideas time after time.
Why focusing all your energies on your work presentation is not necessarily a good thing.
How influence is possible despite holding a junior position in the company.

AND much more...

Be heard. Be known. Be no longer ignored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tan Zhi Rong
• Release date: May 30, 2021

Tan Zhi Rong

Zhi Rong has a diverse management, business and technical background and works as a strategist in his day job. He has a voracious appetite for reading and research, and has always been curious about the study of human nature. His writing draws from scientific research, academic experience, coaching, and real-life experience. He is currently working on his next book, Start Slow.

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This book is dedicated to my wife, who has been incredibly supportive in this journey; to my son, who is a constant source of inspiration and motivation in my life; and to my late father, who had been a powerful role model to me.

Copyright @ 2021

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form including print, electronic, photocopying, scanning, mechanical, or recording, without prior written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Any perceived slight of any individual or organisation is purely unintentional. The resources in this book are provided for informational purposes only.

Although each of the chapters in this book remains factual, some names have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of their families.

Foreword

Have you ever felt frustrated that your ideas and proposals are constantly being shot down, dismissed, or entertained in a condescending manner in the workplace?

If you have, it is likely to have nothing to do with you. It is more to do with how successful you are at influencing people.

In this book, I would like to share with you how to be great at influencing so you can excel at work and in your life. It doesn’t require high IQ, good looks, or charisma. It is really simple once we get the key principles. I will guide you through them so we can succeed together.

I began writing this book after almost a decade of applying the principles herein, wishing that I’d learnt this earlier, when I started working after school. When I was in middle management, I watched the struggles of many of my junior colleagues who felt frustrated that their proposals were met with rejections from their co-workers and their bosses. Some of them blamed the company for having a culture resistant to new ideas and change. Some blamed their bosses for being myopic and hard to deal with. Some blamed their colleagues for being lazy, unwilling to make a change to improve processes that will obviously benefit the company. They would complain that work was not going smoothly for them because their managers or their supervisors were not being cooperative and agreeing with what they had to say. This was despite the amount of effort and time they put behind the wonderful charts, diagrams, and tables to justify their proposal.

While it may certainly be the fault of their bosses or the company they worked in for not being receptive to their ideas, more often than not, the issue lies in how the ideas are delivered. We all went through school and were taught to present our ideas in a coherent and logical fashion. We are somehow conditioned to believe that as long as something is logical and supported with facts, everybody should endorse it. Those who are not supportive are either blind, stubborn, or stupid (or we think a combination of all three). But the reality is not so binary. Your colleagues/bosses may be resisting you due to reasons other than logic.

If logic, data, and results are the only things needed to get buy-in and influence, ask yourself this: Why is it that some people, despite being less experienced than you in the company, seem to exert this aura of influence that gets people to agree and endorse their ideas time and time again? What is their secret?

The Influence of Eunuchs in the Palace

Junior executives often believe that because of their low hierarchy in the organization, no one wants to listen to them. Influence seems to go hand-in-hand with position. This is true, and I will touch on this in the last chapter. But position is not the only means to gain influence. In this book, I want to debunk the myth that influence can only be achieved through position (i.e., if you are new or junior in the workplace, you are unable to have any influence). There are also examples of people who lack influence despite working for years in the company. My goal is therefore to teach you how to gain influence in the workplace without relying solely on your position.

To give an example of a group of people that are of low positions but able to exert a large amount of influence, we can look at the eunuchs serving in the Imperial Palace in ancient China.

Eunuchs were first documented mostly as emasculated slaves by Chinese kings in the eighth century BC, before making an appearance in royal courts in AD 146 -147. Usually acquired from poor families, the boys were castrated before reaching the age of puberty and brought to serve the emperor and the royal household. Their duties mainly revolved around menial tasks such as water fetching, food serving, and food tasting in case of assassination attempts. Higher-ranking eunuchs might be brought in to serve as butlers, maids, and bodyguards to the harem of women under the emperor.

While the eunuchs were trusted to be unable to seduce women in the palace or to father heirs that could usurp the dynasty, the ruling class typically viewed them with disdain, and the general public viewed them as the lowest class of servants in the palace. It didn’t help that the process of emasculation affected their bladder control as well, and young eunuchs typically soiled their bed and clothes, giving rise to the negative Chinese expression as smelly as a eunuch. The expression holds a double meaning; the literal one coming from the whiff of urine stench from their clothes, and the other hinting at the general sentiment of their corrupt nature, avarice, viciousness, and scheming within the palace.

Many of the eunuchs lived a life of hardship, forced into a life that they could not control and had little escape, since escape from palace life was often punishable by death. Nonetheless, there were some that exploited their positions within the palace to gain political influence, often acting behind the scenes to pull strings in the court. Armed with information, such as the daily habits and the whims and fancies of the emperor and the members of the royal family, those eunuchs traded secrets, conspired, and held influence that could sway even the emperor. The emperor, like most of the royal family, may have also viewed them with more trust than other officials and nobles in the court, given their disarming demeanour and their lack of power and base outside of the court, combined with the fact that most eunuchs usually served and knew the royal family all their lives.

At the height of their political power, there were as many as ten thousand court eunuchs in the imperial court, and as many as seventy to a hundred thousand of them outside of the court throughout China. While the emperor was busy with his harem of concubines, those highest in the pecking order gained enormous wealth through stealing, bribery, and even assassinations. They spread rumours of both the inner court and the outside world to their advantage, and with the control of information reaching the emperor, used him to turn him against political adversaries that opposed their influence.

Perhaps the most notorious of all the eunuchs in Chinese history is Wei Zhongxian. During the Ming Dynasty, his power grew and eventually appeared to be second only to the emperor. Starting in the Forbidden City in various unofficial positions, Wei was eventually promoted by Eunuch Wang An to have the job of serving Lady Wang and her infant son Zhu Youxiao, who later became enthroned as the Tianqi emperor (reign AD 1620 -1627). Wei grew close to Zhu Youxiao’s nanny, Madame Ke, and Zhu Youxiao viewed both Wei and Madame Ke as de facto parents, especially after his mother passed away.

Wei’s investment on Zhu Youxiao paid huge dividends when Zhu Youxiao became Tianqi emperor at the age of 15. Given that the Tianqi emperor was not interested in court affairs and frequently left Wei and the Grand Secretaries in charge, Wei’s power grew to influencing the imperial court’s decisions. He was eventually given the role of Minister of the Eastern Depot, a secret police with a force of over a thousand men. Wei, being the Tianqi emperor father figure, was also given the power to deliver imperial edicts, a powerful role given that whatever was mentioned in the edict was supposed to be proclaimed under the name