Influencer The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Ron McMillan_3 pptx

For over three decades, Reid and a constant stream of toral students had tracked the same topic: What vital behaviorsset top teachers apart from the masses?. Wewatched top performers at

current education system essentially set kids on a course of

suc-cess or failure beginning in the first grade—independent of

what anyone did afterward

Stunned and indignant, Reid was determined to find out ifthere was something teachers could do to make a difference.Weren’t there teachers out there who started with children themodel predicted would lag behind, but who helped the stu-dents beat the model? And, if so, what was the difference be-tween those who were successful and everyone else?

Here’s where Dr Reid’s mix of genius and dogged nation came into play She pored over the data until she foundteachers whose students did better in later years than beforebeing taught by those teachers Some did considerably better

determi-“These were the teachers who beat the projections,” Dr.Reid explained “For whatever reason, their students beat themodel We also were able to find teachers whose students didfar worse than predicted after spending a year under theirtutelage

“I was curious as to what was going on with both groups,”Reid continued, “so I gathered a dozen teachers whose studentswere achieving better results than the model predicted andasked them what methods they used to cause their students toread at a higher level than expected They didn’t know what hadled to success Later I gathered teachers whose students had doneworse than predicted and bluntly asked: ‘What are you doing that

prevents the children from learning?’ After an extended awkward

silence, they confessed that they didn’t know.”

And now for the determination For the next five years Reidwatched both top and bottom performers in action in order todivine the vital behaviors that separated the best teachers fromthe rest She codified, gathered, and studied data on virtuallyevery type of teaching behavior she and a team of doctoral stu-dents could identify

With still vibrant enthusiasm, Reid announced to us thefindings They had found certain behaviors that separate top

performers from everyone else They’ve proven to be the samebehaviors across ages, gender, geography, topic, and anythingelse the researchers could imagine.

One of the vital behaviors consists of the use of praise sus the use of punishment Top performers reward positive per-formance far more frequently than their counterparts Bottomperformers quickly become discouraged and mutter thingssuch as, “Didn’t I just teach you that two minutes ago?” Thebest consistently reinforce even moderately good performance,and learning flourishes

ver-Another vital behavior they found is that top performers idly alternate between teaching and questioning or otherwisetesting Then, when required, they make immediate corrections.Poor performers drone on for a long time and then let the stu-dents struggle, often leaving students to repeat the same errors After explaining the vital behaviors, Dr Reid remarked,

rap-“You’re probably wondering how we know for a certainty thatthese are the vital behaviors—the ones that separate the bestfrom the rest.” She then turned to a plain wooden cupboardattached to the wall behind her, opened it, and pointed todozens of doctoral dissertations

For over three decades, Reid and a constant stream of toral students had tracked the same topic: What vital behaviorsset top teachers apart from the masses? She would pick thelearning target she cared about—say, vocabulary Then she’dfind a data set and identify teachers who beat the predictivemodel along with those who trailed it Finally, she wouldwatch both groups in action, codify their actions, and tease outwhich behaviors worked and which ones didn’t

doc-Dr Reid now knows with a scientific certainty the specificbehaviors that lead to the best results This means that she now

knows which vital behaviors to influence if she wants to improve

the outcomes she desires

The good news behind this story is that this type of practice research can be conducted in any organization We

best-(the authors) used similar techniques when trying to determinethe behaviors that lead to high productivity in companies Wewatched top performers at work, compared them with otherswho were decent but not quite as good, and identified two sets

of behaviors that set apart the best from the rest—both of

which we’ve written about in detail in our books Crucial

Con-versations and Crucial Confrontations.*

In each case, researchers compared the best to the rest andthen discovered the unique and powerful behaviors that led tosuccess They didn’t think up their ideas on the way to the mall.They didn’t sit down and brainstorm techniques with their bestfriends They didn’t even ask top performers what they believedset them apart from their peers Instead, they closely watchedpeople with proven track records and discovered what causedthem to succeed

