Personal influence can be a slippery or vague concept to wrap your head around. Is it something you are either born with or without, or can it be dissected, analyzed and learned?
Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential
a) personal influence is primarily a product of the reaction you engender in others, and
b) their perception is a product of the two dimensions of strength and warmth, and
c) using these two dimensions as a lens, you can make adjustments to your own approach to make yourself more influential.
Personal influence is primarily a product of the reaction you engender in others
As we’ve seen before, Aristotle said that ethos is the most important component of persuasion. Quite simply, people are willing to listen, learn and act depending on how they feel about the source. If they respect or fear the source, they will go along as long as the power remains. If they like the source, they might be more willing to be persuaded as long as it doesn’t go against their own interests.[1] Respect and liking together make for admiration and it can accomplish great things. So, how do you get there?
Understand the critical components of strength and warmth
Strength is the perception of your ability plus the will to get things done, and it’s critical to influence, because people won’t follow your lead on important matters if they see you as ignorant or weak. Yet strength by itself can only coerce or intimidate.
Warmth is empathy and concern for others. Warmth can get people to like you and want to do things for you, but warmth by itself can also get people to walk all over you.
The ideal leader or influencer is seen as both strong and warm. As that great influencer Al Capone said, “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.”
The problem is that strength and warmth are fundamentally in tension with each other. Dial up strength, and you risk being seen as cold or uncaring. Dial up warmth, and you might be seen as vulnerable.
Viewing persuasive influence through the dimensions of strength and warmth is like putting on polarized lenses, letting you see under the surface to the process below. In the week or so since I read the book, I’ve started seeing the relative amounts of either dimension in interpersonal contacts, both my own and others’. For another example, the controversy about relationship selling vs. challenger selling is fundamentally about the relative importance of each dimension.
That clearer view is what allows you to be smart about any adjustments that you need to make.
Dial up strength and warmth as needed
The bulk of the book is a practical “how-to”; once you have analyzed how you come across, you can figure out how to dial up each dimension. Although a lot of the recommendations are things you’ve probably seen before, they are explained comprehensively, clearly, and usefully. The main section of the book treats the nuts and bolts of influence, including nonverbal and verbal communication. The last section addresses how to use the ideas in the real world, such as in the workplace, in public speaking, even on-line.
You’ll have to read the book to get the individual recipes, but there are two critical messages in the how-to section. The first is that, although strength and warmth are largely determined by the hand you are dealt through genetics and upbringing, there is still a lot that you can change and control if you decide to. You can change behaviors and habits through knowledge and hard work, using the techniques described.
The second important theme is that there are two routes to those changes. One is outside-in, just doing things differently. For example, standing up straighter and taking up more space will not only make you look stronger, it can actually make you feel more powerful. It’s called embodied cognition, although most of us know it as “fake it ‘til you make it.” The inside-out route is more effective in the long term; if you change the way you feel inside, you will change your outward behaviors, e.g. the best way to show people you like them is to actually like them better. This sounds superficially obvious and difficult at the same time, but there are techniques described in the book that can help change your frame of mind.
If you’re still stuck on a gift idea for the influencer on your list (even if it’s yourself) I strongly and warmly recommend Compelling People.
[1] Machiavelli addressed this tension by asking whether it’s better for the prince to feared or loved. He concluded that it’s better to be feared, because people are quick to set aside their affection if they see the opportunity for gain or if they fear someone else more. But even Machiavelli acknowledged the importance of warmth by cautioning that even though a prince does not have to be loved, he should also not be hated.
Who knows where the next good idea may come from?
Last week I wrote about the rare and valuable intrapreneurial sales professional. One of the defining features of ISPs is their ability to generate insights and capture new value. Just like entrepreneurs, the first quality that most people think of when they describe them is their ability to generate good ideas, maybe because they see things that others don’t.
In the next article of this series, we will see that the ability to think of good ideas may be the least important factor in intrapreneurial success, but you do have to start somewhere; you can’t grow a tree without a seed.
So, how does the would-be intrapreneur find ideas?
Salespeople are in a great strategic position to know what’s going on outside and inside their own companies. On the outside, they spot ideas by being creatively dissatisfied with the status quo, or productively paranoid, if you will; by listening closely to customers without relying entirely on what they say they want and need; by constantly asking questions such as these:
- What else can we do for the customer?
- How can we improve the results they get from doing business with us?
- How can we improve their experience of doing business with us?
- What could cause us to lose this critical account?
- Why are we not doing business with customer X?
- If we lost this customer today, what would we have to change to get them back?
- Why do we do things this way?
- Why don‘t we do things that way?
- If I got a job with our biggest competitor, how would I steal this account?
But of course customers are not the only source of valuable ideas, which is why successful intrapreneurs also stick their noses into areas within their own company where they don’t belong. They find out what’s going on in R&D and Marketing and anywhere else there might be good ideas. They’re the ones who seem to know everyone else in the company and they seem to be the first to know the latest gossip and major news before it’s officially announced.
Finally, since one of the best ways to generate new thinking is to connect ideas from unrelated fields, intrapreneurs are curious about everything else outside their own and customer’s circles. They read widely, talk to a lot of different people, and pay attention to the world around them, to the economy, and to their own industry.
In short, sales intrapreneurs are curious, imaginative, and paranoid. But that’s just a start, as we’ll see in the next article in this series.
