Bold Influence: Leaders Drive Outcomes

By Kevin Peterson

The objective to this book is to provide practical techniques to no longer just sit through situations as a passive victim, tolerating perpetual inaction. Be the one to set the tone for healthy collaboration and actively develop those peers that will be constructive partners to "help solve the ills of the enterprise," by stepping out from behind the conference table and exhibit the boldness to influence your peers. This book provides a set of twenty-four-key takeaway insights, some of which are listed below, brought to life with a host of real-world business stories that provide tangible guidance on how to apply these concepts to make a bold difference in your sphere of influence, whether in business or in your personal life. - Quality of character is prerequisite to earn the right to influence. - Influence leaders get assigned to the "hairiest problems." - Influence leaders know when to stop talking and act. - Influence leaders wear the risk of failure on behalf of their team. - Influence leaders do not quit until they succeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644718322

Book preview

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Bold Influence

Leaders Drive Outcomes

Kevin Peterson

ISBN 978-1-64471-831-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64471-832-2 (Digital)

Copyright © 2019 Kevin Peterson

All rights reserved

First Edition

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Peterson, Kevin (Kevin Dale), author.

Title: Bold influence : leaders drive outcomes / Kevin Peterson.

Description: [Murrells Inlet, South Carolina] : [Covenant Books], [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781644718315 (paperback) |

ISBN 9781644718322 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Influence (Psychology) | Executive ability. | Management. | Responsibility.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 .P48 2019 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4092--dc23

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Preparing for Bold

The Essence of Influence

Confidence in Capabilities

Drive Must Extend Beyond Self

Fundamentals of Influence

Perspective on Influence

Barriers to Influence

Right to Influence

Envisioning the Future

Work Back from Done

Future Plans That Link to Current State

Anchor Current Activities to End Game

Planning for Action

Know When to Stop Talking

Be Quick to Smoke Test

Frame the Elevator Pitch

Focus on Momentum

Own Initial Action Items

Pursue an Initial Win

Start with the Willing

Committing to Journey

Operate Beyond Comfort Zone

Dissect into Bite-Size Challenges

Cut Brush in Front of the Team

Being a Closer

True Grit Matters

Don’t Let Things Spin

Find a Way to Succeed

Achieving by Influence

Appoint Yourself as Chief Influencer

Get Assigned to the Hairiest Problems

Cultivate the Seeds of Bold Influence

Notes

About the Author

To my daughter, Tita. She is currently pursuing a college experience and has a lifetime of influence yet to come as she gears up to pursue her future life endeavors. His hope is that she will leverage the life lessons embedded in this book to allow her to boldly achieve the aspirations of her upcoming adult life choices and career pursuits.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank all who contributed their support during the development of this book. A special thanks to the individuals listed below who contributed time, advice, and/or key support to the development of this book:

Dr. Charles Chuck Ward

Dr. Hans Peterson

Deena Peterson

Tita Peterson

Preface

As a business professional, it is common to sit in a conference room with your peers and listen to the complaints flow around the table pertaining to poor processes, low sales, people issues, and strategy flaws that are contributing to frustration within the organization and suboptimal business outcomes in the commercial real-world. These complaints may have nothing to do with the reason the meeting was called in the first place. In fact, after the meeting, no call to action occurs, and you, along with your peers, feel like your time was just wasted and the meeting sucked the positive energy right out of each of you.

The objective to this book is to provide practical techniques to no longer just sit through situations as a passive victim, tolerating perpetual inaction. It will encourage you to have the confidence to appoint yourself as chief influencer by orchestrating the willing partners among your peers into change agents. Rather than feeling like a deer in the headlights, blink and respond with assertive and constructive actions.

Envision that you can turn the company’s systemic challenges into opportunities to overcome. Become the strongest catalyst to mobilize like-minded peers to tackle the hairiest problems that are causing friction and/or dysfunction across the seams of the organization. Demonstrate a willingness to proactively expose your ideas to challenges by your peers; thus, lowering the vulnerability barriers to promote collaboration with those peers. Be the one to set the tone for healthy collaboration and actively develop those peers that will be constructive partners to help solve the ills of the enterprise, by stepping out from behind the conference table and exhibiting the boldness to influence your peers. Go to the whiteboard to start the dialogue of taking accountability. Your sense of let’s make stuff happen will ignite an empowerment fire within a subset of peers that will literally transform the productivity and maturity of the entire company within twenty-four to thirty-six months. This can-do spirit will likely get you noticed and advance your career as the executives observe your impact to stretch your peers into greater levels of contributions than those executives thought possible.

A key goal of this book is to challenge professionals in business that they have enormous untapped potential to dramatically increase their sphere of influence beyond their defined roles within the organization. This potential is based on unlocking the constrained empowerment embedded in the hands of your peers that they either do not know they have and/or do not know how to apply to move the organization into much greater levels of value creation from their actions beyond the narrow boundaries of their perceived role definitions. All you need to do is to be bold enough to discover these under-utilized resource reserves and channel them into productive problem-solving opportunities by convincing your peers to join you at the whiteboard to drive the enterprise to embrace their suppressed ideas.

This book will provide techniques you need to convince your peers that this collaborative approach will enable them to pool their intellectual capital to invest in solving the strategic and/or tactical challenges that will substantially move the needle with innovation and best practices to mature the organization and/or make step changes in the quality of the outcomes for the organization. As you plant these seeds of influence over time, the contributions from your peer community will start to grow like compound interest over time literally reshaping the productivity and effectiveness of the business like an oasis around your sphere of influence.

Part 1

Preparing for Bold

Chapter 1

The Essence of Influence

It is easy to sell what you believe in.

When author Kevin Peterson was growing up in a family of eight children, three brothers and four sisters, his parents focused on the importance of getting a great education including to go on to college. He never heard either his dad or mom say "if you go to college, but it was always when you go to college." Ultimately, all eight children did attend some level of college achieving a host of undergraduate and some advanced degrees.

While it was vitally important for his parents to establish going to college was the expectation norm for the family, it was only the foundational component of influence to accomplish the vision for all these children to get the opportunity to attend college. The passion for education started in Kevin’s father, Dr. Hans Peterson, while he was just a teenager, as described in his father’s autobiography. He explained a couple of his events during his boyhood of losing a favorite pet (a dog named Hercules) by being hit by a car and a Holstein calf death to a dehorning infection. These events prompted him to want to pursue a career to become a veterinarian. He graduated from high school in 1951, and even though his grades were not impressive, he went on to explain how he pushed through a host of challenges to achieve his goal to become a doctor. As he observed the tangible impact that this had on his potential of his life, he embraced the realization that one of the single most important things that he and his spouse could