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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I’m your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. Today, we’re joined by Patti Massulo to discuss the product demo, Boost Your Influence with the Interpersonal Influence Inventory. And before we dive in here,

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Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at HRDQU.com for exclusive updates, upcoming webinars, and resources to help you and your team excel. Patti, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you, Sarah. How are you? I’m doing well. I would love for if you could start here. For anybody that’s tuning in that hasn’t had the chance to watch the webinar yet, could you share a little bit about yourself and about your work, your background? Let us get to know you a bit here. Sure. Sure.

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Well, I’m a speaker and a trainer and I work with businesses, even schools, so they can master communication for the most part. A lot of things, professional and personal development in the communication realm, I work with them on how to change the dynamics of the organization through really connecting and not just communication. And I’m based in South Carolina. Great. So now.

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Could you talk a little bit here about, let’s do an overview of the Interpersonal Influence Inventory sold at HRDQstore. Can you talk about what it is? Sure, sure. Well, it’s an assessment tool and it helps people discover their interpersonal influence style. It reveals how we influence and persuade every day because a lot of people don’t realize that what we do every day, we’re influencing somebody and trying to persuade somebody of something, which is

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which is so important. It could be something as simple as getting our kids to eat their vegetables or going to our boss for a raise. So, becoming really knowledgeable about what our influence style is and being self-aware is really the first step. Absolutely. And it’s a skill that we all can always improve on. I think there’s always room for improvement there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And what about this assessment? How does it help individuals become more effective in their interactions at work? OK. Well.

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There’s lots of ways. First of all, you’ll be able to strengthen your communication skills. a lot of research has shown that poor communication is a problem and that misunderstandings among coworkers is a problem. So really strengthening and mastering communication skills is so important. So that’s one thing that it’ll help with. It also helps resolve conflict, helps build those bridges instead of walls within the teams because people

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We’ll be able to understand each other better when they understand each other’s style. And then team collaboration is a big deal too. If it’s done properly, influence is going to build trust and credibility. And it just overall enhances the whole relationship building. And could you walk us through, so there’s four influence styles in the Interpersonal Influence Inventory. Could you walk us through what they are and what sets them apart? Sure. The first one is the openly aggressive, overtly aggressive.

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And that’s the person that really boldly asserts for their rights. A lot of times, unfortunately, they don’t have any regard for other people. They’re mostly driven by anger and they’re very direct. And that’s a style that obviously we don’t want to be. And I’ll talk a little bit about that in just a minute. And then there’s the concealed covertly behavior. That’s where we more subtly assert our needs. So that’s more a little bit on the indirect side. But even

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Even in that, what we do is we harbor these hostile emotions and thoughts. And a lot of times that person can seem very manipulative. They can be also described as maybe a gaslighting type of person because they’re saying one thing and they’re thinking something else and harboring hard feelings. Then there’s the passive behavior. Now this is your people, stereotypical people pleaser. You place other people’s needs above your own at all costs. And a lot of times that’s just done out of fear, to be honest.

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It can lead to a lot of different things like hidden victimization that the person might feel, even resentment from something from their past. And so it comes out and plays itself out in passive behavior with other people. And then the ultimate long one is the assertive behavior. This is what we all want to strive for. This is the confident person. They’re able to express their rights and their needs with no problem. They respect other people. They communicate really clearly. They have a lot of emotional control.

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And that’s what I love about this whole tool, the interpersonal influence is that we can really work towards and change our behavioral style. And is it possible for someone to kind of teeter in between different styles throughout, I don’t know, the day or the week or just kind of embody different styles or just do people kind of typically fall within one group?

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No, that’s the beauty of this particular tool as opposed to some other ones. And that is that you can change, you can develop. So for instance, if you find yourself being an openly aggressive person, but you know you don’t really want to function that way, there’s things that you can do within the whole process of taking the assessment and going through the training to help you get to the ultimate goal, which is that assertive behavior. Now, could you during…

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the course of a day or a week teeter back and forth with some of those things. Sure, we all could. I mean, we’re human and you know, there may be times when we have passive behavior where we were really not typically like that. But for the most part, when you take the assessment, you’ll see where you are more, more likely, you’re more likely characteristics will show up in one style over another. And you, might have a little bit of each, but, you’ll see that you might be heavy in one area over another one.

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How can organizations use this tool for leadership development programs? Wow. OK. Well, they can use it in lots of different ways. They could integrate the training into the workplace culture, make it like a core competency in their leadership development strategies that they do with their team. It can be put into leadership evaluations, team collaborative initiatives, things like that, helping leaders to understand their influence style and how it can be applied and doing that in

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any sort of trainings that you’re doing with your team. It gives them really gives them that self-awareness and they can pretty much gain insight into their strengths and look at the areas where they need to improve because we always have areas where we can all improve. And then the inventory reveals like potential friction, interpersonal friction based on whatever our style is. So it would help us to grow as individuals and be able to navigate, you know, let’s just say.

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workplace conflict or things like that. And that obviously will make us a better leader once we know that. And also you can design personalized development plans for your leadership. If a leader tends to talk too much, for example, they can practice active listening. That’s one of the things that we talk about in the tool and the training. And, you know, for instance, that might look something like before you respond to someone, take three, three seconds and listen to what that person has said to you before you jump to

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an answer right away, which is very typical of that openly aggressive style. And lastly, Patti, what type of feedback does the assessment provide and how can participants apply it to real world interactions? Well, the first thing is it identifies your style, which is the first thing that we need to know. And then it identifies and helps us develop specific influence strategies so that we can be more effective in our interactions. It’ll show us how we come across to other people.

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And then based on the behavior that’s most characteristic, it gives things like our thoughts, our emotions, what our behaviors and both nonverbal and verbal might look like. for example, someone that has that openly aggressive behavior style, their thoughts are usually to jump and get angry quickly. Their emotions are usually running pretty high. And then their verbal and nonverbal

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communication is more of a stiff, they’re standing tall, they’re kind of pointing at people, they’re rolling their eyes and things like that. If a person is, let’s just say passive and they avoid confrontation, some of the things they can do, they could set small goals, they can challenge themselves to speak up at meetings and things like that, take initiatives to volunteer for different tasks within the organization that aligns with their strength, that would be a good thing to do.

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And so, you know, those are just a few of the ideas of how you can really apply that in a real world situation. Great. And for our listeners, we will have the information link below. have the webinar that was related to this link below, so you can check that out. We’ll have all the information so that you can contact us at HRDQstore.com if you’d like to learn more. And if you’d like to take a free test drive of the assessments so that you can see it in action for yourself.

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With that, Patti, thank you so much for your time today. Sure. I just want to say one last thing. I just wanted to let everybody know that this is different than any other tools because it’s a tool that can help us persuade and communicate well, and it also can be learned and developed, which that makes it very unique. With other tools, they’re based on more natural talents and abilities and personality and behaviors where this one can really be something that we can work on to learn and develop and

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have the sorts of behaviors that we want to have. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s a great way to kind of conclude and give that final synopsis there of the tool. So again, make sure that you check all of the information that we have linked down below for you so that you can learn more. Patti, thanks again for tuning in today with me to talk more about the Interpersonal Influence Inventory. Thank you, Sarah.

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