Being persuasive is a foundational soft skill that everyone in an organization has a responsibility to use, although it’s vitally important to being a successful leader.

Dr. Tobin Porterfield and Bob Graham discuss the soft skill of being persuasive and how it use can spur an organization’s growth.

Among the topics they discuss are:

• Why being persuasive makes our list
• How to differentiate between manipulation and persuasion
• A working definition of persuasion
• How persuasion leads to “buy-in”
• How persuasion is about attraction
• Identifying what makes a proposal fit the goals of an organization and how being persuasive fits in
• When to set aside an idea because the buy-in is missing
• Knowing when to move things forward
• When persuasion becomes office politics and how to avoid it
• Examples of persuasive arguments
• How to ask for a raise using persuasion
• Tips for what any
• persuasion ultimately needs to include
• When persuasion can run amok
• When persuasion reaches coalescence
• How understanding your audience is critical to any effective persuasion
• Where an organization’s history plays into persuasion

Next week

We will explore a listener’s timely suggestion for another soft skill to add to our list of 55 soft skills.