Dear Crucial Skills,

I often find that I, as a consultant, am brought in as an expert, but as I attempt to guide clients toward a different way of thinking or problem-solving, they take it as a threat to how they currently do things. A power struggle ensues because they think my recommendations are an attempt to change them. Isn’t that what they hired me to do?

How can I get them to understand that my recommendations are meant to help, that we are heading toward the same goals, and that they hired me to help them fix something that isn’t working? How should I respond when someone asks for my advice then gets offended when I give suggestions?

Signed,
Trying to Help

 Dear Trying,

You’ve come to the right guy! After years of answering questions, I finally get someone asking me about consulting! Thank you, thank you.

In addition to the ideas I’ll share below, I encourage you to read the reader comments below my response. I know many of our 169,000+ subscribers are consultants (internal or external), so I hope they’ll share a boatload of wisdom as well.

So how can you increase the chance that your ultimate recommendations will be seen as helpful thoughts rather than annoying criticisms? Here are a few practices I use:

Contract up front for commitment from the real leaders. When you’re contracting for the work, be sure you’re reporting to a group that wants change. Often, at the front end of a project, I talk with a senior person who is motivated to lead change, but as things progress the work gets delegated to those with more parochial agendas. I’ve learned that I have more influence before I promise to take on a project. After that, you begin to get consumed within the system that everyone else gets stifled by. So, I take advantage of that “influence window” to contract with the real leaders of change for the amount of time and access I will need in order to accomplish the result they are asking of me. Then I hold them to it.

Clarify and document the mission. I’ve found that in longer-term projects you can easily get mission drift—especially in my work. Leaders say, “We want to change the culture.” With a charter a mile wide like “changing culture,” you’re bound to get people who criticize most anything you do—as it doesn’t match their image of what these vague “results” mean. I am very careful to ask leaders up front to clearly articulate, publish, and document the mission. What behaviors are you trying to change? Why do you want them to change? What results will that produce? How will we measure success? If I’m sloppy about clarifying, documenting, and socializing the results at the front end, it’s easy for people to take offense or disagree with what we ultimately produce.

Honor what’s working before talking about change. In Crucial Conversations, we teach a skill called contrasting. Essentially, we teach people to avoid giving unnecessary offense by helping others understand not just what you mean but also what you don’t mean. When someone like you or I comes in spouting off about change, it’s easy for people to feel like their important contributions are about to be lambasted. That’s not your intention. You aren’t trying to show disrespect for the thousand positive things that are working well. You’re trying to offer ideas for how to improve a dozen or so things that aren’t.

Be sure to explicitly acknowledge best practices that are working well as a way of contrasting to ensure you maintain a sense of mutual respect and mutual purpose with those who have created what you are criticizing. If you sincerely acknowledge what’s working, you make it easier for them to see that your motive is to help, not just to make yourself look like the only smart person in the room.

Build motivation by calibrating to their ability. This is a tricky one. You want to be sure you’re honest about what needs to change, but if your recommendations seem overwhelming, even well-intended leaders will lose motivation to consider them. You have to calibrate your recommendations to their ability to absorb them. Sometimes their rejection of your proposals is a reflection of your failure to present them in a hopeful way rather than an overwhelming concern that leads to more work.

Involve them in the journey. I left this one for last because it’s one I want you to remember. As I said in the previous suggestion, your job is not just to offer right-headed ideas, but to do so in a way that builds motivation to address them. The best way to do this is to involve your clients in the discovery process. If you do too much of the diagnosis with little or no involvement on their part, then you’ll be left to use verbal persuasion—PowerPoint presentations filled with sterling logic and compelling data—to make your case. And as we teach in Influencer, verbal persuasion is the least effective tool you can use. Direct experience is the best.

When VitalSmarts conducts assessments, we never do interviews without partnering with the leaders who will be responsible to implement findings. We know that having them hear key concerns firsthand affects them emotionally in a way PowerPoint never can. Be sure your consulting process builds motivation along the way and you’re less likely to be surprised by resistance at the end.

Best wishes,
Joseph

The Challenge
As the housing market flourished over the last thirty years, Gallery Furniture enjoyed years of profitable sales and growth. But with the burst of the housing bubble in late 2007, the furniture retailer took a hard hit.

