Are you an influencer?
Once a man goes to a shop to buy a parrot. He asks the shop owner price of the Parrot.
Shop owner: $500
Customer: Why so costly?
Shop owner: He knows Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Customer: What's the price of this second Parrot?
Shop owner: $1000 as it knows Word, Excel, PowerPoint and also Programming
Customer: how nice, and what's the price of this parrot which is sleeping?
Shop owner: That's for $5000
Customer: And what does it know?
Shop owner: That I don't know, I haven't seen him do anything, but the other two parrots call him influencer.
Influencers are people that no matter what their position has sway over others. These influencers can control the flow of work the trust people have in leadership, and be a positive or a toxic force depending on what action they chose.
I suggest the best and healthiest path people should take is to be a positive influencer.
1)If you want to be a good influencer you need to feel passionate about what you want to support or change.
2) Influencers do not take things at face value. They avoid rumors.
3)Influencers don't grumble or seek to undermine others, they seek to understand.
4) They do their research to gain facts about the messages leaders are sending.
5) They question assumptions that leaders are making about the situation and offer alternatives if needed.
6) They can freely share their thinking with colleagues avoiding the "Chicken Little the Sky is Falling" doom and gloom scenarios.
In many ways, the influencer has the most powerful role in an organization.
You can look to figures like Robert Mosses that influenced the infrastructure of generations of New York's parks and urban transportation decision-makers. Tomas Scot who influenced the t4-year-old Andrew Carnegie. Elon's was inspired by Richard Feynman's—a famous physicist. Most of these influencers most people never heard of but their impact can't be truly measured. I am not saying you have to be the next Robert Mosses but if you want to shape the world around you start utilizing some of the tactics I suggested in this blog and let me know how it worked.
