Notes on Influencer to Change Anything_13 pdf

For instance, in the fields of leadership and interpersonal influence, students are rarelytaught specific behaviors that they can then rehearse whilereceiving detailed feedback from a tr

For instance, when it comes to your own health care,here’s an interesting best practice It’s wise to talk with your per-sonal physician with the idea that any lingering symptoms youexperience might have more than one underlying medicalcause Recent research into how doctors think reveals thatpatients who say, “Yes, it sounds like I might have X, but couldthere be something else going on as well?” are more likely toresolve their overall health problems than those who hold tothe belief that if they treat one source of the problem, they will

be fine

Left to our natural tendencies, most of us make poor use

of the vast array of the tools that can help improve performance.When it comes to complex interpersonal skills, we rarely think

to make use of deliberate practice For instance, in the fields

of leadership and interpersonal influence, students are rarelytaught specific behaviors that they can then rehearse whilereceiving detailed feedback from a trained coach In-stead, students are taught “from the neck up” a set of ideas thatrarely leads to changes in behavior

The ability to withstand yearnings and temptations is rarelyviewed as a skill Instead, the ability to overcome enticements

is routinely attributed to inherent, DNA-driven personalitycharacteristics Consequently, almost nobody actually practicesmethods for delaying gratification When people don’t believethat the ability to withstand cravings is skill based, they rely onevery source of motivation imaginable Eventually theirinevitable failure leads to depression and helplessness ratherthan a search for newer and better skills

Social capital also remains a largely untouched resource forenabling change Often we’re led to believe that battles need

to be won within the confines of one’s own heart Heroes havefirst and last names, not collective descriptors such as “team”

or “group.” Consequently, asking for help is seen as a weaknessrather as than a savvy strategy Master influencers know better.They identify those who need to be added to the change effort

in order to succeed They make use of peer influence andensure that social circles support the effort rather than get inits way

When it comes to enabling performance by making use of

the physical world, most people typically fail to even think about

this powerful and yet largely untapped source of influence Dr.William F Whyte came up with the idea of building the restau-rant order spindle when he was dealing with restaurant argu-ments, but nobody else thought of it Dr Frederick Steeleexplained this mental gaff by suggesting that most of us are envi-ronmentally incompetent We rarely see the effect the physicalenvironment is having on us, nor do we make use of environ-mental features when crafting an influence effort

In short, you must address all six sources of influence whendesigning an influence strategy Stop thinking of influence tools

as a buffet, and recognize them as a comprehensive approach

to creating systematic, widespread, and lasting change agnose both motivational and ability sources of influence, andthen lock in the results by applying individual, social, and struc-tural forces to the solution You now have a powerful six-source diagnostic tool at your fingertips Use it liberally

Di-MAKE CHANGE INEVITABLE

Let’s end on the concept of making change inevitable Morethan anything else, this characteristic sets effective influencersapart from everyone else Individuals who routinely hit their

change goals overdetermine vital behaviors in order to make

change inevitable, meaning that they routinely look at all sixsources, find methods from within each source, and continueadding new influence strategies well after others have stoppedsearching for change levers They do this for a good reason.Typically the change they’re attempting to orchestrate is soaudacious—so completely hopeless—that they pull out everyinfluence tool available

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

To see how the principles we’ve studied can be used incombination in an actual business case, let’s take a look atwhat we (the authors) once did when working with an ex-ecutive team to solve a particularly destructive problem.The leaders attempted to use each influence method we’vediscussed to deal with the company’s inability to deliver oncommitments

In this company, employees were good at making promises;

it was keeping them that gave them fits With each new

proj-ect, senior managers set clear objectives, department headsagreed to detailed specs and deadlines, and then one or moregroups fell miserably short of their goals and delayed the proj-ect This habit of always missing deadlines caused enormousproblems with customers Delays and crisis recoveries causedcosts to spiral out of control And the company’s growing rep-utation for being “long on commitment but short on fulfill-ment” was beginning to cost them dearly in the marketplace.Old customers were fleeing while new ones were becomingincreasingly difficult to find

To identify the self-defeating behaviors that were leading tofailure, a team consisting of several senior managers and theauthors conducted interviews with project managers and proj-ect team members The research team quickly discovered thatpeople were completely aware of consistent failures, as well asthe reasons for them

Fact-Free Planning One manager told us that corporate

executives would lay out plans without gathering facts aboutwhat the team was actually able to accomplish If they did askfor input, it was just a joke because they already had the dead-line in their heads The manager explained, “More often thannot, we know from the onset that we’re going to fail because

we don’t have sufficient resources Watching one of our ects unfold is like watching a ‘slow-motion train wreck.’ You

proj-know that your project is going to end in disaster, and all youcan do is sit back and watch it tumble off the track.”

