I want to give you the first 14 questions you must answer about yourself in order to build yourself into a person of influence. Neglecting any of these 14 questions mean you cannot be credible or perceived as credible to your clients, customers or the world.
Credibility is one of the common denominators of their success at influencing others. Credibility (O’Keefe) are the “judgments made by a perceiver concerning the believability of a communicator.”
Credibility is the pivot point. President Trump was a lightning rod as President. He was typically seen as certain in his own ideology, but was rarely perceived as competent in the world community. Adding his seemingly low credibility as a leader to his perceived arrogance (which is how people view the U.S.A. in much of the world) we have a predictable reaction by the world community. The messages Trump sends are therefore polarizing and people internationally will accept the polar view to what someone like President Trump says, so long as it is perceived as slightly more credible than what he communicates. President Biden? Not perceived as all that credible for other reasons. Don’t follow either leader’s example.
Credibility matters. Credibility is the pivot point in influence. Unfortunately it doesn’t initially matter whether you have credibility (or are credible) but whether you are perceived that way.
Credibility is critical to your being recognized as a person of influence. Credibility is an emergence of six component factors of which, in this article, we will discuss the first of the six factors.
What factors make up credibility?
Competence is the first major component in the credibility puzzle. Go back to the list of the names at the top of this article. They are/were all very competent people. Competence is a cornerstone of credibility. (Notice that competence isn’t correlated with having good values, morals or the best interests of others.) You can fake competence for awhile but eventually competence is tested and it makes or breaks you. Competence is expertise. It is your qualification(s).
Golden Key: Building your true competence level and building the perception of your competence are two separate projects.
a) You must be the expert.
b) You must be perceived as the expert.
What specifically do you want to work on? (McCroskey and Young) You want to work on the seven subscales (continuums) of competence with those two goals in mind.
Critical: You want to be competent and you want to be perceived as competent. It does you no good at all to be competent and perceived otherwise.
- Are you experienced or inexperienced?
- Are you perceived as being experienced or inexperienced?
- Are you informed or uninformed?
- Are you perceived as being informed or uninformed?
- Are you trained or untrained?
- Are you perceived as being trained or being untrained?
- Are you qualified or unqualified?
- Are you perceived as being qualified or unqualified?
- Are you skilled or unskilled?
- Are you perceived as being skilled or unskilled?
- Are you intelligent or unintelligent?
- Are you perceived as being intelligent or unintelligent?
- Are you an expert or not?
- Are you perceived as an expert or not?
After answering all these questions, you must construct a competence-building and perception-of-competence building system.
If you aren’t experienced, you need to become experienced. If you aren’t perceived as experienced you must make clear verbally, in writing, via testimonial or some covert fashion that you are experienced.
If you look in the yellow pages you may come across words and phrases that attempt to establish credibility because this is such a big piece of the influence puzzle.
“27 years of experience”
“Harvard educated”
“Black Belt”
“Award Winning”
“Internationally known”
On television you see Michael Jordan lend his credibility and competence as the world’s greatest athlete to everything from hamburgers to batteries to underwear. This is roughly what a testimonial on the back of a book does for the author. It is called the “halo effect.” You are borrowing someone else’s credibility to build your own. It’s smart to do and something you should pursue as well.
Competence is the cornerstone. Covertly make your client base aware of your competence. (Have awards on the wall of your office. Have testimonials in your portfolio.) Then, make it certain that in all of your interactions with your clients every single one of them knows that your knowledge runs deep and wide. You are the obvious expert in your field. That done, you have the first of the six building blocks of credibility standing tall.
