Last week, we announced the release of the second edition of Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change. For a sneak peak of the book, download the first chapter now.

This new edition includes:

• New subtitle
• Updated statistics, facts, and figures
• New research and case studies from organizations like KIPP, Menlo Innovations, Fundación Paraguaya, and others
• Skill applications gleaned from six years of Influencer Training
• “Act Like An Influencer” stories: twenty-five vignette examples of real influencers
• New focus on the three keys of influence: 1) Focus and measure, 2) Find vital behaviors, and 3) Engage all Six Sources of Influence
• Now available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book

WIN A COPY: Enter our drawing to win one of twenty-five copies of Influencer by watching Joseph Grenny discuss the principles of influence at our local TEDX event. To enter, watch the video, leave a comment, and share with others. (One entry per action taken. Winners will be selected and announced June 5.)

Dear Crucial Skills,

We are looking for meaningful ways to recognize our nursing staff in our busy, stressful ICU. In our last employee satisfaction survey, we scored low in “recognition.”

We know from Influencer that external rewards aren’t always the best way to motivate people. We would like to find ways that would encourage staff to grow and have internal satisfaction for doing a great job with their patients, families, and other staff.

Other than external rewards, how can we meet our staff’s need for meaningful recognition?

Managing Motivation

 Dear Managing,

Your question is relevant to every leader. It’s common for hardworking, productive, and dedicated staff to say they don’t get the recognition they deserve. If not corrected, this feeling can undermine their commitment, engagement, and performance. Leaders need a variety of ways to recognize performance and show appreciation.

1. Don’t resort to using money as a motivator. Personally, I like money. I endorse the view that, “Money may not buy happiness, but it sure makes misery more comfortable.” The challenge is that money often plays the role of de-motivator. If you don’t think your pay is fair, then it’s hard to stay motivated. But, if you do think your pay is fair, then you stop thinking about it and its power to motivate fades. Leaders need to establish fair pay, but they shouldn’t rely on fair pay to motivate.

2. Use rewards in moderation and in combination. This is the guideline we introduce in our book, Influencer. Rewards work best when they a) aren’t so large that they become the only reason for acting; and b) are combined with personal and social motivators.

The merit badges scouts earn are a nice example. The badges themselves are just bits of cloth or tin. They are very moderate in value. But they work in combination with both personal and social motivation. They recognize hard work and a worthy accomplishment, something to be proud of—personal motivation. And they create an occasion for family and friends to cheer the scout’s success—social motivation.

When rewards are too large and not used in combination with personal and social motivators, then all eyes are on the rewards and the rules for winning them. You see people cheat and game the system. They may even lose track of the personal and social reasons for their actions.

Here is a scary example. A hospital had made rewards and punishments a big part of their hand-hygiene program. A nurse manager saw a nurse put her hand under a hand-sanitizer dispenser, but nothing came out. The dispenser was empty. The nurse continued into the patient’s room and began to work with the patient. When the manager pulled her aside the nurse said, “I did my part. It’s not my fault the dispenser isn’t working.” This nurse was so focused on the rules, she failed to remember patient safety and the intrinsic reasons for having clean hands. That is the danger of rewards that aren’t used in moderation and in combination.

3. Make the invisible visible. This is a skill we teach in Crucial Confrontations and Crucial Accountability Training. Have you ever looked back at a tough day—a day spent coping with emergencies, interruptions, and switches in priorities—only to wonder what you’ve actually accomplished? This is the rat race, right? You know you’ve been running all day, but you aren’t sure you’ve gotten anywhere. Many of us experience this frustration, and I bet nurses who work in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) experience it more than most. Here’s why.

Patients who are in ICUs are among the sickest in the hospital. In fact, they are usually so sick that, even when they are healthy enough to be discharged, they don’t get sent home. Instead, they are sent to another unit in the hospital, one that deals with less critically ill patients. Often ICU nurses don’t get to see or experience the positive end to the patient’s story—the patient’s leaving the hospital and their happy families welcoming them home.

Work to fix this situation by creating ways for your ICU nurses to see and experience their accomplishments. I’ll suggest a couple of ideas, but I bet you and your staff can generate far more.

• Involve your ICU nurses in post-discharge calls to patients. Most hospitals are now implementing some kind of post-discharge call to patients. Research shows these calls improve patient satisfaction, reduce medication-related problems, and result in fewer return visits to emergency rooms. These calls can also be a powerfully motivating source of feedback for nurses.

  I’m not suggesting that your nurses have time to make these calls, though that would be great. Most hospitals already have specially trained staff who make these calls. Have the people making these calls meet with your nurses to share outcomes, or meet with the phone team yourself and then share outcomes with your ICU nurses. Create regular opportunities for your nurses to see the human impacts of their hard work.