Project Chicken Another manager explained how the

team played the same pernicious game we discussed earlier “Inevery planning and follow-up meeting,” she said, “project man-agers say they’re right on spec and schedule, while in truththey’re quietly praying that someone else will admit that he orshe is behind schedule so that person will take the heat whileeveryone else is given a reprieve It’s a deadly game that pitsmanagers against one another in a way that eventually crushesour customers.”

AWOL Sponsors Finally, we found that the organization’s

projects suffered when project sponsors were absent without

leave Each project was assigned a senior leader whose job it

was to sponsor the project The sponsor was supposed to helpguide the project through the organization as they and otherleaders competed for resources If there was a problem, it wasthe sponsor’s job to seek additional resources as required,update key personnel, and otherwise smooth the skids The trouble in this organization was that sometimessponsors wouldn’t show up for meetings, wouldn’t enforceagreements with other departments, and would fail to alignother leaders behind the teams’ decisions The project teamwas left hanging, and the project would inevitably come tonothing

One project, for example, burned up thousands of hours and over a million dollars in precious resources, butended up on the scrap heap at the end The most painfulpart of the failure, however, wasn’t just the loss of time andmoney It was that halfway into the project everyone knew

person-it was doomed because the sponsor was doing nothing toenforce commitments, gain support from stakeholders, andmaintain accountability Everyone would show up to projectmeetings, but they’d just play with their BlackBerries becausethey knew the meetings were irrelevant!

Search for Vital Behaviors

To discover what it would take to turn around this culture offear and failure, we asked if there were any project managers

or team leaders who consistently hit their deadlines, and if so,

if we could watch them in action It turned out there were So

we and the executive team studied these positive deviants

While studying these accomplished project managers, webegan to see why they hit their goals when others didn’t Forinstance, in one key meeting we watched a positive deviantdeal with Fact-Free Planning A senior executive had commit-ted to a deadline without ensuring that the organization coulddeliver When confronted with her misstep, the executivebecame very defensive She threatened to outsource the proj-ect if the internal team “didn’t have the commitment required.” That was when the magic happened We watched this skill-ful project manager deal with the defensive executive, refuse

to respond in kind, and calmly create a sense of shared purposebetween the project team and the executive The manager leftthe room with the backing of the executive for a far more real-istic plan and, more importantly, with an agreement on howfuture project commitments would be made

Watching this woman along with other positive deviants

showed us that the vital behaviors for project success involved dealing with what we later called “crucial conversations.” In fact,

we’ve found that being able to successfully hold crucial sations is frequently the vital behavior behind change (Our book

conver-Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High

teaches a very common set of vital behaviors—the ability to speakand be heard and encourage others to do the same, no matterhow controversial, political, or unpopular one’s views.)

Having found our vital behaviors in this particular zation (the ability to hold crucial conversations about Fact-FreePlanning, Project Chicken, and AWOL Sponsors), it was ourjob to use every means within our control to ensure the results

organi-they wanted What would it take to get everyone to enact thesebehaviors and eventually turn the culture around?

Change How You Change Minds

We knew one thing for certain: Verbal persuasion wasn’t going

to offer much help Telling people that they needed to speak

up when they disagreed with a person in authority or had badnews sounded more like, “You need to naively expose yourproblems, put your career at risk, and be seen as a whiney non-team player So go ahead—who wants to be first?”

What we needed to do was find a way to help peoplechange two specific views First, they had to believe they couldindeed speak frankly without looking like rebels or wimps.Second, they had to believe that if they did effectively sharetheir contrary or controversial ideas, they and their colleagueswould make the right choices about deadlines and resources,and eventually they’d be able to actually hit their goals

MAKE CHANGE INEVITABLE

To replace their existing fears with a growing sense of dence, employees didn’t need a lecture; they needed to

confi-improve their actual skills (Personal Ability) To do so we took

the rather complex behaviors demonstrated by those who knewhow to make it safe to talk about just about anything, and fol-lowed the tenets of deliberate practice We broke the skills intolearnable parts and provided positive examples As individualspracticed the new skills within a protected training environ-ment, they were given immediate feedback from a coach.Finally, as they grew their competence they began to believethat they could indeed speak their minds without taking a hugerisk

