It was David Berlew, who was a professor at MIT, and Roger Harrison, who was affiliated with Yale, who in the 1970’s performed the studies of, how people influence each other. In the beginning their motivation was their own personal interest in increasing their power and becoming more influential and thus more effective, but within shortly their friends and colleagues became interested in the studies, as they were introduced to these and received training within how, they could increase their personal power.

David Berlew and Roger Harrison learned that personal power requires respect and flexibility within the behaviour, with which you pursue influence, so that you have more strings to pull in the dialogue with others. This is, because the behavior which will give you the desired result in one situation, might not have the same positive outcome in other situations. With this knowledge David Berlew and Roger Harrison outlined The Influence Model with its four influence styles, which ensures that you achieve your goal, while maintaining respectful relations with the people, whom you influence in the process.

Training within The Influence Model is a part of the course Power2Influence, which we offer both in our open enrollment programme and as an in company-course held for your organization. You can learn more about the options here.