“When the housing business fell through the roof, we saw a huge decrease in our customer base,” says Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, owner of Gallery Furniture. “In order to grow during the recession, we had to innovate or else we were going to evaporate.”

It was that need to innovate and take a larger share of the dwindling furniture market that caused McIngvale to go looking for a model to change behavior within his 150-person company.

“I could do as much blubbering, cajoling, screaming, and hollering as I wanted to try to get my team to change behavior, but I knew it wouldn’t get us where we needed to go,” says McIngvale. “I was looking for a process that would get my people to want to change their behavior and act in ways that give the customers what they’re looking for.”

The Training
A voracious reader, McIngvale skimmed a review of Influencer in the newspaper and was interested enough to pick up the book. After reading it, he thought, “These guys really get it.” It wasn’t long before he asked the experts at VitalSmarts to train his leadership team in Influencer Training. The group of twenty leaders spent the entire session focused on the challenges facing their business and implementing the Influencer principles into their goals.

After his management team was trained, McIngvale ensured that everyone in his company—from the furniture loaders to the truck drivers to the sales team—also got trained. Over the next year, 150 employees went through Influencer Training, and McIngvale occasionally invited outside vendors and key customers to attend sessions.

“We now use Influencer Training and the other VitalSmarts training courses as the main management tool for the whole business,” McIngvale reflects.

The Solution: Read our case study to learn how Gallery Furniture used the Influencer model to innovate the way they do business.

Dear Crucial Skills,

I have just confirmed that my daughter is using drugs and I am beside myself with worry. I have always been very frank when I talked to her about drug use and I fear that because I made her feel safe to talk to me about it, I may have also made her feel like I condone the use of drugs. She confides in me because she feels like she can tell me anything and I don’t want to lose this relationship.

How can I express concern for my daughter’s behavior and drug use without damaging our relationship and losing her trust?

Worried Mother

 Dear Mother,

Good for you!

Good for you for thinking about both sides of the parenting problem you have to solve. You’re not just worried about expressing disapproval of a self-destructive choice. You’re also worried about ensuring your daughter feels safe maintaining dialogue with you. And in my estimation, doing these two things is the heart of parenting.

Now to answer your question, let me make a huge assumption. The fact that you’re worried you sent a message of tacit approval of drug abuse makes me suspect you probably have. I assume this worry is fed as you review past interactions with her and find it hard to recall a consistent pattern of clear expressions of disapproval. With that said, don’t give yourself an “F” on being a positive influence, as your own personal decision to not abuse drugs is an important force for good. However, clear influence has to go beyond silent disapproval.

I know you asked how to “talk,” but I’m going to broaden the issue to the larger topic of influence. Here’s the picture we, as parents and guardians of our children, need to have: there are six powerful sources of influence that shape our children’s (and our own) choices. And most of them line up in support of experimentation with harmful substances. For example:

Personal Motivation: Kids are told it feels good. Experimentation is pitched in morally appealing packaging—as a way to experience life, demonstrate independence, be your own person, learn about new options, etc.

Personal Ability: Information about options, dosages, delivery methods, etc. is widely available.

Social Motivation and Ability: Powerful peer influences can encourage participation and shame those who don’t engage. Kids mentor each other in new ways to get high, ways to get money to get high, and ways to avoid detection. The messages kids get from peers through Facebook, YouTube, movies, television, and other media tend to be pro- not anti-drug abuse.

Structural Motivation: Costs for drugs have declined over the years in a perverse version of Moore’s law, the drug high gets stronger as the prices get lower.

Structural Ability: At school, kids are probably never more than five minutes away from access to illicit drugs or alcohol.

I’ve only scratched the surface in describing how the various methods of influence shape the world your daughter inhabits far more than they did when you and I were walking school halls. I share all of this as a backdrop to a resounding answer to your question. Kids today need much more than a passively disapproving parent in order to avoid succumbing to an overwhelmingly potent influence strategy to engage in harmful behavior—they need parents who are aware of how all six sources of influence are affecting their children, and who take action to offer their children an environment that supports positive choices.

With that said, a conversation is a good place to begin. It could very well begin with, “Sweetheart, I worry that I’ve been derelict in a very important responsibility. I want to begin remedying that now. . .”