Of course, the real test of this and other forms of practice research comes when scholars take newly discoveredvital behaviors and teach them to experimental groups Ifthey have indeed found the right behaviors, experimental sub-jects show far greater improvement in both the vital behaviors

best-and the desired outcome than do control subjects Consider

Ethna Reid’s success Studies in Maine, Massachusetts, igan, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina,Nebraska, Washington, Virginia, Hawaii, Alabama, and Cali-fornia have shown that, independent of the topic, pupils,school size, budget, or demography, changes in the vital behav-iors Reid discovered improve performance outcomes that influ-ence the entire lifetime of a child

Mich-From this best-practice research we learn two importantconcepts First, there is a process for discovering what success-ful people actually do We know what to look for when exam-ining others’ claims that they’ve found vital behaviors If the

*For more information on Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations, visit

www.vitalsmarts.com.

individuals who are offering up best practices haven’t ically compared the best to the rest, found the differentiatingbehaviors, taught these behaviors to new subjects, and thendemonstrated changes in the outcomes they care about, they’renot the people we want to learn from.

scientif-Second, in many of the areas where you’d like to exert ence, the vital behaviors research has already been done Forexample, if you want to learn how to live healthfully with typeone diabetes, two vital behaviors have already been found: Testyour blood sugar four times a day and adjust your insulin appro-priately to keep your blood glucose in control These twobehaviors substantially increase the likelihood of a normal,healthy life If you search carefully, you’ll find that good schol-ars have found the vital behaviors that solve most challengesthat affect a large number of people

influ-STUDY POSITIVE DEVIANCE

Let’s add another tool that can help us in our search for vitalbehaviors It draws from a long-tested methodology often used

in social research and is known as positive deviance To see how

this method works, we look more closely at the Guinea wormefforts conducted in Africa and Asia

The destructive pest has been largely eradicated by a egy devised by a small team at The Carter Center and Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention Leaders from The CarterCenter didn’t have the luxury Ethna Reid had of conductingcontrolled laboratory experiments It was simply not practical

strat-to study hundreds of villagers and perform statistical analyses

on behavioral differences to arrive at the vital few they wouldthen attempt to influence across the continent They had tofind a different strategy

“Positive deviance” can be extremely helpful in ing the handful of vital behaviors that will help solve the prob-lem you’re attacking That is, first dive into the center of the

discover-actual community, family, or organization you want to change.Second, discover and study settings where the targeted prob-lem should exist but doesn’t Third, identify the unique behav-iors of the group that succeeds

When members of The Carter Center team began theirassault on Guinea worm disease, they used this exact method-ology They flew into sub-Saharan Africa and searched for vil-lages that should have Guinea worm disease but didn’t Theywere particularly interested in studying villages that wereimmediate neighbors to locations that were rife with Guineaworm disease Eventually the team discovered its deviant vil-lage It was a place where people rarely suffered from the awfulscourge despite the fact that the villagers drank from the samewater supply as a nearby highly infected village

It didn’t take long to discover the vital behaviors Members

of the team knew that behaviors related to the fetching andhandling of water would be particularly crucial, so theyzeroed in on those In the worm-free village, the womenfetched water exactly as their neighbors did, but they did some-thing different when they returned home They took a secondwater pot, covered it with their skirts, and poured the water

through their skirt into the pot, effectively straining out the

problem-causing larvae Voilà! That was a vital behavior Thesuccessful villagers had invented their own eminently practi-cal solution

The team took copious notes about this and a handful ofother vital behaviors By studying the successful villagers, theteam learned that water could easily be filtered without import-ing prohibitively expensive Western solutions

To bring this a bit closer to home, let’s briefly look atsomething many people have experienced—what seems likeuncaring or insensitive medical care In this case, a large re-gional medical center’s service quality scores had been decreas-ing slowly and consistently for 13 consecutive months Clinicalquality was very good, but the scores showed that patients and

their families didn’t feel like they were being treated with care,dignity, and respect.

