DIY Executive Coaching — Unlock Your Influence Through Stronger Professional Relationships
As your scope grows, getting buy-in and influencing without authority becomes table stakes. Here is a concrete exercise for building the kind of high-trust relationships that make everything else easier.
👉 DIY Executive Coaching: unlock your influence through stronger professional relationships.
You’re a strong leader with deep technical and domain expertise. But as your scope increases, you’re starting to see the importance of other skills — getting buy-in, managing up, and influencing where you don’t have authority.
You’re a quick study, and you realize it would all be much easier if you had stronger, high-trust relationships with key colleagues and leaders from around the company.
This is one in a series of posts I call 💡 DIY Executive Coaching 💡. I frame up a scenario and then pass the ball to you.
Having strong connections — why is this so important?
You’re writing a proposal and you want a decision-maker to review an early draft.
- 👍 A strong connection says: “Sure, let me help you make it stronger before you present it to the group.”
- 🚫 A weak connection says: “I’m super busy. Just include me when you circulate your final draft and I’ll respond with my feedback then.”
You’re pitching a big initiative to your manager.
- 👍 Strong connection’s gut reaction: “I’d like to help. I think I can help get buy-in from other execs.”
- 🚫 Weak connection’s gut reaction: “This seems too risky right now. We have other priorities.”
You’re building a new product and you require lots of work from a team whose leader is outside your org.
- 👍 Strong connection: “Sounds important. Let’s figure out a way to get this done.”
- 🚫 Weak connection: “My team is already swamped. Fill out an intake for next quarter.”
Yes, you can get things done without having built high-trust relationships in advance — but everything is just A LOT easier when you have.
So how do we make progress?
We’re good humans and genuinely want great, authentic, non-transactional relationships. But either the “how” eludes us, or we’re just not making it a priority.
Here’s an exercise:
- Make a list of 5-10 people where a strong professional relationship matters.
- Decide on one action to create or strengthen each relationship. Even for ones you feel are solid, do one more thing that you’re not already doing.
- Ask these questions to generate ideas:
- ❓ What business value can you offer them? How can you be a source of useful information or contribute to their objectives?
- ❓ How can you better acknowledge this person for their contributions?
- ❓ Are you consistently following through on your commitments with them?
- ❓ How can you invest time with them in a way they’d value?
- ❓ What limiting beliefs might you hold that hinder your ability to build a stronger connection?
- ❓ Are your communications with them of high quality and appropriate frequency? How can you adapt your style to better match theirs?
If you take a stab at this exercise, I’d love to hear how it goes.
And if you want to explore individual or group coaching as a way to accelerate your success, schedule a discovery call.