• Solicit feedback from patients’ family members. Often, ICU patients are so sick and sedated that they hardly remember their ICU experiences. But their family members sure do! Most are overwhelmingly grateful for the wonderful work ICU nurses perform and would be happy to share. Find ways to get family members’ feedback—solicit notes, ask family members to record a message that can be shared, or have family members attend a routine meeting.
• Tighten links to the units that accept the patients you discharge. Involve staff from your internal customers—the step-down and medical-surgical units that take your patients when they no longer need to be in your ICU. Ask them to attend regular meetings, so they can share how they, their patients, and their patients’ families have been impacted by the work your ICU nurses perform.

4. Use crucial conversations to reduce de-motivators. Ask yourself whether there are leaders, physicians, or staff members whose actions undermine morale on your unit. Sometimes you can identify a handful of individuals who are rude, dismissive, or disruptive in ways that counter the recognition others provide. I’m not suggesting that these people should ever sugarcoat bad news or provide less than honest feedback. But you may ask them to be more constructive by focusing on facts, allowing room for dialogue, and showing respect.

I hope these ideas give you a few additional ways to recognize your staff. However, none of these can substitute for your own genuine appreciation for their work. Make sure you spend time rounding every day, noticing all the right things they are doing on the job, and removing barriers so they can do even more.

Please let me know what you try and how it works.

David

When she first met her husband, Patty Loeffler was thin, active, and the picture of good health. But nine years into her marriage, Patty found herself 100 pounds overweight and a perpetual yo-yo dieter. She had joined and left Weight Watchers so many times that she was embarrassed to even consider going back. And yet, she knew she needed to make a big change. That’s why in 2012, she made the resolution to simply “get healthy”—and the timing couldn’t have been better.

In March 2012, Patty enlisted in Influencer Training by VitalSmarts. Already a Crucial Conversations certified trainer, she was excited to learn the Six Sources of Influence model for changing behavior. When prompted to identify a change challenge to which she could apply the model and principles, she selected her “get healthy” initiative. Shortly after, she received the newest book from VitalSmarts, Change Anything, which helped her further apply the Six Sources of Influence to her personal goals.

Patty started her “get healthy” change plan by identifying two vital behaviors that proved to be instrumental to her success:

1. Make a plan. Patty found planning to be essential. She not only planned her healthy meals, but also where she would go if and when she ate out. She learned where all the healthy restaurants and meals were in the city so she would never have to make a last-minute unhealthy choice.

2. Weigh daily. By weighing herself daily, she found that she could stay on top of her weight loss and most importantly, quickly get back on track if she started slipping.

Patty used all six sources of influence to help keep her vital behaviors, but she attributes the majority of her success to social motivation and ability. She says the social influence that was missing from her past diet attempts meant the difference between her success and the years of failure.

Patty recruited her husband and son to join her in her goal to get healthy. Like Patty, her husband also had a history of failed weight loss, and as a result, was pretty reticent to participate. But after Patty begged him, he agreed and they made a very serious commitment to each other that they would see the plan through to the end.

When Patty’s son came home from college that summer, she also recruited him to participate, and together the three found success in applying the model from Influencer and Change Anything. The Six Sources of Influence Patty identified to help keep her behaviors included:

Personal Motivation – Patty hung her skinniest jeans on her closet door which served as a daily reminder of what she looked like and how good she felt when she first met her husband. The jeans also reminded her that at the age of 53, her window of opportunity to change was closing as she may only face more health issues in the future.

Personal Ability – A key part of Patty’s plan included a nutrition program called Ideal You sponsored by her employer. At first, Patty was skeptical this would be just another failed diet plan, but this program taught her skills to control her diet with higher protein and lower carbohydrates and fats—skills she never learned before. There was also a phased approach which began by limiting her diet in the beginning and slowly adding in healthy foods as she learned to get her intake under control. The program also taught her effective strategies to maintain her weight loss.

Social Motivation and Ability – Patty and her husband faced every part of their weight loss journey together. They started by publicly announcing their diet at her daughter-in-law’s birthday party. This public proclamation lead to support from her entire extended family. Her husband also did most of the shopping under their approved dietary guidelines and they began exercising together and spent less of their time together watching TV or eating out at unhealthy restaurants.

Patty also garnered support at work. She teamed up with a few coworkers who also had a goal to get healthy and they spearheaded a transformation of their entire team. For example, they stopped bringing in unhealthy food to celebrate events and when they ate out together, they went to healthy restaurants. Patty’s family and friends never made her feel bad for wanting to choose healthy meal options. On the contrary, many actually thanked Patty for her example and motivating them to make their own healthy choices.

Patty also attributes much of her success in beginning an exercise regimen to the help of personal trainers who reintroduced her to exercise and how to do it effectively.

Structural Motivation – Instead of falling into old habits of rewarding herself with her favorite foods, Patty started going to the spa and treating herself to massages, manicures, and pedicures when she hit her weight loss goals. She was also really motivated to change by shopping for cute clothes she couldn’t fit into previously and the money she saved from giving up expensive and fattening fast food meals helped to offset the expense of a new wardrobe. Patty was also motivated to stick to her new diet because it was a plan she paid to be part of and she didn’t want to see that money go to waste.

