Imagine this: you are in a meeting, oat milk latte in hand, presenting what you genuinely believe is a cracking idea. You have done the spreadsheets, prepped the PowerPoint, and even resisted the urge to animate the pie chart. Yet your idea is politely nodded at, then quietly forgotten — like last year's New Year's resolution.
What happened? It is rarely about the idea itself. More often it is about the delivery, the buy-in, the subtle art of persuasion. And this, dear reader, is where influencing skills training comes in.
Why Influencing Matters More Than Ever
Organisations are flatter, workforces are hybrid, and decision-making is dispersed across continents, time zones and Teams calls. According to McKinsey (2021), cross-functional collaboration is now cited as one of the top three skills leaders need to thrive in a complex environment. But here is the rub: formal authority is no longer enough. The ability to influence — without the job title, the budget, or the proverbial big stick — has become genuinely indispensable.
Think of influencing skills training as the upgrade from dial-up internet to fibre broadband. Once you have experienced it, you wonder how you ever managed the other way.
The Business Case for Influence
Some people hear the word "influencing" and picture glossy Instagram personalities convincing them to try a new skincare regime. In the workplace, it is a different proposition entirely. It is about guiding decisions, creating alignment, and moving projects forward when consensus feels like herding cats.
The research is consistent and compelling. A landmark study by the University of Michigan and Accenture (2017) found that training programmes targeting influence and communication skills yielded an average ROI of 250% — primarily through increased productivity, reduced conflict and improved engagement. LinkedIn's 2023 Workplace Learning Report ranks communication and persuasion consistently among the top five most in-demand skills globally. And yet, paradoxically, they remain the least formally trained. Companies are leaving capability — and the commercial return that comes with it — on the table.
What Influencing Skills Training Actually Looks Like
Good influencing skills training does not involve Jedi mind tricks, nor does it require participants to become the loudest voice in the room. What it does involve is developing the specific behaviours that make influence work in practice: understanding what actually drives the people around you — which, as it turns out, is rarely the KPIs — adapting how you communicate depending on who you are talking to, building the kind of credibility that makes people want to hear what you have to say, and finding the outcome that moves things forward without leaving people feeling steamrollered.
I was working with a group of senior associates at a City law firm recently when one of them said, mid-session, "I've been trying to get this initiative approved for eight months." We spent twenty minutes unpacking how she had been making the case. The idea was sound. The audience analysis was not — she had been presenting the same argument to very different stakeholders as though they all cared about the same things. They did not. By the end of the session she had three different versions of the same pitch, each built around what a different decision-maker actually needed to hear. The initiative was approved within a fortnight.
That is what influencing skills training does. Not manipulation — precision.
Counting the Pennies — and the Pounds
For the finance director who has sat through this blog patiently waiting for a number: here it is. A mid-sized organisation invests £50,000 in a tailored influencing skills training programme for 100 managers. If half of those managers save just one hour a week — by running more efficient meetings, reducing rework, or cutting through the kind of circular conversation that has been going on since Q1 — the savings reach £130,000 per year. That is more than 2.5 times the initial investment, before anyone has counted faster project delivery, fewer derailed stakeholder relationships, or the deals that did not fall over because someone finally knew how to make the case.
Harvard Business Review calls this "the hard return on soft skills." It is a phrase that should be on a poster in every boardroom where someone is still questioning whether this kind of development is worth the budget.
The Cost of Not Investing
The commercial argument cuts both ways. Organisations that do not invest in influencing capability tend to see the cost show up in less visible places: projects stalling because no one could build the buy-in, promising people disengaging because they feel consistently unheard, and leaders spending hours in conversations that go nowhere because nobody in the room has the skills to move them. None of that appears as a line item. But all of it has a very real financial impact.
Influence as Competitive Advantage
Technical skills get you in the door. Influencing skills get you a seat at the table — and keep you there. The organisations that invest in both tend to find that the gap between having good ideas and implementing them closes considerably. Influence is not a personality trait reserved for the naturally charismatic. It is a set of learnable behaviours, and the return on developing them is, on the evidence, substantial.
Final Thought
Next time you are weighing up another technical certification or software licence, consider this: what if the real competitive edge is something more human? Influence, after all, is what turns clever ideas into implemented realities — and implemented realities are what the bottom line is actually made of.
If influencing capability is a gap you keep bumping into across your leadership population, it tends to show up clearly in a Leadership Capability Diagnostic. Worth a conversation.
Curious whether your leadership population has the capabilities this blog is talking about?
The Leadership Capability Diagnostic™ gives you a precise answer — and a clear roadmap for what to do about it.