You then need to confront her with the information you have about her drug use. Do so factually. Do not use judgmental language, lay out the case that convinces you there’s a problem. For example, a horrified parent might be tempted to say, “Don’t you dare lie to me, I know you’ve been using. You’ve already been sneaking out with friends and lying to me about what you’re doing.”

The “facts first” version would sound more like, “When you asked me to bring your cell phone to you at school, a text came through. It was from Denise. She said, ‘Does your Mom have any more oxy? I need some.’” Resist the temptation to embellish or exaggerate the information you have. Simply lay out the facts then share your conclusion: “Sweetheart, it’s clear to me you have used drugs.”

At this point, you need to reassure her she is safe discussing this with you. After you lay out such embarrassing and sensitive facts, most teens will worry that your motive is to judge or punish them. Let her know that’s not the case. For example, you could tell her, “I am not bringing this up because I am angry at you or to try to embarrass you. I love you, and I want to help you make choices that will make you happy. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Your goal is dialogue. Only through a healthy dialogue can you influence her heart and mind rather than just her behavior. But similarly, you won’t influence her heart and mind if at some point in the dialogue you don’t make a strong and clear statement of disapproval—not of her personally, but of this choice.

A few years ago, we worked with the White House on the campaign, Parents. The Anti Drug. We conducted research and created a list of Crucial Conversations tips for speaking up to your kids about drug abuse. These tips can help you in this very crucial conversation with your daughter. I encourage you to check them out.

I am thrilled to know that you have carefully established trust with your daughter that enables her to talk to you. Just make sure you haven’t done so in a way that diminishes your ability to have her listen to you. That would not be dialogue, but monologue. Find a way to get your voice into the dialogue while still preserving the wonderful safety you’ve so effectively created.

Best wishes,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

Do you have any advice for someone who is looking for a white-collar job and has a conviction in his record? How and when should he or she bring it to the attention of the potential employer?

Signed,
Timing is Everything

 Dear Timing,

You ask a great question. And while many readers might not be in your exact position, I think all of us have been in a similar situation. It may be that we’re applying for a job and have to explain a long period of unemployment on our resume. It could be that we’re in a performance review and need to put a disastrous project in the context of our larger year’s work. Or perhaps it’s pitching a proposal to a client who might find a gap in our credentials worrisome. Hopefully the advice I offer below will be valuable to people in a variety of situations where they need to acknowledge a fly in their ointment.

Let’s answer the easy questions first. Then I’ll offer a social science principle as a guide for your ultimate decision on timing.

First, you have to bring up your conviction as soon as legally required. For example, if you are asked a direct question in an interview or are required to fill out a form, of course you must disclose whatever you’re legally required to share.

Second, you must do it soon. If you wait too long, you risk the potential employer feeling manipulated or deceived.

Third, with that said, you want to wait to bring it up until you’ve established a mental frame of who you are in the employer’s mind that is much larger than the past offense you committed.

To illustrate the psychological principle behind this, I invite you to try the experiment at this website before reading further. It will take about three minutes and is a lot of fun.

Spoiler alert: If you read further before trying the experiment, you won’t enjoy the video!

If you won’t be watching the video, here’s the gist of it. University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons created a video experiment in which six people—three wearing black shirts and three wearing white—pass a basketball to those wearing the same color shirt. Viewers are asked to count how many times the ball is passed by those wearing white shirts. After a minute, subjects report their count. Then, they are asked if they saw anything unusual. Shockingly, the majority report that they saw nothing other than the black- and white-shirted players passing balls. This is so shocking because when they are invited to view the video again, they are stunned to discover that in the midst of the basketball melee, a person in a gorilla suit walks slowly into the very center of the scene, pounds his chest, then saunters off—and they never saw it!

Human beings use heuristics to improve mental efficiency and decision-making. We distill complex realities into simple rules of thumb. When we’re trying to get a handle on a person sitting in front of us, we develop simple labels such as punctual, athletic, lazy, or likeable. These labels act like an instruction to the brain—watch for basketball passes between white-shirted people—that cause us to filter out data that distract from the simple task we’ve created. From this point forward, we suffer and benefit from selective perception. We can even miss a huge gorilla in the center of our visual field because we’re looking only for information that fits our heuristic.