Structural Ability – Early on, Patty decided to chart her weight loss. This strategy helped her to see her long-term success—which was a tremendous motivator during the weeks of plateau. She also changed her surroundings. She brought exercise equipment out of storage and placed it in her family room. She also got rid of all the junk food in the house. She even made changes at work. For the first time in her career, she began to use the on-site personal trainer and fitness center provided by her employer.

Results
By using the change plan found in Change Anything, Patty shattered a long history of failure to lose weight. In just nine months, she lost an impressive 102 pounds. And, as it turns out, her weight loss impacted her life in even more immediate ways. After discovering a life-threatening illness months into her get healthy initiative, doctors told her that losing the weight was the best thing she could have done and possibly even slowed the progression of the disease thus allowing it to be discovered and treated at an early stage.

Patty wasn’t the only one who experienced such dramatic success. The social influences she learned about in Change Anything really made a difference not only for her but also for her husband and son. In the end, Patty’s husband lost 80 pounds and her son lost 100 pounds, proving that with the right plan, you really can change for good.

The Challenge
J. Lynn Jones is a VitalSmarts veteran. An elementary school principal for sixteen years, he became a certified trainer in Crucial Conversations and used those tools to help his school boost achievement. When he was promoted to director at the Nebo School District in central Utah, he added a certification in Crucial Confrontations. He taught both courses to most of his 600-person staff and also offered them to other administrators, teachers, and support staff in his district.

But his biggest challenge in his expanded role was a persistent one. He was responsible for special education in the district and focused particularly on the special education teachers in its twenty-seven elementary schools. These are the instructors who give extra help to mainstreamed students with learning disabilities. And they didn’t have a history or culture of being accountable to progress their students.

“We had a number of veteran teachers who never had high expectations, and the kids never performed well. The teachers used the excuse that ‘these kids have disabilities’,” he said. “In the end, we weren’t seeing good instruction and we weren’t seeing good results.”

Of about sixty teachers, Jones was comfortable with only five or six of their results. But because he was not a career special educator, he lacked immediate credibility to shake things up by himself.

About the same time he came to this realization, he added another VitalSmarts certification to his credentials: Influencer Training.

The Results: Read our case study to learn how J. Lynn used Influencer Training to boost literacy rates and double the number of special education students released into the regular school system.

Dear Crucial Skills,

I work as a nurse in the education department of a healthcare institution. I lead unit nurse educators whose role is to maintain the competence and educational skill level of the nursing staff on their units. They sometimes struggle with having a crucial conversation about safety or performance with a colleague who says, “It’s no big deal.”

How can I teach my nursing staff to hold their “friends” to a high standard without having the friend get defensive or tune them out?

Nurse Educator

 Dear Educator,

Thanks for a great question. The issue you raise is relevant far beyond healthcare. Every organization has groups that are tasked with tracking and supporting best practices. Think of quality and safety departments in manufacturing, or human resources or IT departments in nearly every organization.

Here is what happens. Everyone knows that your group owns the issue. In your case, your education department owns competency and skill building. A natural human reaction is to conclude that if you own it, then I don’t. In their minds, you become an enforcer and they act like drivers on the freeway who slow down when they see a cop but then speed again as soon as they’re out of radar range. They don’t take responsibility for their behavior. That’s why you hear them say things like, “It’s no big deal.” It has become your issue, not theirs.

There is no way that enforcement alone can drive good behavior. Not only does it fail to produce positive change, it makes the enforcers feel ineffective, unwanted, and unappreciated. But there are solutions. I’ll share a few ideas that come from our Influencer approach and have worked with many of our clients.

Create an influence plan. Begin by meeting with the unit educators. Describe the problem and get them on board. They can never really succeed as long as they are seen as enforcers. Your team needs to get employees in the units to own the problem. Then they can play a supportive role by coaching, building skills, and getting access to resources. Make sure your team knows how their roles will need to change.

Focus on measurable results. Determine a handful of measurable results that you and the units can track. For example, you might focus on infection control, falls, and patient and family experience. Pick the few that will have the greatest impact. If you include too many result areas, units will lose focus.

Determine vital behaviors. Vital behaviors are the two to three actions that will drive the results if they are consistently and reliably employed. Some of these behaviors will be unique to the result areas you target. For example, wash in wash out reduces hospital-acquired infections; quick screens reduce falls; and bedside reports improve patient and family experience.

Important to your case, a few vital behaviors span nearly every result area. One of these is 200 percent accountability, which means, “I’m 100 percent accountable for my own best practices and I’m also 100 percent accountable for your best practices.” Instead of your education team members being the only ones to hold others accountable, everyone on the unit/team will hold everyone else accountable. This is the vital behavior that will fix the problem you describe in your question.

But this is a tough behavior to implement. Making it work will require all Six Sources of Influence™. I’ll suggest one idea for each of the Six Sources.