The chief administrator called the executive team gether He shared the data and made a proposal The question

to-he posed was this: “What do we have to do, all 4,000 of us, tofix this?” Two teams of respected employees, six to a team, wereformed Each team represented half the functions in the hos-pital The teams were chartered with finding positive deviance.Locate those health-care professionals who routinely scoredhigh on customer satisfaction in areas where others did poorly.They were not to worry about systems, pay, or carpet in theemployee lounge, but behaviors they could teach others—behaviors that were both recognizable and replicable

Each team interviewed dozens of patients and family bers and sought ideas from colleagues in their hospital Theysearched the Web and called colleagues in other hospitals Butmostly they watched exactly what top performers did to seewhat made them different from everyone else

mem-Eventually the teams identified the vital behaviors theybelieved led to higher customer satisfaction scores They foundfive: Smile, make eye contact, identify yourself, let people knowwhat you’re doing and why, and end every interaction by ask-ing, “Is there anything else that you need?”

The executives created a robust strategy to influence thesebehaviors The result? As 4,000 employees started enactingthese five vital behaviors, service-quality scores quit decreasingand improved dramatically for 12 months in a row The re-gional medical center became best-in-class among its peerswithin a year of the executives’ focus on these five vitalbehaviors

SEARCH FOR RECOVERY BEHAVIORS

To explain the next search principle, we return to the Guineaworm problem The Carter Center tackled In addition to

discovering what the successful villagers had done to avoid tracting the parasite, the team also studied what the villagersdid when an occasional worm did pop up in the village Hereteam members exemplify our third search principle: Search forrecovery behaviors People are going to make mistakes, so youhave to develop a recovery plan.

con-For instance, people in the healthier villages knew that theywere most vulnerable to the spread of the parasite when a wormstarted to emerge from a person’s body As was stated before,the infected villager’s only source of relief from the excru-ciating pain is to soak the limb in water If the villager usedthe local water supply, it would be contaminated for yet an-other year

The Carter Center team found that within the positivedeviant villages, the locals took two recovery steps to cut off thedisease cycle First, villagers had to be willing to speak up whenthey knew their neighbor was infected Once villagers realizedthat the worm came from unfiltered water, those who got theworm sometimes felt ashamed to admit their error The vitalrecovery behavior, then, was that friends and neighbors had tospeak up when the Guinea worm sufferer was unwilling to do

so Only when the community took responsibility for ance could the entire village protect itself from the failure of

compli-a single villcompli-ager This crucicompli-al converscompli-ation triggered compli-a responsefrom village volunteers that enabled the second vital behavior:During the weeks or months it takes the worm to exit the vic-tim’s body, villagers had to ensure that he or she went nowherenear the water supply

It turned out that if everyone in a village enacted these tworecovery behaviors—speaking up and keeping infected peopleaway from the water supply—for one full year, the worm would

be gone forever No new larvae would enter the water, and theGuinea worm would be extinct

These same methods for discovering positive deviance can

be applied almost anywhere We (the authors) used the

tech-niques to invigorate a massive quality effort in a large facturing organization in the United States A few hundredemployees had been through several weeks of Six Sigma train-ing (a quality improvement program aimed at eliminatingdefects as completely as possible), but the company was seeingalmost no benefit For reasons that were hard to comprehend,Six Sigma graduates didn’t appear to be applying any of the newtools they had spent weeks learning To learn what was going

manu-on, two of the authors and a handful of managers went on asearch for positive deviance We were looking for the answer

to two important questions: Had anyone in the company found

a way to put the tools to work? And if so, could other teamsapply the same techniques? It wasn’t long until we found fourteams that had enjoyed several Six Sigma successes despite thefact that most other teams were cynical about the effort and hadgiven up on employing any of the new techniques

