Academic Leadership: Fundamental Building Blocks214
FIGURE 11: Increasing Your Upward Influence
- Centrality – how are you positioned in terms of information flow within your School
or Division?- Are you central enough that you are not kept out of information loops?
- Are you on important committees and meeting groups that receive significant
information? - Are you linked interpersonally to key people who are central to information and
communication in the organisation?
Being central to information increases your influence because you can prepare and
anticipate organisational and course trends.
- Criticality – in addition to centralising yourself in information networks, you need to
examine how critical is the information that is flowing through this central network.
Be strategic about how, where and with whom you position yourself centrally so that
this position accesses critical information important to your role and responsibilities. - Flexibility – is important. In the higher education sector, change occurs rapidly.
Things do not remain the same and being highly inflexible means that people will
bypass you because they know they can anticipate a rigid approach from you.
Monitor your flexibility so that people involve you in organisational matters where you
can make an impact. - Visibility – like centrality and criticality, visibility is important for building influence.
- When you are in meetings and engaging in your work, are you visible?
- Do people ‘notice’ your comments?
- Do they respect you?
Position yourself on key committees where you have an opportunity to profile your ideas
amongst your peers and senior counterparts.
- Relevance – invest your time in things that are relevant to your course, program,
Head of School and organisation. By aligning yourself to key projects, tasks, and
aspects of the organisation’s mission, you raise your influence by virtue of being
connected to highly relevant things related to your role.