But we didn’t stop there We took care to connect the newlyacquired skill set to the trainees’ sense of who they wanted to

be as well as to their core values (Personal Motivation) People

weren’t being asked to learn skills merely because it was the est “flavor of the month;” they were being given the chance tobecome the person they preferred to be Nobody wanted to playproject chicken—essentially lying about their readiness whilewishing the worst on their peers Consequently, as part of thetraining experience people openly discussed the existing culture,how it violated their values, and what it would take to become

lat-a functioning telat-am composed of professionlat-als rlat-ather thlat-an, well,

a group of people who had originally described their culture asone built on lies and deception

In addition, we gave team leaders a firsthand view of thehuman consequences of AWOL sponsorship and fact-freeplanning We had them spend a weekend in development—seeing the problems thoughtless deadlines and lack of supportfrom leadership created for the personal lives of those who had

to meet the deadlines At one point, an operations managerconfessed that his marriage was about to collapse because hehad not been home a full weekend for over a year Members

of the leadership team left with a whole new level of moralengagement

To provide additional motivation to learn and implementthe vital behaviors, we tapped into the social support system

(Social Motivation) First we identified opinion leaders and

asked them to help lead the influence effort They were the first

to go through the training By learning firsthand that the ing could help them resolve real problems they had been fight-ing for years—and then seeing the enormous benefit oflearning and implementing the skills—opinion leaders openlyencouraged their coworkers to take part in the training and putthe skills into play To transform mere words into a vicariousexperience, several told stories of how the skills had helpedthem work through a touchy discussion

train-To further enable each employee to routinely use the skills,the training was always taught in intact teams by the team’s

immediate supervisor (Social Ability) The supervisor would

begin by forming participants into teams of three After thetraining was complete, the teams met and discussed what theywere doing to catch and solve problems early They often gath-ered over lunch, where members helped each other preparefor an upcoming high-stakes conversation

Managers provided additional incentive to routinely step up

to and master the vital behaviors by including the target iors in performance reviews linked to the annual bonus

behav-(Structural Motivation) Employees were now measured against

the skills that were taught in the training In addition, 25 cent of senior executives’ bonuses were pegged to whether or notthey measurably improved the vital behaviors across the orga-nization That put real teeth into the intervention

per-Finally, to make good use of the physical environment,every meeting room displayed a poster that reviewed the skillsemployees were supposed to bring into play when they faced

problems with project management (Structural Ability) Leaders

also included a short list of the vital skills at the top of theirprinted agenda as a way of reminding themselves to review one

or more elements in each meeting And then, to make good use

of the power of propinquity, two groups that routinely went at ithammer-and-tong were moved to the same work area where con-stant interaction helped them become far more collaborative

By carefully considering each of the principles we’ve ered in this book, this particular change team was able to over-come what had been an overwhelming problem We know thatthey succeeded because we measured the results By taking apre-measure of the vital behaviors and then correlatingimprovements in the behavior with key performance indicators,the research team discovered that not only did the use of vitalbehaviors increase substantially, but for each percentageincrease in the use of the vital behaviors, there was a $1.5 mil-lion improvement in productivity Quality and customer satis-faction measures were similarly affected by improvements in

cov-the vital behaviors By applying each of cov-the influence ples and strategies we’ve studied—and not just one or twomethods—the change team was able to resolve what had been

princi-a mprinci-assive princi-and resistprinci-ant problem They hprinci-ad become genuineinfluencers

AN INVITATION FROM THE AUTHORS

Influencers not only overdetermine their results, but they alsorarely work alone Massive problems require a community ofinfluencers working in concert As an increasing number ofpeople apply the works of Bandura, Silbert, Hopkins, Berwick,and other influence experts to problems of every kind, new andvibrant influence communities are springing up each day

By working with others to bring every influence tool inable to bear on their problems, this growing community ofexperts has taught us not to be too quick to pray for serenity.They have shown us that the combined power of their influ-ence tools is far greater than the sum of the individual parts.While turning criminals and addicts into healthy citizens, sav-ing millions of lives, turning companies around, and annihi-lating deadly diseases, they have taught us one of the mostimportant lessons we can ever learn When you understand theforces behind any behavior, along with the strategies to change

imag-it, you hold within your grasp the power to change anything.You too can find strength in numbers by joining the grow-ing community of world-class influencers Start by visiting our

Web site at influencerbook.com, where we’ll provide you with

a worksheet to help you prepare for and organize your nextinfluence project At this site you can blog with other students

of influence who are working to solve challenges similar toyours You’ll also be able to learn more about vital behaviorsand six-source strategies, and view short segments of interviewswith a few of the influencers you’ve already met in this book

Finally, if you’d like to take a measure of your existing ence skills, the site offers a self-assessment that not only givesyou a view into your existing influence repertoire but can alsohelp you develop the next steps for becoming an effective influ-encer Enjoy!