Presentations rarely go exactly as planned, and one of the most common reasons is the incredible—and inevitable—shrinking time slot. You prepare a half-hour presentation because you’ve been told that’s how much time you will have. But unlike you, the previous presenter showed up late or rambled on past their allotted time, and now you have to pay the price.
The meeting sponsor asks if you can give the presentation in 15 minutes instead of 30, and you agree because you really don’t have a choice.
Faced with this challenge, most speakers react in one of three unsatisfactory ways:
- They talk reallyreallyreally fast
- They go on at the same pace with same material, and just stop early
- If they have time, they go through their slides in a panic and figure out which points to leave out
There’s a better way—structure your presentation so that it is scalable.
In its simplest form, a business presentation has an introduction, middle and end. In most cases, you can keep the beginning and end relatively unchanged. You may need to strip out some of the context out of the beginning and forgo the summary at the end, but neither of those will affect the length too much.
To make the middle of the presentation scalable, picture it as a pyramid, with a key message supported by three main points (although the exact number is of course flexible).
In the topical structure, you may have three supporting reasons to accept your theme, each supported by evidence and supporting reasons of its own. For example, the first reason might be that it will increase revenues. Supporting that might be the three ways that it will increase revenues, each illustrated or supported by stories, statistics, and such. In effect, you end up with a pyramid structure.
It does not have to be a topical structure to work. For example, your three main points may be problem description, causes and recommended solutions. Or yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Depending on how you create your presentation, each of the three main points could be a certain slide design, and the supporting evidence could be shown on slides with a different heading style, for example. That will allow you to go quickly through your slides in slide sorter view and hide the bottom level of the pyramid. Leave out the detail but keep the basic structure intact. If people ask for the detail, you can remind them that you don’t have time to provide it but will be glad to leave the complete set of slides or answer questions off line.
The point is that if you leave off the base of a pyramid, you still have a pyramid.
There’s an added advantage to designing your presentations this way. Your own structure and reasoning become much clearer, both for you and for the audience, and that clarity always pays credibility dividends.
By the way, especially when presenting to busy decision makers, it’s a good idea to tell them up front what decision you’re going to ask them to make. They’re pretty quick studies, and they’ll either tell you when they’ve heard enough, or they will tell you what they need to hear to say yes.
I read an average of two books a week, and have done so all my adult life. (Before then, I read even more.) Not only that, but when I really relate to a topic, I write notes in the margins and highlight important parts, and because most of what I read is non-fiction, one would think that I have filled my head with close to 3,000 books worth of information, knowledge, and maybe even some accidentally accumulated bits of wisdom.
The problem is that apparently my mind has been like a river, with a torrent of information flowing through it but very little staying behind in deep pools of knowledge. To give you an example of how bad it can be, on a recent trip I read Roy Baumeister’s book, Willpower. I found the book fascinating and full of good sense, but I also had the strange feeling that some of the stories were vaguely familiar. When I returned home I checked my bookshelves and discovered that I already owned a copy of the book which I had read a couple of years before and filled with highlights—many of them the same exact ones that I highlighted this time!
So, while it’s great to constantly refresh your stocks of knowledge, I’ve learned that there is a huge difference between lifelong learning and lifelong reading.
It’s an illusion of learning. When I read a book and the ideas make sense, it’s easy to fool myself into thinking that just because I get it now, I will still have it when I need it. You probably remember your school days when everything seemed so clear while you were studying but you could not bring it to mind when you needed it for the test.
Like so much in life, things seem easy until you actually put them to the test. That’s when you find the gaps and weaknesses in your understanding, when you realize how little of what you have read or heard has actually stuck in your mind. If you can’t remember it or apply it when you need it, the time you have invested in learning it the first time has been wasted.
Just like a wild river needs to be dammed to capture the benefit of its power, the secret to retention and understanding is testing. Don’t wait for others to test you, or for life to test you, test yourself. Test yourself by trying to explain it aloud, either to someone else or just to yourself. You can also write down a summary of the ideas, and then go back and check yourself.
Researchers have compared various learning strategies, including highlighting, or reading the same material several times, and have found that the single most effective method of really learning is testing. That’s because when we pull something out of memory, it’s not like opening that drawer in our minds where we stuffed the information—the memory is reconstructed each time we need it. The more we reconstruct it, the easier it is. Testing yourself strips away the illusion of learning and exposes what you do or don’t know.
But testing doesn’t just test—it teaches. It teaches in the same way that lifting a heavy weight several times to failure makes you stronger. You have to find your limits in order to exceed them which is why when testing yourself, the best thing you can do is fail. If you haven’t failed you haven’t found your limits. Failure doesn’t cost you anything, except a little extra time—but that time makes all the difference.
How would you apply this? After you read a page or a chapter or even a whole book (depending on the density and difficulty of the information), set aside a few minutes and try to explain the key ideas out loud or on paper. Explain does not mean a bullet-point listing of the key points. It’s an actual description using full sentences that links the ideas together in narrative or causal links. If you have trouble remembering a key piece of information, resist the temptation to check back—really test yourself by trying to fill in the missing pieces to make complete sense. Then, go back and check yourself. When you find you’ve left out a key point, try again.
It can be devilishly hard to do the first few times, but it does get easier. After you’ve done it enough times, you’ll find that the nature of your reading or listening will also change. You will begin mentally organizing the information in ways that will be easier to retain and call to mind when you need them.
