Becoming a Person of Infl uence77
a new product, rather than duplicating efforts, for example, or if you take
on an initiative to standardize a process across the company. This is where
your efforts to build trust and credibility really begin to pay off for you as
a leader.
Managing these collaborations can be challenging, however, especially
if you work in a company with units or systems that operate in isolation
from one another. Your peers don’t necessarily know you, so you haven’t
had the opportunity to earn their trust. What’s more, their business cul-
tures, priorities, goals, and incentives probably differ from yours. To align
your efforts:
Identify key players.
If you’re tasked w ith collaborating with people in a dif ferent unit, take some
time to understand them and who their stakeholders are. How are they
perceived in the organization? Who else has relevant positional power?
Who has personal power with or over the people you’re ultimately trying to
persuade? What are the personality issues in play? Who is likely to under-
mine your efforts if they feel you’re encroaching on their unit’s territory?
Don’t be afraid of including the latter group in your conversations; they’ll
cause you more trouble off the team than on it. Be willing to acknowledge
other people of infl uence in the organization and join forces.
Understand their incentives.
Make sure the motivations of this team are aligned with the change you’re
trying to make. Learn about the performance goals of team members from
other groups and look for areas where there are likely to be confl icts with
the initiative you are proposing. Consider how you will mitigate them. Are
there other incentives you can invoke? Material help or information for one
of their projects? Intangibles like status, respect, or pride? Visibility and
involvement in strategic initiatives can have a persuasive effect.
Carve out time to collaborate.
Formalize your initiative by creating a team with a defi ned membership
and mission: “I’m inviting all the engineering and HR managers together
78Managing Yourself
so we can talk about a problem we’re all facing—how to improve diversity
in our workforce.” If you’re collaborating with people outside your chain
of command, keep the meetings casual and under the radar or look for an
ally higher up who will sanction your work. In either case, let people know
that you value their input and look forward to collaborating with them on
the initiative.
Adopt a negotiator’s mindset.
The individuals on your cross-unit team may not share the same goals,
but you surely have some common ground. Focus on interests rather than
positions: What’s most important to your opponents? Don’t get hung up
on what you can’t do for them; think creatively about what you can do that
they might value. What value do they bring to the table? What good ideas
do they have that you never considered?
Avoid using positional power in these situations unless absolutely neces-
sary. Personal power can be much more infl uential in terms of securing
interest and collaboration from others.
Promoting your ideas to others
We’ve talked about how to garner and leverage personal power to become
a person of infl uence in your organization. As with the mechanics of infl u-
ence, which depend on understanding your audience’s point of view, the
same principles of persuasion apply when you want to argue for a specifi c
idea, plan, or business case.
The fi rst step: determine whether an appeal to your audience’s hearts
or their minds will be more effective. “Heart” here means their emotional
center, the hopes, fears, and memories that shape their attitudes. An ap-
peal to people’s minds, on the other hand, speaks directly to their reasoning
power. While hearts and minds are both important targets for persuasion,
it’s better to use one or the other to frame your initial discussion. You’ll be
most persuasive if you tailor your case as narrowly as you can to your audi-
Becoming a Person of Infl uence79
ence by making a calculation about whether logic or emotion is going to be
most effective.
Focus on two questions. First, how personal is the issue at hand to
your audience? If you’re broaching a topic that’s tied up in their identity
or their vested interests, you should be prepared for a strong emotional re-
sponse that even they might not understand. You’ll need to work through,
or at least disarm, this reaction to bring them around to your point of view,
so come ready to address their hearts. On the other hand, if they don’t have
much at stake in the decision or if they’re good at keeping their egos in
check, they’ll likely respond well to straight reasoning.
Second, where are you in the decision-making process? If you’re at an
active decision point and you’re trying to win votes, lean hard on logic. If
you’re trying to solicit interest early on or get buy-in after the fact, emo-
tions are a better target.
As you make your assessment, avoid sweeping generalizations about
gender or function. Don’t follow persistent biases; for example, that women
are more emotional than men, or that fi nance people only respond to cold,
hard facts.