Personal Motivation—Create a value frame. Currently, employees in the units/teams are giving you and your nurse educators their compliance, not their commitment. They are focused on the enforcement of the rule, instead of the reasons for the rule. You could even say they are in a moral slumber. They aren’t attending to the very real personal impacts of their actions. For example, let’s say they are taking shortcuts instead of fully gowning up. When one of your staff reminds them, I bet they respond with “no big deal.” Your staff needs to make it personal by focusing on the patient, not the rule. For example, “Imagine your daughter was on this unit and you were doing everything possible to keep her safe. Wouldn’t you want people here to gown up to protect her from infections?”

Your goal is for employees in the units/teams to see holding each other accountable as watching out for each other. None of them wants to put their patients at risk and yet, we humans are all fallible. Despite our best intentions, we all make slips and errors. Team members need to give permission to (or request) their peers to watch out for them and to speak up when they see them slip.

Personal Ability—Use deliberate practice. Team members need to decide how to remind each other. For example, “How would you like to be reminded if I see you forget to wash your hands?” They should compose the phrases they’d like to use to hold each other accountable. For example, “I’ll position the patient while you wash up,” or “The dispenser is by the door.”

Then teams need to practice using these phrases. Talking about holding each other accountable isn’t as powerful as practicing holding each other accountable. A fifteen-minute practice is all it takes to turn good intentions into actual action.

Social Motivation—Involve formal and informal leaders. You, as the manager of the education department, will want to meet with the unit managers to get their buy in. They need to understand that making their teams accountable for their own best practices is the best, most efficient way to improve performance.

There will be times when someone will object to being held accountable. Maybe it’s a more experienced employee or a high-status professional who doesn’t want to be reminded by a newbie. In these cases, you want to provide easy and immediate support for the newbie.

Having the formal leaders (the unit managers) on board is essential, but usually not enough. You’ll also want to reach out to informal leaders (the opinion leaders). Ask the manager, a physician, and a few other opinion leaders to play the champion role. They can explain why the issue (infection control, falls, etc.) is personally important to them. They can also provide that easy and immediate support when it’s needed.

Structural Motivation—Reward small gains. This is where it gets fun. Instead of being enforcers, your team members become cheerleaders. Equip them with lots of ways to celebrate the improvements they see as units adopt 200 percent accountability and make progress on their results. You might give them gift certificates to use as recognition or provide funding for a few pizza parties.

Structural Ability—Be the bridge to resources. This is another fun part of your new role. Your team members help units identify and bust through obstacles in their environment. For example, a team might complain that they don’t have enough hand-hygiene dispensers or that they aren’t always full and working. Your team takes on these kinds of challenges and gets to bring resources to the units.

You are starting in a strong position because you already have nurse educators embedded in the units. The challenge now is to move the enforcement part of their jobs from the nurse educators to the staff members in the unit. Once staff members take responsibility for holding each other accountable, you’ll see rapid improvements in quality of care, safety, patient and family experience, and even staff satisfaction and engagement.

David

Dear Crucial Skills,

I lost my job due to a reduction in force and haven’t been able to find another job due to my age. Everyone seems eager to hire me until I show up for the interview and they discover that I am sixty-one years old.

How can I prove to potential employers that I have a lot to offer, despite my age?

Signed,
Overlooked

 Dear Overlooked,

I have a dear friend who has been going through the same ordeal. It’s not a great time for anyone to be looking for a job. And I know that the repeated feeling of disappointment that comes when one after another hope falls through can lead to awful self-doubt at a time when you need motivation to continue to represent yourself boldly.

Before I offer some unconventional advice, let me suggest that you need to know your rights. If you have been overtly discriminated against because you are over forty, there are legal avenues you can pursue. I will not comment on those but suggest you find out what is available to you.

The challenge in your situation is not just helping employers know what you have to offer, it’s ensuring you retain a firm view of the value you have to offer as well. If you start doubting yourself, you’ll be more reluctant to stay in the search as well as telegraph your lack of confidence in interviews.

First, let’s reframe the problem of a job search. The employer’s central question when searching for a new hire is, “Can I trust you to solve important problems for me?” That’s it. It’s all about trust. Since the only way an employer can truly know if they can trust you to solve their problems is to give you the job, they have to rely on proxies for trust in the hiring process.

Giving you and 1,000 candidates the actual job would be too inefficient, so they use proxies—like education, previous job titles, salary levels, and letters of recommendation. They’ll even look for gaps in employment as a way of discerning if you have some hidden issues that made others want to avoid you. As we all know, these are incredibly imperfect proxies. Resumes offer facts and figures that hiring managers hope will reveal truth—but they obscure as much as they reveal. In addition, they aren’t particularly persuasive. Reading that someone worked at Acme, Inc. as a superintendent from 1978-1987 tells me nothing about the kinds of problems I can trust you to solve.

So, if you can’t give the employer a direct experience with your ability to solve problems (i.e., by taking the job for a couple of weeks), and the facts and figures approach to building trust is ineffective and fraught with weakness, what can you do? Also, is there anything you can do to retain trust in your own ability to solve important problems so you’ll stay motivated and project confidence during the search?

Yes. In fact, I have one suggestion that I believe can help with both. It’s the advice I offered my friend and it seems to be helping—no job yet, but the market is responding much differently.

