Welcome back. Earlier, you learned how your approach can impact your ability to influence others. But influencing is about more than just your approach. In fact, so much of your ability to influence others comes from your own sources of power. Throughout your career, you'll rely on your sources of power to influence others to do great work in service of the project goals. In his book, The Elements of Power: Lessons On Leadership and Influence, the researcher Terry Bacon, determined that most power sources fall into two buckets, organizational and personal. From these power sources, we picked out the ones we feel are most important to cover here. Let's start with organizational sources of power, which include your role, information, network, and reputation. First, we have your role, which refers to your position within an organization, or team. In a project management role, you have a certain level of power over the project, and therefore more influence. Information is another source of organizational power, which refers to your level of access, and control over information. As a project manager, you possess a huge amount of information about your work, and your stakeholders, which can work to your benefit. Now it may be tempting to assume that as a leader, you have all of the answers, but to be a good influencer, you should ask questions, and consider all ideas. You may even hear new insights, and notice issues in a different way. Share information with your team regularly so that they can provide input on the full picture. You can also derive power from your network. This refers to people you're connected with professionally and personally. Strong connections within your organization and beyond it can boost your ability to influence others, and help your project continue on. If you demonstrate that you're well-connected and have a good chance of getting stakeholders support, or budget approval for your plans, then you're more likely to get your audience on your side. You should use your network to help colleagues make new connections. Your team's effectiveness will increase as you take on the responsibility of helping each person develop their skills and expand their network, which in turn increases their own influencing power. Lastly, we have reputation, which refers to how others perceive you overall. As you might expect, people with positive reputations tend to be more influential than those with negative reputations. One way I've noticed this play out is through collaboration. If you're a good collaborator, you can boost your reputation by becoming known for being easy to work with, keeping your commitments, and helping others achieve their own goals. Your role, access to and control of information, network, and reputation are important organizational sources of power to be aware of. It's also important to identify power sources that come from you. These are referred to as personal sources of power, which include knowledge, expressiveness, history and character. I like to think of these as your own personal superpowers. Knowledge refers to the power that you draw from your expertise in certain subjects, your unique abilities, and skill sets, and even your ability to learn new things. What comes to mind when you think about an influential leader? Typically, they have a lot of knowledge in their field and you're more likely to trust their opinion. When you're considering how to use your own knowledge as a source of power, reflect on the expertise you already have, and consider areas where you still want to grow and learn more. Expressiveness refers to your ability to communicate with others. This is a big one. As you learned earlier, so much of influencing comes down to how you approach your audience. Maybe you're a great storyteller, or maybe you're really good at connecting emotionally with people. Strong communication skills like these can significantly increase your ability to influence others. The next personal source of power is history. History refers to the level of personal history there is between yourself and another person. Makes sense. A strong relationship with the person you hope to influence can go a long way. As a project manager, you'll be managing team dynamics and building team relationships, which can help you build up personal history with the people around you, and finally, character. Character refers to other people's view of the qualities that make you: you. Like, honesty, integrity, kindness, and so much more. Character is a huge one, you'll derive an enormous amount of power from high estimates of your character. What personal characteristics do you value within yourself? These are the qualities that have the power to make you a strong, supportive leader for the people around you. Knowledge, expressiveness, history, and character, are just four personal sources of power, but it's important to remember that there's so much wrapped in each one of these. There's trustworthiness, authenticity, wisdom, and on and on. There's so many attributes to draw power from. I like to think of these elements as personal superpowers. I learned early on in my career that my personal superpower is knowledge, specifically my innate curiosity. When I started at Google, I didn't have a background in software engineering, but I'm a naturally curious person and I'm not afraid to ask questions. When I join a new team, I find the engineer who seems to have the most knowledge or experience, and I ask them to teach me how everything works. Most people are genuinely interested in sharing what they know. That initial chat usually leads to conversations over lunch, which helps me to build my own knowledge, and personal history with my colleague. Through these conversations, I learn about other teammates to connect with, which increases my network. As you build your career, try to identify your own superpowers. Find the combination of influencing techniques that best suits your particular circumstances. It takes practice to polish your skills, and lean into various superpowers when working with others, but if you invest time in thinking, and troubleshooting your influencing strategy, it will pay off. In the next video, we'll review and wrap up. Meet you there.