If you share a psychologically significant piece of data early in your relationship with a potential employer—I won the Nobel prize for literature, or I spent twelve years in a state prison—you’ll establish just such a label that will make it likely that additionally significant information could be discounted or ignored.

My suggestion is that you ensure you have shared memorable positive information early in the relationship that helps distract from the gorilla you’re about to have prance onto the scene. And make sure you share it in a way that is sticky for the interviewers.

In our book, Influencer, we have a chapter called Change How You Change Minds. Our key recommendation is that you master storytelling if you want to learn how to influence strongly held perceptions and move people to action. This principle works every bit as well in a hiring situation. Those who avoid spending time on the facts and figures of their lives and tell two or three compelling stories that communicate who they are as a unique and special human being are far more convincing.

So, come up with your “three people passing a basketball” that you’ll focus your prospect’s attention on. Identify two or three potent stories that introduce them meaningfully to what is special about you. Then let the gorilla walk on the scene and hope they’ll keep it in proportion.

Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

When I tell my colleagues it’s time to improve our effectiveness, they get uptight about being told why they’re wrong and what to fix. It seems like they’re content to let standards slacken and inefficiencies run wild as long as they don’t have to hear about how much better we could be doing. How can I make improvement sound “cool” so my colleagues don’t feel like I’m forcing them to change?

Changeable

Dear Changeable,

If we could solve this common problem, think of the benefits we’d share. Imagine a department, an organization, or a country where everyone shared a passion for improvement. We’d see immediate advances in creativity, productivity, and competitiveness and I bet we’d see huge gains in engagement and satisfaction as well. So, how do we get there?

It will take more than a carefully worded conversation to solve this problem. In fact, if we think better words are all we need, then we’ve failed before we’ve begun. This challenge is ideal for an Influencer approach.

What your workforce needs is a passion for making things better and the knowledge that they can get it done. Neither of these is advanced through verbal persuasion alone. Changing hearts and minds requires more than data dumps, lectures, sermons, and rants.

I’ll begin with some first steps you might take to get this process going and then I’ll share a few examples from organizations that have made continuous improvement a central value within their culture.

1.  Actions you can take in the short term.

As an individual contributor seeking to influence your colleagues, it’s important to not try and use authority you don’t have. Instead of telling people what they should do, create situations that allow them to discover what they should do. Here are a few ideas.

Social Motivation. Create direct experiences with customers. Your colleagues might not want to listen to you, but nothing is more motivating than getting direct feedback from your customers—either internal or external. Find a way for customers to visit. They will speak the truth to your colleagues in ways you can’t.
Structural Motivation. You think your group is full of slack and inefficiencies, but your colleagues may not see it. So, find a way to make performance more public. Focus on the two or three metrics everyone sees as important and post them where everyone can see. A chart on the wall is objective so it’s hard to deny.
Social Motivation. Ask your colleagues to set an improvement goal based on what their customers want and need. Don’t worry whether it’s higher or lower than the goal you would set. It’s more important that they have a goal they can all accept. Next, have your colleagues—not you—evaluate their progress. This gives your colleagues a chance to motivate each other.
Personal Ability. When individuals—or the entire group—fail to achieve their goal, steer them away from casting blame. Instead, encourage them to focus on solutions. Get them to brainstorm ideas for improvement.
Structural Ability. Set up mini experiments to test your colleagues’ ideas. These should be low-risk tests you can complete in a day or two. Make sure others are involved in the testing and evaluating process. Don’t let this become your project. Use it to make your colleagues look good.

These are tactics you can implement on your own, even if you’re not a manager. Below, I’ll suggest a more intensive approach that requires management support.

2.  Actions your organization can take in the long term.

We’ve worked with several organizations that put continuous improvement at the center of their culture. Each has taken its unique path, but the behaviors they nurture—the vital behaviors—are remarkably similar. For an excellent description of this change-oriented culture, see Steven Spear’s HBR article, Fixing Health Care from the Inside, Today.

Focus on Vital Behaviors

• Scientist and the subject. Employees become scientists as well as subjects. They design their work to be a series of ongoing experiments.
• Trial and error. People use frequent, brief, low-cost, trials—with data—to address both problems and opportunities.
• Hold each other accountable. People hold each other accountable for continuous improvement—trying new ideas every week or month.