The principle is to stop giving facts and start telling stories. Give potential employers a vicarious experience with you. Throw away the resume or keep it in reserve for when the box-checkers demand that you check their boxes for them. But ensure the experience potential employers have with you engages them in interesting stories about the problems you are uniquely suited to solve.

Think about it. If you want to sell a hamburger, you don’t list its ingredients. You show a picture of it. It’s juicy. It’s got a crispy piece of lettuce on it and a dollop of the exact mustard you love. Then you show someone taking a bite of it with eyes drooping in ecstasy. Why do you do this? Because it helps people trust that this hamburger might help them feel the way they want to feel. It’s a vicarious experience—and we trust stories more than we trust facts and figures. We like direct experiences best, but stories are a strong second.

My friend (I’ll call him Greg) threw away his resume. He started over by answering the question, “What am I world class at?” He thought about his personal brand. What problems do I want people to feel I can solve for them? He is a world-class HR strategist. He has a way of elevating every conversation he is part of. He brings humor and happiness to a team. And he’s a brilliant teacher and communicator.

After clarifying the three or four problems he solves better than most anyone in the world, he designed a document that read like a “movie trailer” rather than a “resume.” He created a document that included stories told by others about him that made these points. It includes graphics of logos of companies he solved problems for—sure, as an employee—but the point is not that he worked there—it’s that he solved problems there. He added his own commentary to let them know what he liked about the experiences others told. When you finish this 1,500-word document, you desperately want to meet Greg.

Oh, and I didn’t mention, but Greg is sixty-one years old and legally blind. He worries that he gets shrugged off for one or both of these reasons. As he reframed his life story in terms of problems he is brilliant at solving, he found that his age and his disability were natural parts of the unique strengths he ended up describing. He was able to frame his visual impairment, for example, in a story about a complex negotiation and he was able to describe how listening to nuances that led to a breakthrough was a direct result of limited visual distraction.

You’ll find that when you prepare your pitch as a story (movie trailer) rather than a eulogy, you’ll rediscover your own special value. You’ll bolster your confidence that you’re representing a product that deserves good representation. You’ll stop letting yourself be a prisoner to HR boxes that make you worry your age is a deficit and make it clear to both yourself and others that this is part of the reason they can trust you to contribute.

Good luck telling your story. I hope you find the perfect place to serve and contribute.

Warmly,
Joseph

More from Joseph Grenny on Forbes: Read Joseph’s latest article, “There’s Nothing Like a Financial Crisis to Bring Out The Best In People,” to learn about the importance of vulnerability, sacrifice, and integrity during a financial crisis.

Dear Crucial Skills,

My company has grown to ten times the size it was when I started seventeen years ago, yet our systems and processes have not kept up with our rapid growth. Things need to change! One of my strengths is ideation and after seventeen years on the job, I have a lot of ideas.

I am also an activator, so I write proposals, share thoughts, and provide tangible financial justifications, yet my voice goes unheard. If given the opportunity to share, I use my crucial conversations skills to create an open, comfortable environment to discuss ideas, but I typically only get reasons we can’t do it or I’m told this is the way we’ve always done it—which doesn’t make it right!

How can I get decision makers to take my ideas and input into consideration?

Thank you,
Ignored

 Dear Ignored,

Your company is lucky to have you. The VitalSmarts team now numbers over 100. As founders of the company, we have no illusions about what got us here. We were just as clueless twenty years ago as we are today, and didn’t have a company nearly as influential. The difference today is our team. We have brilliant people who have dedicated their careers to contributing ideas that make us better, stronger, and faster.

You’re asking a pretty tough question to answer with so little visibility into your reality. Why aren’t people taking your ideas seriously? Honestly, I can’t know, but what I can do is guess. So in hopes of being helpful, I’ll give you a variety of possibilities to consider. Then I’ll give you a process you can use to figure out which may have merit.

First, the options—in no particular order:

Nothing personal—it’s about the ideas.

Good ideas. Lack of resources. Your ideas are great but the organization doesn’t have incremental resources to test or implement new ideas.

Bad ideas. Your ideas are generally impractical or off-strategy. They’re being ignored because they should be ignored.

Nice ideas. The ideas are good but not great. No organization has capacity to do all of the “nice to dos.”

It’s personal—work on you first, the ideas second.

Low personal credibility. You have a track record of making implausible ideas, or have had personal failures that have decreased confidence in your abilities in general.

Lack of technical/strategic skill. You don’t have a profound understanding of the strategic needs and direction of the organization, so your ideas are off target.

Communication skills. Your ideas have merit, but the way you communicate them (orally or written) undermines the merit of the ideas.

Hobbyhorses. You’re proposing ideas that are interesting to you, but not relevant to others.

Half baked. You haven’t put enough thought into developing the idea for others to take it seriously. There’s a big difference between saying, “Let’s make a new MP3 player!” and developing a prototype of an iPod. You may need to put more work into fleshing out your concept before others will see its merit. Most organizations don’t need more ideas, they need more leaders—people who will champion an idea through successful implementation. If you’re hoping to simply “ideate”—or toss out gems and have others do the work, you are likely to remain disappointed.