What had the deviants done to avoid failure and the ant cynicism? When the researchers interviewed unsuccessfulteam members, they learned that their cynicism stemmed fromthree experiences First, when they offered innovative ideas,their supervisor usually shot them down Second, they had irre-sponsible teammates no one ever dealt with, and therefore theyconcluded that improvement ideas were a crock And finally,they felt powerless to question management policies or deci-sions that appeared to obstruct their improvement efforts

result-The successful teams were opposite in every respect Inthese three dicey situations, they behaved in ways that keptthem from becoming cynical Their “recovery behaviors”involved stepping up to conversations their peers avoided.Team members vigorously but skillfully challenged theirsupervisor They were candid with peers who weren’t carryingtheir weight And finally, they were capable of talking to sen-ior management—the same senior managers more cynicalpeers avoided—about policies or practices that they believedimpeded improvements

We concluded that the teams that had successfully plemented Six Sigma techniques did so not because theylearned the methods better or had received more support fromtheir bosses, but because they knew how to step up to crucialconversations.

im-The good news with positive deviance techniques is thatthese methods for uncovering vital behaviors are available toeveryone Start by examining the exact population and the set-ting you are interested in changing Next, look for people whoshould be experiencing the problem but aren’t Then discoverthe unique behaviors that separate them from the rest Whenapplying positive deviance techniques to yourself, compare

yourself to you Think back to a time when you were

success-ful, and figure out what you did that caused your success.Finally, take care to identify recovery behaviors as well

TEST YOUR RESULTS

Let’s add a word of caution With standard research methods—such as the work done by Ethna Reid—scholars compare topperformers to poor performers, codify and record behaviors, andthen have the computer tease out the answer to what causeswhat With positive deviance you typically don’t have this lux-ury Practitioners interview and watch successful subjects onsite until they think they’ve discovered how top performers dif-fer from their less successful counterparts Then they draw con-clusions about what causes success—in their heads

There’s the rub Allowing one’s brain to complete the finalcalculations can be dangerous One can easily draw bogus con-clusions With Guinea worm disease, modern medicine ex-plains the worm’s entire life cycle, so when practitionersobserved villagers filtering out larvae in their skirts or avoidingcontact with their water source when the worm was emerging,they immediately and correctly concluded that these specifictechniques eliminated the noxious worm

With something as fuzzy as the ability to talk to others abouthigh-stakes issues, it’s less clear that this precariously “soft”interpersonal skill is the primary contributor to the Six Sigmatraining taking effect Successful teams did report progress inthis area as opposed to the cynical teams, but did the ability to

talk openly actually cause the difference?

When you move from computer analysis to taking a guess

on your own, you walk precariously close to the line that arates science from everything else Crazy superstitions live offbogus conclusions Whole companies can be brought to ruinwhen leaders respond to hunches

sep-Given the inherent dangers of watching and concluding onyour own, it’s essential to immediately follow up your conclu-sions about cause and effect with a test Then you must teachyour newly discovered vital behaviors to the failed groups andsee if the behaviors you chose actually do cause the resultsyou’re trying to achieve In the Six Sigma case, we (the authors)taught the three vital behaviors across the 4,000-person factoryand saw immediate gains in the company’s Six Sigma invest-ments With the Guinea worm, The Carter Center and CDCteam has now eliminated the plague from 11 of the 20 coun-tries that were afflicted when they began the campaign.Worldwide infections have dropped by over 99 percent because

of an influence strategy that focused on three vital behaviors.Evidently, they were the right ones

TRY THIS AT HOME

How about the home version of the search game? When you’renot dealing with Guinea worms in sub-Saharan Africa or failedSix Sigma projects at a factory, you might wonder which searchtechniques, if any, could work for you personally HenryDenton—our friend who is trying to lose weight—would cer-tainly be interested in finding a handful of vital behaviors thatwould make it easier for him take the weight off