Published on: Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Power of Influence to Execute Strategy
Comments
There were tremendous learning opportunities at the 2010 World Business Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported, but, warned Joseph Grenny, the delegates were likely to confront resistance at the office when they attempted to implement new ideas and strategies.
"The challenge begins when you return to the office and have to encounter human beings," said the business strategist and bestselling author, "human beings who are often unwilling to change."
Resistance to change is such a frequently encountered problem that Grenny said he found author David Sedaris' comment telling: "I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out."
Grenny further supported his point with sobering statistics that show most change management initiatives fail. In leadership: 85 percent of corporate change efforts fail; personally: 19 out of 20 diet attempts fail; socially: criminals are re-arrested within two to three years.
There are two problems leaders face that prevent effective change management, Grenny explained:
- Strategy: What should we do?
"There's no strategy so brilliant that people can't render it worthless."(Grenny's Law of Leadership)
- Influence: How do I get everyone to do it?
"Everybody in this room has a theory of influence but most can't articulate what that theory actually is. And when we fail to execute, we're unable to improve upon our own flawed theory."
To gain some insight into your own theory of influence, Grenny posed an influence problem: "You're the manager at Air Nippon airways. If passengers used the restroom before boarding the plane, they could lighten the load by 240 pounds, reduce the carbon footprint and reduce fuel and materials costs. How do you get that to happen? Is it your inclination to influence people monetarily by charging them to use the restroom on the plane or subconsciously by playing waterfall sounds in the boarding area?"
By examining your own response, Grenny said you can determine what aspects of influence you tend to rely on and you may also see some gaps in your thinking. Grenny explains in his latest book
Influencer: The Power to Change Anything that there are two big reasons people do what they do: because they want to do something (motivation) and because they are able to do something (ability). "Leaders tend to develop motivational strategies that do little on the ability side," said Grenny. "They also tend not to understand that there are three types of motivation and ability: personal, social and structural."
Grenny's premise is that there are six sources of influence, and leaders who understand behavior from each source of influence can develop the most effective and successful influence strategies.
- Source 1: Personal motivation – do I want to do it?
- Source 2: Personal ability – can I do it?
- Source 3: Social motivation – are others encouraging me to do it?
- Source 4: Social ability – are others helping me to do it?
- Source 5: Structural motivation – is the environment right for me to do it?
- Source 6: Structural ability – does the environment support me doing it?
"Our research confirms that leaders who use all six of these sources of influence are ten times more likely to secure change," Grenny comments. "One way leaders can help people make an experiential linkage between the behavior that is being asked of them and their own core values, is to use engaging stories or recreate powerful personal experiences." It's not always comfortable to do, but it does work, he notes.
For example, Grenny showed how storytelling could engender results. He cited Dr. Don Berwick at Harvard Medical School who set out to reduce the number of lives lost in healthcare facilities due to infection. Berwick issued a challenge to the medical community to "save 100,000 lives by June 14, 2006."
Berwick charged doctors to personally investigate patient deaths and share how they occurred. The experience motivated the group of healthcare providers to change behaviors and the system, and as a result, in-patient deaths were reduced by roughly 122,000.
Berwick didn't change all the people who were involved in saving those lives. Grenny pointed out, that what Berwick did was to persuade 10 percent of the organization to change. This strategy is called influencing the opinion leaders, and Grenny pointed out that doing so will bring others along.
Additionally, Berwick's success was the result of his innate understanding of how to influence individual behavior. He began by changing his own focus and actions. As a result, those around him were intrinsically motivated to change their own behavior. "The most important person you can change is yourself," said Grenny.
Robyn Greenspan
Lessons learned from and about six-figure leadership and executive career management
