Influencers from Around the World - How Executives Can Learn Influence

This month’s Influencers from Around the World guest post comes by way of my good friend Sean Patrick. Through the power of the internet, he sent it to me all the way from Ireland in just milliseconds. Sean started a his own sales training company, Sales Training Evaluation, and spends time in various parts of Europe training salespeople and executives. Sean was in the U.S. several years ago to attend the Principles of Persuasion workshop and there’s a good chance he’ll be here again in late summer or early fall. If you don’t get to meet him while he’s here you can always “meet” him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

How Executives Can Learn Influence

How can executives acquire meaningful persuasion skills so they can influence outside their power brokerage?  As people like myself know all too well, skill transfer is one of the toughest tasks that can be placed upon a learning and development executive.  Natural persuaders just like successful sales people who adhere to no formal sales process, struggle to share insights into their behaviors.  They will tell you that they “just do it.”  It just flows.  Words can’t describe the cognitive processes, emotions and beliefs that form specific actions to take place at specific intervals during the influence process. So imagine you’re the boss of a very large department and you need to come up with a plan to motivate more production out of your staff.  In today’s corporate world, working environments are highly collaborative as well as individualistic, where multi stakeholder partnerships exist. It’s these environments in which the skills of influence rule over old school manipulation.

According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, today's executives who lack the superior communication skills of the “naturals” can turn to science in place of sourcing the very same skills that win deals, gain compliance and get employees to willfully change.  Executives can gain consensus and win concessions by mastering simple basic principles that can be easily learned and applied in a relatively short period of time.

Here are a few simple ways where influence can be applied in everyday corporate environments:

1. Liking - Informal conversations during the workday create an ideal opportunity to discover common areas of interest, whether it’s a sports team, hobby, or watching “Mad Men.” The important thing is to establish the commonality early because it creates a sense of goodwill and trustworthiness in every subsequent encounter. It’s much easier to build support for projects when the people you’re trying to persuade are already bonded with you.  Managers, who praise members of their staff where relationships have been impaired, begin to radically turn around those relationships through the simple act of recognition.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that men acted more favorably for an individual who flattered them even if the compliments were untrue. And in their book Interpersonal Attraction (Addison-Wesley, 1978), Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield Walster presented experimental data showing that positive remarks about another person’s traits, attitude, or performance reliably generates liking in return, as well as willing compliance.

2. Reciprocity - Line managers who share staff and resources with their peers who are fast approaching deadlines are more likely to receive favors and help when they need it in the future. Odds will improve even more if you say, when your colleague thanks you for the assistance, something like, “Sure, glad to help. I know how important it is for me to count on your help when I need it.” 

Gift giving is one of the cruder applications of the rule of reciprocity. In its more sophisticated uses, it promises a genuine first-mover advantage on any manager who is trying to foster positive attitudes and productive personal relationships in the office

3. Social Proof - According to one of Dr. Cialdini’s research pieces, a group of researchers went door-to-door in Columbia, S.C., soliciting donations for a charity campaign and displaying a list of neighborhood residents who had already donated to the cause. The researchers found that the longer the donor list was, the more likely those solicited would be to donate as well.  The people being solicited became the subject to the power of peer pressure once they saw the names of all their neighbors on the list.

4. Consistency - People need not only to like you but also to feel committed to what you want them to do. Good turns are one reliable way to make people feel obligated to you. Another is to win a public commitment from them.  Israeli researchers writing in 1983 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin recounted how they asked half the residents of a large apartment complex to sign a petition favoring the establishment of a recreation center for the handicapped. The cause was good and the request was small, so almost everyone who was asked agreed to sign. Two weeks later, on National Collection Day for the Handicapped, all residents of the complex were approached at home and asked to give to the cause. A little more than half of those who were not asked to sign the petition made a contribution. But an astounding 92% of those who did sign donated money. The residents of the apartment complex felt obligated to live up to their commitments because those commitments were active, public, and voluntary.

5. Authority - The principle of authority asks us to believe in the advice dispensed by experts. Since there’s good reason to take heed to expert advice, executives should take pains to ensure that they establish their own expertise before they attempt to exert influence. Surprisingly often, people mistakenly assume that others recognize and appreciate their experience. The task for managers who want to establish their claims to expertise is somewhat more difficult. They can’t simply nail their diplomas to the wall and wait for everyone to notice. A little subtlety is called for.

Through liking and similarity, they can also provide an opportunity to establish expertise. Perhaps telling an anecdote about successfully solving a problem similar to the one that’s on the agenda at the next meeting or maybe a recreational dinner is the time to describe years spent mastering a complex discipline, as part of the ordinary give-and-take of conversation.

6. Scarcity - Study after study shows that items and opportunities are seen to be more valuable as they become less available. That’s a tremendously useful piece of information for managers.  Managers can learn from retailers how to frame their offers not in terms of what people stand to gain but in terms of what they stand to lose if they don’t act on the information.  According to a 1994 study in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, potential losses figure far more heavily in managers’ decision-making rather than potential gains. In framing their offers, salespeople and executives should also remember that exclusive information is more persuasive than widely available data.

The persuasive power of exclusivity can be harnessed by any manager who comes into possession of information that’s not widely available and that supports an idea or initiative he or she is aligned to.  The next time that kind of information crosses your path, gather your key stakeholders.  The information itself may seem dull, but exclusivity will give it a special appeal. Push it out to those who need to buy-in and inform them saying, “You just got this report today. It won’t be distributed until next week, but I want to give you an early look at what it shows.” Then notice the rise in interest.

Over to you

If you manage people in your job, how can you take these examples of persuasion and use to gain compliance?

I’d love to hear about how you’ve pushed yourself to use these principles of persuasion.  I’d also love to hear about your wins and what you learned through the experience.

Sean

Sources:

Influence: Science and Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 2001)

Influence At Work www.influenceatwork.com         

HBR Business Essentials: Power, Influence and Persuasion (HBR Press, 2005)

Social Psychology, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1985)