Leadership and the Subtle Science of Influence
by Lois Melbourne
When we were together at #HREvolution in Chicago this Spring, Paul Hebert, @incentintel, led a session with Jason Seiden with the objective of discussing how to influence people. I found an interesting twist to the conversation that I have not been able to get out of my head for the last couple of months. So, I have been reading and thinking and watching with this topic in mind. I feel that my thoughts might be helpful for some.
The topic about influencing continually moved to compensation and incentives. I believe some in the group had a very different perspective of these terms then I did. And, if I am going to develop myself and my managers as good leaders at Aquire, I need to figure out why! Why were they moving a conversation about influencing to incentives? They are very different things. As I listened, I figured out that several of those gravitating to incentives were recruiters who live their day in the compensation negotiation role, so they leap to money and benefits. This got a little scary for me, when I thought about the deeper consequences of recruiters – the people setting the stage for new employees, thinking that motivation and inspiration were possibly the same as incentives or $. I am glad to hear that my own staff clearly saw the difference between these terms. One of my managers thought I should create a primer of some of the confused terms.
Being more a short story teller then an academic designing primers, I put together the following scenario.
If I want you to leave the room:
- I can give you an incentive to leave the room by offering money or food if you leave the room.
- I can motivate you to leave the room by threatening to hit you if you don’t leave the room.
- I can influence you to leave the room by giving you information about why it might be better to be outside of the room.
- I can inspire you to leave the room by telling you a story about what we can achieve by helping the people in the room next door understand how reading to their children, as toddlers, helps them build their imagination, vocabulary, ability to focus and desire to have books in their lives. So, we get up and eagerly leave the room to do better things.
There is a great deal of difference among these.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a book about this topic, which Paul did encourage us to read. I had read it years ago, and in the last 2 months, it became available on the Kindle, so I am reviewing it again. I encourage anyone needing to influence people (which is everyone) to read it and better understand the power and subtle science of influence.
For even more wisdom on Influence, Paul’s website will continually educate you upon all of these nuances.
Cheers,
Lois
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Lois, thanks for sharing your thoughts – especially the story scenario -easy to visualize and retain. (I give you high marks on the The Heath bros’ “sticky” factor!) I was in the session at #HRevolution and struggled with the same thing.. influence vs. comp and incentives – very different things in my environment. I actually thought I’d misunderstood the topic for a bit but also “get” that the free flow of the conversation is the nature of the unconference. Thanks for the reminder on the book Paul had mentioned. I’ll definitely add it to my reading list!
Thank you Caryn.
I am finding this topic getting more and more deep as I watch people interact and consider their motivations and their methods. It really is educational when you start considering the intent with the methods.
Cheers,
Lois