Driving these vital behaviors into a culture requires a concerted effort across the organization. This approach should be guided by the Six Sources of Influence. I’ll suggest a few tactics.

Personal Motivation. Use direct and vicarious experience to create a passion for improvement. Make sure every employee has a line-of-sight relationship with his or her customers. For example, an insurance company took jobs that had been organized around forms: “I’m the specialist on form 35c.” and reorganized them around people: “I’m the resource person for all of our agents in Denver.”

Have employees visit best-in-class companies—both within their industry and beyond—to learn what’s possible and to gather ideas to test. A mining company takes front-line supervisors to a best-in-class steel mill to get ideas for improving workplace safety.

Look for positive deviants—groups within their own firm that have achieved extraordinary results without extraordinary resources—and either visit them or invite them to visit. Surgeons compare surgical outcomes and then travel to learn from the best.

Personal Ability. Use training, coaching, and deliberate practice to help everyone become a scientist at their job. Teach people how to lead brief, low-risk, short cycle time experiments. A pharmaceutical firm trains people in Lean Six Sigma, and has them design experiments that take no more than two days.

Learn by doing. Every week, each department should design and conduct a trial that tests an improvement idea. A hospital asks every unit to complete one experiment per week.

Build confidence. As teams make progress, they’ll discover they have far more control over their work process and work environment than they ever realized. When they reach this insight, their progress and morale will surge.

Social Motivation & Ability. Have employees present their experiments to others in the organization using poster sessions and twenty-minute presentations. A computer chip manufacturer has its entire organization, including senior leaders, attend these improvement fairs. Make sure everyone participates in designing, testing, and evaluating improvement experiments. Each experiment should be a team endeavor.

These are just a few examples from three of the six sources of influence. For the best results, brainstorm strategies in all six sources to bring about the change you desire. Some of these actions require more formal authority than you may have, but I hope they stimulate your thinking. Let me know how it goes.

David

Frustrated, Joyce Geier and her team in Xerox’s Corporate Lean Six Sigma Office had just developed an implementation plan they knew to be flawed. Yet how were they supposed to disseminate a new process improvement tool—called QwikSolver—to a corporation of 50,000 employees?

Months later, reflecting on what was ultimately a successful deployment, Geier, a Master Black Belt and QwikSolver Program Manager, concludes: “QwikSolver is a good product, but we could have killed it by rolling it out wrong. The Influencer Model from Influencer Training is what gave this thing legs to run—and, by golly, it is running.”

The Context
Nearly a decade after implementing Lean Six Sigma, Xerox Corporation not only achieved widespread adoption of the new framework, but also discovered some of its limitations. Culturally, employees regarded Lean Six Sigma as a program “for the privileged few” and aimed only at massive problems rather than day-to-day issues. Ms. Geier explains, “That’s not the kind of culture we wanted at Xerox, and so we said ‘we have to do something about it.’”

Based on extensive internal research, Geier and her Lean Six Sigma team developed QwikSolver—a simple decision-making rubric that any team, division, or department could use and was free of cumbersome requirements. Geier’s team believed that if they could train and motivate Xerox employees to use QwikSolver, the entire organization could benefit from the kind of results traditionally experienced by Lean Six Sigma.

Although convinced of QwikSolver’s merits, the team was challenged by the implementation. If only influencing the behavior of 50,000 people were as easy as making photocopies!

The Problem
Ms. Geier’s team knew from experience—and from the earlier research—that a traditional, management-directed approach would likely backfire. Yet, their best attempts at creating a deployment plan that didn’t rely strongly on management direction felt flat. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it just didn’t feel like our rollout plan would meet what our people told us they wanted—a process supported by employee pull, not management push.”

Ultimately, a colleague recommended the book Influencer to Ms. Geier, and her thinking about designing an influence strategy changed.

The Solution: Read our case study to learn how Xerox used the Influencer model to drive rapid adoption of QwikSolver.

Dear Crucial Skills,

As a manager, I’m guilty of getting very task focused and not taking the time to develop my people. I focus on my customers and put them above all else—usually taking it upon myself to handle the really difficult customer issues. As a result, I fail to give my people a chance to be “bloodied” or to “earn their stripes” with tough, demanding customers.