It’s political—you lack understanding of how to get a decision made in your organization—who the power players are and how to gain their support.

It’s process—there are channels through which you need to move in your organization to advance ideas. Your strategy has been to “ideate” only, but you haven’t done the dog work of filling out forms, attending meetings, gaining approvals, etc. It could also be that you have such a stifling bureaucracy that no ideas will survive birth. If that’s the case, you may need to raise that issue rather than continuing to toss pebbles at the brick wall.

There are dozens of other possibilities, but I hope these stimulate possibilities for reflection. So, how can you know not just what might be going on, but what is going on? I have two suggestions to help you learn how to exert great influence in your specific case:

Find positive deviants. Identify cases in your organization that contradict your experience. Look for examples where someone proposed a similarly bold idea as yours—but in this case, it was picked up, developed, and implemented. In as ego-less a way as possible, compare your case to this one. What was different about this idea, this person, the political process, or the bureaucratic process that made it work? Using any insights you gain, decide how you will tweak your approach in the future.

Find honest friends. In addition to self-reflection, you can ask others to give you honest feedback. This is tough to get. Most people will take the easy way out and say, “Your ideas are great, people are just too busy,” when in fact part of the story is that your ideas haven’t been that great or you lack personal credibility. If you want them to be honest, you need to make it entirely clear that it is safe for them to be so. One way to do this would be to:

Define the problem. Give them examples of the last few ideas you’ve pitched that fell on deaf ears. Give a contrasting example of a “positive deviant.”

Make it safe. Tell them you have no ego in this and that your sole intention is to gain influence. You desperately need their help. The more sensitive their feedback is, the more actionable it will be for you!

Prime the pump. Give them examples of the kinds of things you think might be going on (for example, use the list I gave you above). Ask them to ponder over the three to five reasons on that list as to why your ideas are ignored.

Give them time. Don’t demand an immediate response. Ask them to give it some thought then get together with them to debrief.

I know this last exercise sounds like a bit of work, but given your passion about making a difference, I think it will be worth it. If you want to feel fully engaged in your work and experience the joy, I can tell you are capable of finding in it, you need to solve this puzzle. It’s clear that the capacity to innovate is an important value for you, so don’t give up. Get feedback. Examine all the possibilities. Be patient as you develop greater skill at influencing your thriving and growing organization. Influence isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort!

Warmly,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

Morale in our organization is low due to financial strain. Our leaders are under a lot of pressure, which negatively affects their communication to their employees. Their harsh tone and negativity are not intentional and most employees know it’s not personal, but after a while, it gets really frustrating.

Everyone knows we are struggling, so why not face it with a positive attitude instead of one of intensity or doom? Perhaps I am being overly critical, but I feel like this would lead us to a better outcome.

Feedback here is often quickly dismissed, so how can I approach leadership about this so that they’ll listen?

Signed,
Gloomy

 Dear Gloomy,

I have one idea that I hope is useful to you.

Your statement that, “feedback here is often quickly dismissed” really struck me. I think that’s true in lots of organizations, and not because leaders are simply uncaring or insecure. It’s frequently because the feedback isn’t given in a way that connects.

Most feedback is given in the form of “verbal persuasion.” In other words, we use abstract generalizations, logic, or data to try to impress others with our points. For example, you offer feedback like, “You know, I think it would really lift our spirits if leaders delivered positive messages now and again. We know times are tough, but it hurts morale when leaders remind us of it so often.” This is stated as a truism. It’s hard to argue against, but it’s not particularly persuasive.

Imagine a teammate telling you, “We need to take better care of our customers.” Even if you didn’t become defensive, you might not be influenced by the statement. Why? Because it affects neither your motivation nor your ability—the two things that predict how we behave.

By contrast, imagine you share the following with your senior managers. First, you start by making it safe to ensure your intent is clear before you get to the content of your message: “I worry about the heavy emotional load you and the other senior managers carry. We’ve been going through tough times for a while, and I know that must wear on you. I want you to know that we are pulling for you and want to do all we can to contribute.”

Now, here’s the critical part:

“And there is something you and the other senior managers can do to help us stay focused and engaged. You have such an enormous influence on morale here that I’m guessing you aren’t aware of how small things you do affect mood and focus. For example, last week my team received a total of five e-mails from upper management—a typical week. Each reported either a lost client, disappointing industry outlooks, or a budget shortfall. I noticed with each one, a feeling of gloom deepened over our department. After the e-mail about budget shortfalls, our team meeting got derailed for thirty minutes with discussion about how we’re in a death spiral—we can’t spend money, which means we can’t sell as well, which means we lose revenues so we can’t spend money, which means we can’t sell as well, etc.”

