Question

We are bombarded every day by persuasive messages, from commercials to advertisements to requests from a boss or significant other. Share a time that you had to use your persuasive skills, either in your personal or professional life. Briefly explain the situation and the persuasive skills that you used. Lastly, reflect on the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of those skills and if there was anything you could have done differently.

Answer 1

As a professional in the field of business, there has been various instances when I had to use my pursuasive skills to convince an individual or a group to accept my idea or approach. Recently one such incident happened, I work as a business analyst for an organization and the client is an insurance organization who are planning to develop their IT infrastructure in order to sustain in the industry. I forwarded the idea of making the conventional PDF reports obsolete and instead use Power BI dashboards which will be technically sound and also have attracting physical presence that will help the users get a better view and more options as well. The client although was not ready to change the existing system because they fear data breach and changing the format will mean issues and discrepancies as well that may impact business.

As the business analyst I had pursue the business partners of our client that we will develop this initially for reports that are of less priority and then compare the results and if it is convincing then we can go ahead and we will also have a buffer backup for 3 months so that any issues can be validated by the PDF reports after that we can make them obsolete. Sound knolwedge along with communication skills and negotiating skills finally worked as they were convinced. They also wanted to monitor the progress of the change and evaluate if that is matching their expectations and as we agreed it created an environment of mutual trust and transparency as well.