Leverage and Influence Cont. — How to communicate with each of the Roles to get your opinion heard

Written by a Luminary & Prophet

As humans, we need to understand that our value is not in convincing ourselves of a direction but instead how to influence and communicate that opinion with others. This task is easier with people who play similar Roles to us, but what happens if they don’t or who maybe play the Roles we are weakest in?

In a previous article we walked through how each of the Roles communicate to others. Now, we are going to learn how to flip that around to communicate with someone who plays different strengths. Let’s walk through how to communicate with each of the roles.

Communicate to a Prophet

When you are talking to someone or an organization that plays the Prophet role strongly, push the long term vision in a short and direct manner. Hint: Using bullet points can go a long way for their communication style. Be direct about shortcomings and own up to previous mistakes quickly. Let them disagree with you to start as the Prophet is comfortable disagreeing and finding flaws within the idea. Preempt that but hear them out.

Communicate to an Organizer

Show examples of how this process will work and has worked in the past. They want to understand that each detail is optimized. Show them how this is the most efficient use of the team’s time and effort.

Communicate to a Conceptualizer

Start with a hypothesis and walk them through how you got to your conclusion. Gather as much information, risk and dependencies as possible and quantify it. Be prepared to answer the ‘5 whys’ (LINK) to each question that arises. When you don’t have all the information, acknowledge it.

Communicate to an Investor

Always go back to long term benefits, compromise is a good thing for the Investor upon trying to reach the end goal. Investors are phenomenal at the ‘sniff test’ which indicates that the long term value isn’t there or that there is an overarching issue, be prepared to go quickly into the Conceptualizer response if that arises. Finally, search for the negotiation or the compromise, if this idea will piss off all of the stakeholders the team works with, this won’t feel right to the Investor but instead will push for compromise to keep long term happiness and effectiveness in mind.

Communicate to Implementor

Give them the problem to be solved and let them come up with the first step to the solution, once you agree on the first step, walk them through the consecutive steps to get to the final desired outcome. If the Implementor can’t see the steps towards the ends, they won’t be on board.

Communicate to Luminary

Don’t bog them down on the details, excite them around an idea and go back to the value. Additionally, spend time talking through the people involved to get to the solution and be open to their suggestions of who else might be interested in helping you get there.

Communicate to Team Builder

Listen to them and relay how this leads to a better, more connected outcome. Being combative or relaying aggression/competition, similar to the investor, will not achieve buy-in from a Team Builder, it will only lead to resistance via silence.

Conclusion

Feeling ‘heard’ in the workplace is a common difficulty, the most interesting solution is to actually speak to the person you don’t feel heard by in their Roleset, rather than yours. It’s counterintuitive, but if they can’t understand how you came about the idea (ie not in the terms of how they think about problems), they won’t be able to hear you, even if they try!

Lumiere Sciences is a tech-education company providing collaboration-focused sessions and executive coaching around the 7 Roles Framework. We help your team’s boost productivity, be empowered in their strengths, and achieve goals through 7 critical Roles!

We help team’s understand each-others Role strengths and weaknesses, create efficiencies and build harmony. Managers are well-equipped to lead, hire and retain top talent. Our family-owned company, My Team Role, can give you a brief overview of the roles, let you access our assessment, and allow you to schedule individual coaching sessions with one of our executive coaches.