For some more specifi c scenarios, see exhibit 5-1.
Once you know whether you’re targeting your audience’s hearts or
minds, you can tailor your argument accordingly.
EXHIBIT
Winning employees’ hearts or minds
Win hearts when . . . Win minds when . . .
• You’re introducing a new idea and trying to
pique interest.
• You want to raise the bar on performance or
commitment.
• You’re leading a team that is struggling with
discord or confl ict.
• You’re presenting something that’s disruptive
to the listener’s sense of self.
• You’re talking to people who are in a height-
ened emotional state.
• You need to gain support for a decision that’s
already been made.
• You’re talking to people who won’t feel person-
ally implicated by what you have to say.
• You’re presenting a correction to the facts
under lying a decision.
• You need to address a highly complex or techni-
cal set of problems.
• You want to help an overwhelmed team stop
overanalyzing and see a situation clearly.
• You’re trying to change direction on something
previously decided.
80Managing Yourself
Winning hearts
To draw out your audience’s emotional response in service of your ar-
gument:
Make it personal.
Your argument needs a “hook”—an opening idea that goes right to the
heart of what your listeners care about. What’s in it for them? What frus-
trations will your proposal remove, what excitements will it draw on? Ad-
dress people directly, and when you talk about the overall benefi ts for the
organization, tailor your pitch to the things that matter most to them. For
example: “I know we’re all worried about job security as our company looks
for a buyer. The initiative I’m proposing will make our whole unit more
valuable to the organization—and to any buyer.”
Speak explicitly to a big emotion.
Fear, anger, betrayal, pride, ambition, joy—these feelings come from an in-
tensely personal place. If your listeners are resisting change because they’re
afraid of trying something new, validate that emotion and then disarm it:
“Changing how we do this will be scary, because we’ll all have to learn
something new and risk failure. But we’re all in the same boat here: we can
learn together and support each other while we make mistakes.”
Tell a story.
Stories bring your ideas alive. They grab your audience’s attention with
riveting plots and characters that individual listeners can relate to, evok-
ing powerful emotions. They also simplify complex ideas. Think about Ae-
sop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The moral of that story is a fairly
subtle idea about the costs of lying, not that it’s bad or that it doesn’t work,
but that it harms us down the line when others learn to disbelieve even
our truths. But everyone who hears that story intuitively and emotionally
knows what it means. Good stories stay in our minds because they force us
to draw out the meaning for ourselves.
Becoming a Person of Infl uence81
Use metaphors and analogies.
Metaphors represent overarching worldviews that shape people’s everyday
perceptions and actions, such as “Business is war.” Analogies are compari-
sons that include the words “like” or “as”: “Finishing this project was like
climbing a mountain in a snowstorm.” You can use both of these rhetorical
tools to give people a new, vivid way of thinking about a familiar idea. A
good metaphor or analogy strikes like lightning, illuminating your point of
view without overexplaining or belaboring your point.
Winning minds
If you’ve chosen a strategy that focuses on the logic of the argument, try
these tactics:
Present compelling evidence.
Variety is impressive, but you want to focus on the kinds of proof that your
audience is most likely to care about. Listeners who care about expert en-
dorsements will like testimonials, while statistics will work on audiences
who work with numbers or who want to quantify the big picture. Data vi-
suals can be very powerful with wide audiences—slides, fl ip charts, video
clips, or product samples.
Ask striking questions.
Questions stimulate your listeners’ attention and invite them to contrib-
ute— in a controlled way—to the point you’re making. Disturbing ques-
tions focus their attention on their most pressing problems (“How many
sales did we lose to last week’s software malfunction?”), while leading
questions infl uence how your listeners interpret facts and what they re-
member (“Don’t you think our competitors would do X if given the
chance?”). And rhetorical questions press the listener to accept a propo-
sition that you’ve formulated (“Are you willing to risk that we’ll look so
unprofessional again?”).
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