No matter where you are in the organizational food chain, you probably have to exert influence to get your job done. In the book, Influencer, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler the authors explore how to master six factors sources of influence. These sources of influence are based on the premise that almost all of the profound, pervasive and persistent problems that we face in our lives and in our organizations can be solved; all they require is for people to act differently.
Although not everyone will become a prominent influencer, everyone can learn and apply the methods and strategies the world’s best influencers use every day. This book shares those methods and strategies, as well as the principles and skills these leading influencers use to bring about important changes – both in their personal lives and in their organizations. Here is the first of six sources of influence.
1. Personal motivation: How can you get people to do things that they find loathsome, boring, insulting or painful? If you can find a way to make a healthy behavior intrinsically satisfying, or an unhealthy behavior inherently undesirable, then you wouldn’t need to continue applying pressure to change. Instead, the behavior would carry its own motivational power. There are two ways of helping people change their reaction to a previously neutral or noxious behavior: creating new experiences and creating new motives.
a. Create new experiences. Sometimes people don’t like the idea of a new behavior simply because they lack adequate information to judge it correctly. So, one way to create new experiences is to get people to try the new behavior. Simply immerse them in the activity. Oftentimes people will learn to like certain behaviors if they give them a fair chance.
In addition, one of the keys to motivation lies in the mastery of ever-more challenging goals. Almost any activity can be made more engaging if it involves reasonably challenging goals and clear, frequent feedback. These are the elements that turn a chore into something that feels more like a game.
b. Create new motives. What do you do when neither the activity itself nor the feedback the activity produces are inherently pleasant or motivating? People stimulate internal motivation to engage in an unpleasant activity by investing themselves in it. They make the activity an issue of personal significance. They set high standards of who they’ll be, high enough to create a worthy challenge, and then they work hard to become that very person.
When confronting the demands of the moment, people often react to their emotions instead of acting on their values and principles. The challenge facing influence masters is to help people see their choices as moral quests or as personally defining moments, and they must keep this perspective despite distractions and emotional stress. The only way to stop disconnecting ourselves from our moral grounding is to reconnect possible behaviors to the larger moral issues; if we don’t, we will continue to allow the emotional demands of the moment to drive our actions and we will make short-term, myopic choices.
One way to reengage people morally – and to rehumanize targets that people readily and easily abuse – is to drop labels and substitute names. Confront self-serving and judgmental descriptions of other people and groups.
The best way to help individuals reconnect their existing unhealthy behaviors to their long-term values is to stop trying to control their thoughts and behaviors. Replace judgment with empathy, and lectures with questions. You can influence even a resistant group of people if you’re willing to surrender control. Instead, talk with them about what they want. Allow them to discover on their own the links between their current behavior and what they really want.
Watch for the next five sources of influence in upcoming articles at CausePlanet.org. Read more about Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by subscribing to Page to Practice™ book summaries. Or, purchase this or one of our other Page to Practice™ executive summaries by visiting the CausePlanet summary store. We welcome your comments on this book or any of our others on our CausePlanet blog. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