What’s the difference in this approach? It uses a story. Stories create a vicarious experience for the listener. Rather than relying on abstract ideas or verbal arguments, they take the listener into your team to help him or her feel the human consequences you are trying to describe. If you pick the right story, and tell it in the right way, you can profoundly affect others’ motivation to change. But stories can do more. They can also influence ability.

For example, you could end with:

“Please know I am not saying you should protect us from the truth. But let me tell you, a month ago when you sent a note asking us to reduce travel, that note felt entirely different. Why? Because your note began with a positive comment that boosted our spirits and gave us hope. You said, ‘You have made enormous progress toward reducing our operating costs. You have pulled off a miracle by dropping our operating budget by 12 percent in the past year. Most changes are the result of creativity and teamwork. I am proud of you.’ I can tell you that this little acknowledgement felt like water on parched ground. I saw three copies of the e-mail with that phrase highlighted in various cubicles over the next few days.”

Now, what happened in this part of the story? You provided specific guidance—a suggestion. You made it clear how your leaders could lift morale, not just that it needed to be done. And you did it in an affirming way by pointing out something your leader did right—a good way of disabusing your listener of his or her concern that you might just want to gripe or insult.

Of course, there is no guarantee that even a well-told story will change leaders’ behavior. But the odds are much higher if you communicate in this way rather than using logic, data, and abstractions.

You’re absolutely right to draw your leaders’ attention to this concern. While times are tough in many organizations, the job of leaders is to build people’s motivation and ability to pursue solutions. If you communicate with stories, you can set a good example by building their motivation and ability to be better leaders!

Best wishes,
Joseph

If you’ve been connected to VitalSmarts for even a few minutes, you know the company often makes some audacious claims, not the least of which is that you and I, just ordinary people, can develop the capacity to “change anything.”

Wait a minute—anything?

Sure, we might be able to design a strategy to quit smoking or perhaps maintain a new exercise routine. And maybe we can even ensure the success of an important initiative at work by flexing our Influencer muscles.

But what about bigger, stickier social issues, problems, and opportunities?

The newly organized Influencer Institute, a private operating foundation funded primarily by a percentage of VitalSmarts profits, is an emerging answer to the question of how we’ll leave the world a little better than we found it. It’s our attempt to put our money where our mouths are. And here is a snapshot of some of the initiatives we’ve been working on this past year.

Helping Families Escape Dire Poverty
Poverty flows from myriad causes, particularly poverty that reaches through many generations within families, communities, and nations. And while it’s trite and inadequate to say “poor people have poor ways,” it is true that in many cases, individuals remain in poverty for reasons attributable to behavior as much as to genes or circumstance.

In partnership with Fundacíon Paraguaya, Influencer Institute co-designed a program that helped participating families enact vital behaviors related to growing their monthly incomes and increasing their savings. Fundacíon Paraguaya estimates that 6,200 families have lifted themselves above the poverty threshold through these efforts.

Meanwhile, the Institute has partnered with Cause For Hope, another fine Latin American development organization, to pilot a new form of poverty alleviation intervention based on Influencer principles. We’re in the thick of the experiments now: creating strong peer mentoring entrepreneurship groups, teaching the basics of self-directed behavior change, and designing lean, scalable support systems. Early results are promising, and we anticipate that many individuals and families will be enabled to lift themselves from longstanding poverty.

Improving Educational Outcomes for At-Risk Youth
Influencer Institute has also partnered with KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), a leading USA-based public charter school system that has shown tremendous results in helping inner-city, at-risk youth prepare for, enter, and graduate from college. We’ve been working with KIPP to reduce turnover among their key administrators, a factor that impacts the day-to-day educational experience of their students. Early indicators are good, and we look forward to helping KIPP help tens of thousands of our nation’s youth.

A Call to Action for Certified Trainers
How would you like to make a difference in your own community by training the leaders or members of a worthy nonprofit organization? You choose an organization that aligns with your values and serves people you care about. You donate your training time and we donate up to twenty-five toolkits through the “Not For Profit Training Grants Program.” (See the one-page application on the Trainer Zone website for details.)

Certified Trainers from around the globe have reported personal, moving experiences related to giving freely of their time and talents. How might you make a difference in your own context?

I invite you to stay tuned to Influencer Institute updates, and to join us in the great adventure of transferring the VitalSmarts tools and ideas from the training room to the trenches, and helping to change our communities for good.

Dear Crucial Skills,

I have two employees who are categorized as management yet they do not have any direct reports nor do their job descriptions indicate any responsibilities specific to management. Because it is a large company, I am unable to modify the job classification.

I would like to delegate increased responsibility to their role, but there is also an issue of trust. These two employees do not have the desire to grow as leaders. They are content with working their eight hours a day and going home. As much as I try to help them develop, they just aren’t interested.

Do you have any suggestions for motivating or developing managers?

Motivated Manager

Dear Motivated,

Thanks for describing an interesting influence challenge that many managers face. Organizations ask managers to develop their people, and the workload makes it important for people to take on larger roles, but some employees seem comfortably stuck in their status quo.

