Influencing yourself and others to achieve results

DELVING DEEPER 
Joseph Grenny on influencing yourself and others to achieve results
Over the past 20 years Joseph Grenny has taught and advised more than 100,000 leaders from all over the world.  His experience – combined with the latest research – has led Grenny to develop what he calls “six sources of influence.”  In this exclusive interview, Grenny discusses these six sources and how they can give you the power to change anything. 

Over the past 20 years Joseph Grenny has taught and advised more than 100,000 leaders from all over the world on how to get the best out of themselves and others.  His experience – combined with the latest research in behavioral economics and the social sciences – has led Grenny to develop what he calls “six sources of influence.”  He contends that these sources of influence – if carefully and consistently nurtured – will provide you with a systematic strategy for executing on influence and give you the power to change anything.  Read on to learn more.
Interview by Chris Stanley

Why is influence so important to business leaders?If you think of problems like an iceberg, business leaders face problems both above and below the water line.  Those above the water line are the visible problems of setting strategy and policy, developing new products, creating processes.  These are the visible, tangible, tactile challenges that they need to generate solutions to.  The problems below the water line tend to deal with behavior in the organization - things that are not always visible and apparent, but that profoundly affect the ability to execute on the elements that are above the water line. Of the two, the below the water line problems tend to be the more profound, persistent, and the most resistant to change.  And leaders tend to have the fewest tools for solving them.

So what would you say are the typical characteristics of a great influencer?There are two big things that people need to do to be effective at influencing change. 
Firstly they need to have a robust and proper way of understanding today’s behavior.  For example, if they need to improve service quality, the first thing that leaders do is they start rolling out a change strategy without deeply understanding the behavior that they are confronting.  If employees are lethargic, disinterested or resistant, leaders tend not to have a very robust way of thinking about the root causes of that resistance.
Secondly they need to have a robust way of creating an influence strategy. We’ve spent 25 years studying the best that social science has to offer and also looking at the best practitioners on the planet to see how they create effective, rapid, profound and sustainable behavior change across an organization.  We found that the measure of the potential effectiveness of an influence strategy is the degree to which it reflects six sources of influence.

What are these six sources of influence?There are two big reasons people do what they do - because they want to do something and because they can do something.  What leaders tend to do is develop motivation strategies that do very little on the ability side. They also tend not to understand that there are three types of motivation and ability: personal, social and structural.



Personal motivation and ability looks at ‘Do I want to" and "Can I?"  When leaders are creating change strategies, they tend to focus on just personal motivation. They are trying to convince people that they ought to something.  What they don’t understand is there are social and structural factors that profoundly affect whether people want to do something and whether they are capable of doing it.
Social motivation looks at whether my leaders, peers, direct reports and others are encouraging me and praising me or discouraging me and getting in my way.  On the social ability side, the same is true - are people throwing up barriers or providing me with the help and resources that I need?
Finally there"s structural motivation - rewards and incentives; and structural ability - the design of the organization and the resources that are systematically made available.
All six of these affect any behavior.  They enter into your choices about what you are going to eat today or whether you stick with the diet or not.  They enter into whether you show up to work on time or not and whether you stay engaged all day long.  If leaders don’t know how to think about all six of these systematically and most importantly draw upon all six of them, they fail more often than not in affecting the problems below the water line. We have found that leaders who use all six of these sources of influence were ten times more likely to see change succeed.



So let’s talk about some of these sources in a little bit more detail. The first one you mentioned is personal motivation. So how would you go about motivating someone to do something they don’t want to do?
Generally positive behaviors are less common than negative behaviors.  So how do you get people to engage in positive behavior?   The answer is that leaders have to help people make an experiential linkage between the behavior that is being asked of them and their own core values.  When we say experiential we mean that it does not require a lecture or some sort of verbal persuasion.  Leaders need to use engaging stories or recreate powerful personal experiences to help people to anchor the new behavior, and they tend not to be very comfortable with that.

Can you give me an example of this working in practice?
Yes, absolutely. We looked at supervisors in a fast food chain who were just trying to get employees to pick up a broom and brush up the dining area during slow periods. You would think that this is a particularly insignificant behavior and that it would be difficult to create a sense of vigor and passion about it.  We found that those who were successful in counseling employees and changing behavior did so by describing customer experiences that were particularly dissatisfying in a way that was quite animated to the employee. So for example a manager spoke to an employee who was not very engaged in brushing up the dining area and described how twenty minutes earlier he had seen a mother come in with her two year old daughter.  The mother had gone to order food while the two year old daughter sat at the table sweeping her arm across all of the debris and smears of ketchup that the previous guest had left, putting her hand to her mouth and licking it off. This created such a sense of disgust in the 17 year old employee that he didn’t need to be told to go out and clean the dining area; he felt a moral compulsion to go out and do it. So even with mundane behaviors like that, using stories can create a sense of moral motivation that profoundly affects people’s choices.

What are some of the challenges that leaders face in harnessing social pressure in a positive way, that doesn’t create resentment within teams?
The first mistake leaders make is that they don’t target their influence towards the opinion leaders.  They tend to try to just diffuse their attention across the entire employee population.  But the leader’s job is to persuade ten per cent of the organization, and the opinion leaders will bring everybody else along. Leaders ought to focus their attention on this unique population.
The second mistake is that when leaders do try to engage opinion leaders, they usually work with suck ups rather than real opinion leaders.  For example if you are rolling out a big new quality program or a customer service program, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is go out and ask for volunteers.  The people who volunteer tend to be the ones who are least socially credible in the organization, and that is the death of your effort.

Have you any evidence of the effectiveness of employing these six sources of influence?Yes, we have studied over a thousand organizations and their attempts to bring about change.  This very broad systematic strategy showed differences of an order of magnitude of 1000% when organizations started to employ all six sources of influence. These aren"t marginal differences that made some incremental change. The six sources of influence describe the physics of change.  If you are not using all of these elements you shouldn’t expect to see real significant behavior change occur.

We’ve talked a lot about influence within businesses and organizations and change management in organizations. How does influence work on a more personal level?  If I want to convince my boss that I want a pay rise for example, how might that work, how might I go about doing that successfully?
The first is that you need to realize that your boss will decide to give you a raise not just when he or she is motivated to do it but also when he or she is able. So you will have to be able to deal with both the motivational and the ability side. Often when we try to influence our boss we are just thinking about making him realize they should give us the pay rise but not realizing that they can’t. The people who are the most persuasive are the ones that make arguments that deal with the ability side as well. So if my boss says he’s only got budget for a 2 percent pay increase across the entire team, I have to deal with the ability side of that as well.  I either have to add additional value or demonstrate where additional money is. Thinking in this way opens up other avenues that help me to be more persuasive and effective with others as well.

How do you view the internet and technology in general as a tool for influencing people’s behavior?
In general technology over the past 20 years has done more to feed impulses than values.  In spite of the fact that it has been a wonderful enabler of information access, the kind of personal behavior that it has promoted has largely been negative.  It has caused people to be more isolated at times.  We are using social networking rather than social get-togethers.  In many cases we respond to the impulses of text messages or cell phones and email as opposed to organized thought.  Yet I think that the potential is there for technology to be profoundly helpful in helping people to create self-directed change. This is one of the next big projects that we are involved with the support of Dr. Albert Bandura at Stanford who stands as quite a pioneer in this field.  Our next big project is to try to harness all six sources of influence through the use of technology to help people to create more self-directed change.

Source : HSM Global