Mixed-up Manager

 Dear Mixed-up,

I’ve coached leaders for more than thirty years, and you’re wise to recognize that this is a serious problem. Our research shows that nearly half of all managers struggle with the same challenge. It’s a true career blocker.

I think you described the dilemma perfectly. You want what’s best for your customer and you want to minimize headaches and opportunities for potential screw ups. You decide to either handle the customer yourself or assign one of your experienced staff. It may sound like a smart way to operate, but in the long run, you will fail as a manager. Managers need to have every member of their team build the necessary competencies to become “experienced.”

There are lots of ways you might address this challenge. I’ll suggest three potential strategies, and then use one as an example:

1. Build staff development time into your day. For example, regularly have inexperienced members of your team partner with you when you work with customers. Coach them in advance regarding the customer’s situation and assign them a role that requires face-to-face problem solving with the customer.

2. Create a formal mentoring program. For example, assign senior and junior team members to work together.

3. Use pairing across your team. For example, have people work in pairs, and mix up the pairs on a frequent basis.

Each of these strategies can work, but the key is to support it using all six sources of influence. Make sure you document what you do and the results you obtain—collect data and use it to analyze and adjust your strategy.

I’m going to use the “pairing across your team” strategy as an example. Menlo Innovations, a software development firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, uses pairing across their organization. Programmers work in pairs and share a single computer. They are paired with a different partner each week and never get to write code without a partner looking on.

The obvious question is whether or not having two people at one computer cuts productivity in half. The answer is, “No!” Pairing has cut mistakes and missteps at Menlo Innovations dramatically. It has greatly expanded the number of programmers who can handle tough, demanding challenges and has resulted in amazing levels of customer satisfaction.

What if you tried pairing your people? Imagine you paired people on every project that didn’t involve travel. And you switched up the pairing fairly often. My bet is that you would provide a higher level of customer service while building incredible bench strength within your team.

Suppose you have an important presentation coming up with one of your most demanding customers—a presentation on market analytics. You’d have one of your senior people pair with a more junior analyst and place the keyboard in front of the junior analyst. They’d work together to prepare the presentation, and then tag team in front of the customer.

Let’s suppose you thought enough of this idea to give it a try. You would want to test it in a way that gives it the best possible chance of success. Below are a few ideas, drawing on the six sources of influence:

Measurable Results. The results you want are improved customer satisfaction and improved skills/experience across your team.

Vital Behavior. The vital behavior is to pair up people, always have them work with a partner, and switch the partners often—perhaps weekly so people continually cross train.

Personal Motivation. Take a team to visit Richard’s organization in Ann Arbor, or visit their website to see case studies of how well it works. My bet is that a single visit will convince you and your team to give it a shot.

Personal Ability. Menlo Innovations has been at this long enough to build “people skills” into their interview and selection process. You can begin by setting some ground rules, anticipating concerns, and role playing how to handle these concerns. And, of course, reading Crucial Conversations will help.

Social Motivation & Ability. Partners will motivate each other. Working together increases accountability and focus in marvelous ways. Of course, you will also be a resource by coaching all the pairs.

Structural Motivation. Your organization’s reward system probably focuses on individual accomplishment which can undermine teamwork. Make sure everyone knows their performance review will not only focus on individual performance, you also will review their ability to help their partners succeed.

Structural Ability. The biggest structural change is taking away people’s computers. At Menlo Innovations no one has their own. They truly share. Again, this may be difficult at your organization, but what if you tried it for a month? People would have to remove Facebook and iTunes from their computers, but is that such a great loss at work?

Let’s step back a minute. You might not go with pairing. You might select a different approach to combine mentoring with customer service; however, whatever you choose, make sure you line up all six sources of influence to support your vital behaviors. Evaluate your results and make course corrections as you move forward.

Again, thanks for sharing your challenge. If you tackle this problem, not only will you help your people “earn their stripes,” you’ll make yourself more eligible for a few extra bars on your career jacket.

David

Dear Crucial Skills,

I am trying to encourage employees to work safely, but often meet with resistance and feel like people only behave when the safety guys are around. How can I create long-term change and encourage employees to take responsibility for creating a safe work environment?

