Content Benefit

Content Strategy | UX Writing | Content Design | Globalization | Communications

The subtle art of influencing

The subtle art of influencing

The influencing skill: the psychology behind a competency turned profession

There is a talent that rarely shows up on resumes, yet it determines the outcomes of meetings, projects, and careers: the ability to influence. Nothing to do with manipulation or social media likes: I mean the ability to bring people over to your side when formal authority is missing, which happens to be the condition almost all of us work in, almost all the time.

I realized it years ago at PayPal, when I took an internal training on this very subject. I thought I was signing up for yet another communication course. I came out with a set of tools I still use today, from the table of a commercial negotiation to family discussions.

What influencing really means

In matrix organizations, where teams overlap, and direct managers matter less than cross-functional relationships, hierarchical power gets you nowhere. A content designer who wants to change a product flow has to convince product managers, legal, engineers, and researchers, none of whom report to them. I told this story when writing about my experience across content strategy and content design at PayPal: the real work lay in building consensus, long before any writing happened.

Influencing, in this sense, means creating the conditions for an idea to be welcomed. It takes listening, timing, empathy, and a fair dose of strategic patience. Ancient gifts, which the job market now calls by a new name: influencing skill, precisely.

The psychology behind it

The discipline rests on solid foundations. Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist, codified in the 1980s the principles that govern our saying yes: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. They are automatic mechanisms, mental shortcuts the brain uses to decide quickly. Daniel Kahneman would have placed them in “System 1”, the fast, instinctive one that drives most of our choices while we believe we are reasoning.

Those who write for a living handle these principles every day, often without naming them. I discussed this when covering the fundamental books of copywriting and CTAs that convert: understanding what goes on in the reader’s head is the heart of the job. The difference between persuasion and deception lies entirely in the intention: using psychological levers to facilitate a decision that benefits both parties, or to extort a harmful one.

The training at PayPal and my negotiation

The course I took started from a simple premise: before asking, map. Who the stakeholders are, what they fear, what motivates them, and who they listen to. Then you prepare the ground: relationships cultivated before you need them, favors done with no hidden agenda, credibility built through small promises kept.

The results on the way I negotiate were concrete. I stopped showing up to meetings with a position to defend and started arriving with interests to explore, which is the central lesson of Fisher and Ury in Getting to Yes. I learned to ask questions instead of stacking up arguments, to leave silences where I used to fill every pause, to distinguish what was vital to me from what I could concede with theatrical generosity. Negotiations, once arm-wrestling contests, took the shape of problems to solve together.

From competency to profession

Meanwhile, outside corporations, influence has turned into a standalone occupation. Civil and commercial mediators, professional negotiators, change managers, lobbyists: figures who sell exactly this ability. Even the word influencer, which we now associate with social media, describes a role rooted in the same idea: shifting opinions and behaviors through reputation and following.

The market has taken notice: relational skills now sit at the top of recruiters’ wish lists, and curiously it is the rise of AI that makes them more precious, because machines can argue, but trust is born between human beings. I wrote about it in my post on the philosophers and humanists hired by tech companies: critical thinking and the knack for reading the person in front of you have become prized assets.

Mediation as an inclination, and a thought about studying

Then there is a part of this story that concerns character. I naturally lean toward mediation. In discussions, I look for the point where positions overlap, and in team conflicts, I often end up as the one who translates each side’s reasons to the other. I noticed it while writing about the generational clash at work: in medio stat virtus remains my operating motto, and during the years I spent working on wellness at PayPal, that disposition found fertile ground.

This inclination has led me to a thought I have been nurturing for a while: perhaps enrolling in an associate degree in psychology. The idea of providing academic foundations for what I have learned in the field so far appeals to me greatly. Digging deeper into the mechanisms of human behavior would help my work on content, my career, and, most likely, my private life too. As I have always maintained, when it comes to communication and politics, preparation earns you the right to speak: if influence has become a discipline, we might as well study it as one.

We shall see where this reflection leads. In the meantime, I keep practicing the ancient art of convincing without forcing, one negotiation at a time.

Related sources

Chiara Bonifazi