Workshop: Interpersonal Skills: Styles of Influencing

On the 8^th of April 2008, Grasp together with the “Career Development and Training” department of the RUG organized a workshop on Interpersonal Skills. The workshop focused on the different styles of influencing. During the workshop 14 Grasp members learned that we are actually influencing other people all the time, in our professional lives and also in our personal lives. We started out with an exercise in which we were to get signatures from other participants by assigning correct features to each participant, ranging from “likes gardening” and “has been to Indonesia” to “works in the weekends”. Everyone started out asking friendly questions, starting with “do you…” or “are you…”. When we learned we had only a few minutes left, the questions changed to “I think you…”. Apparently we changed our style of influencing without being aware of it.

In general, each situation asks for different styles of influencing. For example with your supervisor you take a different approach than with your partner or your children. Four styles were identified by the workshop hosts, Jan Pieter Weening and Gerald Lier. Every person has his/her own preferred style of influencing, and we found out what we thought were ours by filling in a questionnaire. As it turned out in our group, all 3 men preferred the logical style, based on arguments and reason and all women preferred either the enthusiastic or relational style, both respective styles based on respectively creating a bond or investing in a relationship. We practiced different styles with each other, by simulating certain situations which occur e.g. with your supervisor, which was a nice way of trying a style which you normally wouldn’t choose.

Afterwards we had a nice ‘borrel’ which lead to many new ideas for other activities Grasp can organize in the future, so keep an eye on the newsletters!

More information about the courses offered by the “Career Development and Training” department can be found here. Check out the “Succesful PhD Research” course.