Seeking Workplace Safety

Dear Safety,

Thanks for asking this important question. At first, it seems strange that people would resist following safe work practices. After all, none of us wants to be injured at work. Yet the problem you describe is very common—in part because many of us already feel safe at work.

Our workplaces are far safer than they used to be. In the U.S., time lost due to injuries has dropped by more than 50 percent since 1991. This means many of the most obvious sources of danger have been addressed and resolved. Now we are focusing on less obvious dangers and more stubborn behaviors.

Another complication is that many of the most dangerous behaviors are ones we are guilty of in our personal lives as well as at work. We accept the risks at home and we think we should be able to take the same risks at work. For example, many of the most fatal workplace accidents involve bad driving behaviors—we fail to buckle up, we speed, we drive carelessly, and we back into things. Another huge source of injuries involves bad ladder behaviors—we fail to use a ladder when we should, we don’t tie off our ladder, or we carry tools in our hands as we climb the ladder. How many of us ignore these risks when we’re not at work? So, it’s a challenge to get us to take these risks seriously when we’re on the job.

I’ll use our Influencer model to suggest a few steps you can take to create a safer working environment.

1. Focus on a few crucial moments. My guess is that most of your people follow most of the safety practices most of the time. This means your safety problem boils down to a few perfect storms—crucial moments when some of your people fail to follow some of the safety practices. Get your team involved by having them identify the handful of crucial moments that are most dangerous in their work environment. Our research study Silent Danger identified five crucial moments that we often use to justify skipping safety practices:

• Get It Done. Justifying unsafe practices due to tight timelines.
• Undiscussable Incompetence. Unsafe practices that stem from skill deficits that people don’t feel able to discuss.
• Just this Once. Justifying unsafe practices as exceptions to the rule.
• This Is Overboard. Justifying unsafe practices because the precautions seem excessive.
• Are You a Team Player? Unsafe practices that people justify by saying they are for the good of the team, company, or customer.

2. Identify the vital behaviors in these crucial moments. The vital behaviors are the few actions that will keep people safe during the crucial moments they’ve identified. For example, suppose one of the crucial moments your team has identified is, “When it’s our fault that we’re behind schedule, we do whatever it takes to make up our lost time. And a typical shortcut is failing to use ladders when we should.”

The vital behaviors are: a.) Watch out for this crucial moment and warn others when you think you are at risk; b.) Be especially careful to avoid dangerous and tempting shortcuts when you’re in this crucial moment; and c.) Confront those you see taking a dangerous shortcut.

3. Build personal motivation. Your question revealed that people aren’t taking personal responsibility for their safety behaviors. They know what they should do but they aren’t doing it. This sounds like a motivation problem.

The typical mistake we make in motivating is to rely on verbal persuasion: data dumps, lectures, sermons, and rants. These are the least effective ways to motivate people.

The most effective way is personal experience. For example, we found that nurses who suffered a hospital-acquired infection were much more likely to remind their peers to wash their hands. Their experience turned hand hygiene into a moral passion.

But people don’t need to be injured to become motivated. Personal experience isn’t required. Our nurses were just as motivated if they’d had a family member or close friend who suffered an infection. Vicarious experience can be just as powerful.

Below is a link to a video we’ve used on off-shore oil rigs to remind people that accidents still happen and have life-changing consequences. We use it to start a conversation. Our goal is to have people share their own experiences and reconnect to the reasons they need to keep safe and watch each others’ backs.

You might also like to watch and share this compelling video about workplace safety.

4. Build Social Motivation. Another of your concerns is that people see you as the enforcer. There should be social motivation, but reminders should come from their peers as well as supervisors.

Often, it is important to involve senior managers and leaders and show them what they can do during crucial moments. For example, during a crisis when everybody is rushing and tempted to take shortcuts, it is very helpful for the manager who is over the entire crisis to remind people that they still need to take every safety precaution. These timely warnings from senior leaders counter the cynical expectations many employees have about their organization’s commitment to safety.

Obviously, these are just a few ideas to add to the mix. You’ll want to consider actions in each of the six sources of influence. Remember, leaders who combine four or more of these sources are ten times more successful at achieving their desired results.

David

During the month of July, we will publish “best of” content. The following article was first published on January 27, 2010.

Dear Crucial Skills,

My husband and I have $40,000 in credit card debt. We’ve made all kinds of budgets and set all kinds of goals but still can’t get together on this. We fight about it a lot and it’s become a real source of conflict for us. We both want to get out of debt, but one bad deed keeps leading to another. How can we stick to our budget?

Signed,
Good Intentions

Dear Good Intentions,

I’m sure you’re not alone after a tough financial year—many of us have had to try to change our spending habits to help us weather everything from economic anxiety to a true financial famine. Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to change your good intentions into good behavior.

First, I’d suggest you and your husband play a game together. Let’s call the game Name That Influence! The object of the game is to identify all the different sources of influence that are undermining your good intentions. You’ll be shocked at how long the list is. Here are three questions to help you generate some specific answers:

1. What visual images in your home get you thinking about spending rather than saving? (Hint: Do you longingly browse shopping pages on the internet? Do you have a Library of Congress-sized stack of catalogs by a comfortable reading chair?)
2. How do your interactions and conversations with friends or family affect your thoughts, plans, and actions toward spending? (Hint: Is shopping a social event?)
3. What sources of influence keep you from immediately counting the cost of your spending choices? (Hint: Do you buy with cash? Checks? Credit cards? Do you have “one-click” purchasing enabled on favorite Web sites?)

Set a goal with your husband to come up with at least a dozen different influences that both motivate and enable you to spend more than you should. Be honest with yourself and recognize your role in your current situation. As you do this, something very important will happen. You’ll realize the problem is not that the two of you are weak. The problem is that you are blind and outnumbered. You’re blind to the many sources of influence that are shaping your choices. And the one source working for you (your willpower) is hopelessly outnumbered by the sources working against you. (If you read our book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, you’ll find you’re outnumbered 5 to 1. Not good odds!)

When you finish creating this list, your job is to change as many sources of influence as you can to support your good intentions. Dismantle those sources you know are encouraging your indulgence. Create positive influences that will keep saving top of mind, make it easier, and help you feel rewarded for following through.

For example, you could:

1. Make it a game. Create a progress chart for your savings goal. Keep it visible. Make a ritual of posting progress as a couple and generating the “completion endorphins” that come when you color in the next progress bar.

2. Banish temptation. Change your home page, delete tempting web pages, toss out magazines and catalogs or other “triggers” of spending impulses. Make no mistake—shopping generates dopamine in the same pleasure centers of the brain that cocaine does. You’re fighting a pleasure-driven habit and your best defense will be to minimize the temptations.

3. Make spending harder. Eliminate any structural enablers of mindless spending. For example, research shows people spend far less if they have to fork over cash than if they can simply slide a credit card through a slot. You might try carrying nothing but cash with you for six months. You’ll find this one physical change will profoundly affect your choices. You may also choose to undergo “plastic surgery” by cutting up your credit cards.

4. Change an accomplice into a friend. If shopping and spending are social activities, you’ll need to identify your accomplices. For example, if you and a girlfriend enjoy a regular outing at a mall, you’ll need to change that relationship. Eat some humble pie and let her know you are in desperate need of change. Ask for her help. If your husband is the accomplice, find a substitute activity you can do together. You won’t succeed by simply eliminating social activities; you’ll need to generate new ones. Our research shows that changing habits almost always involves engaging the help of at least two trusted friends.

These ideas may or may not be the right ones for you. But one thing I can promise you is that if you’ll examine your situation carefully, you’ll realize the problem is out there. There are myriad sources of influence working against you—and until you recognize and reverse them, you’ll continue behaving in a way you don’t want.

Best wishes for a prosperous, frugal, and fun year!

Joseph

Thank you to all our readers and fans who have helped us launch our new book Change Anything to bestseller status. The book has been an immediate hit on all the major bestseller lists and we couldn’t be more ecstatic. See for yourself:

#3 New York Times (Hardcover Business)
May 1, 2011

#3 New York Times (Advice, How-to)
April 20, 2011

#1 Wall Street Journal (Business)
April 23, 2011

#1 USA Today Money

#2 Amazon.com
April 10, 2011

#1 BarnesandNoble.com
April 11, 2011

#7 Publishers Weekly (Hardcover, Non-fiction)
April 21, 2011