Or maybe you’re a mom or dad whose son or daughter is comfortably stuck in the status quo—or whatever you call their basement bedroom. You want your child to launch a career, but he or she doesn’t seem interested in doing what it takes.

How do you get a person who is comfortably stuck to take action?

Avoid the fundamental attribution error. When people are stuck, we have a strong tendency to blame their personal motivation. More often than not, we describe them as lacking character, willpower, grit, or determination. This bias is so strong that psychologists call it the “Fundamental Attribution Error.” However, when a person is stuck—even comfortably stuck—there is usually a lot more going on than simple laziness.

I’m not saying the employees you described aren’t lacking personal motivation. I think you described their poor initiative quite well; however, there is a good chance that personal motivation is not their only problem—it’s just the most obvious one.

Diagnose all six sources. When people are stuck, it’s usually because all Six Sources of Influence are working in combination to hold them fast. Their world is perfectly organized to create the behavior (or lack of behavior) you are currently seeing. Here are the questions we use to diagnose obstacles in all six sources:

Personal Motivation. Left in a room by themselves, would they want to take on greater responsibilities? Would they enjoy it, find it meaningful, and aspire to it as an important part of their identity? Would they take pride in it, or see it as a moral imperative? Ideas for action:

• Invite choice. As part of the performance-management process, ask each employee to prepare a two- to three-year plan. Ask them to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) your organization and your department face. Then have them anticipate how they see your department and their jobs changing in order to take advantage of these SWOTs. Finally, have them describe what they would like to be doing in two or three years and what they need to do now in order to prepare themselves.
• Try small steps. Identify the crucial moments when it would be most helpful for your employees to step up to greater responsibilities. Think of times, places, and circumstances when you could really use their help in a particular way for a short period of time. It will be most effective if you can include them in finding these crucial moments. People are more trusting when they discover crucial moments for themselves. Then ask for their help during these brief and occasional crucial moments.

Personal Ability. Left in a room by themselves would they have all the skills they need to feel confident taking on greater responsibilities? Do they already have the right knowledge, skill sets, experiences, training, and strength? Ideas for action:

• Training that focuses on critical dependencies. Ask your reluctant employees to identify skill sets that are new, are becoming more important, or are in short supply. These skills would make a person indispensable. If they aren’t quick to identify these skills, work with them to identify the people in your organization who could help and ask your employees to interview them.
• Training that fills in missing skills. Suppose your reluctant employees did accept a greater role, what parts of an expanded job would they find most difficult, tedious, or noxious? How could you skill them up so they’d be confident, efficient, and effective in these areas? We often say, “If it’s taking too much will, add some more skill!” Maybe an ounce of skill will yield another pound of motivation.

Social Motivation. Are the right people encouraging them to take on greater responsibilities? Do the peers they respect, the managers they look up to, and their family members encourage or discourage them from stepping up? Ideas for action:

• Get them some feedback. Do they know how others see them? Most of us want to believe we are doing our fair share. Motivate change by using a 360-degree feedback tool to get feedback from their peers and customers. Make it clear that the feedback is for development—not evaluation—purposes and make sure you have solutions for whatever negative feedback they receive. Otherwise, this kind of feedback can be more demoralizing than motivating.
• Connect them with a greater purpose. Get them involved in field trips where they meet with their internal or external customers. Make the connection as personal as possible. Have them report to your team on what they learned and on how your team can improve.

Social Ability. If your employees take on greater responsibilities, are the people around them ready to lend a hand? Do they have mentors, trainers, and peers who can give advice and step in to help? Ideas for action:

• Make them coaches. Sometimes people step up when they become responsible for someone else’s success. Consider assigning them to work with another person in your group.

Structural Motivation. Does your organization provide incentives such as performance reviews, pay, promotions, and perks that could motivate these employees to take on greater responsibilities? Your employees’ job descriptions don’t include management activities so it’s hard to use the formal reward system, but there may be other routes to explore. Ideas for action:

• Recognize incremental improvements. Try small assignments, projects that can be completed within a week, and then give your honest, heartfelt appreciation when they complete them. Then gradually increase the number, size, duration, and importance of these projects. Continue to show your appreciation as you deem appropriate.

Structural Ability. Is there a way to use the environment, data, tools, cues, or systems to make it easier and more convenient for these people to take on greater responsibilities? Ideas for action:

• Discover and remove obstacles. Ask yourself (or your reluctant employees), “If you wanted to take on a few additional responsibilities, what are the biggest obstacles you would face?” One good guess would be time. If nothing else about their jobs changed, they would have to work longer, harder days. How could you change that? What could you take off their plates so they would have more time for higher-value work? Showing your flexibility may encourage them to become more flexible as well.

I hope these ideas help you generate more strategies tailored to your exact situation. Notice all these ideas involve an investment of time, energy, and thought on your part. It would be easier to write off the employees as unmotivated slugs, but that would mean abdicating your own responsibilities as a manager. It would also be a very costly write-off, since they are likely to remain on your payroll.

Whether you’re dealing with reluctant employees or a child who is still living in your basement, never lose faith! When you marshal the power of all Six Sources of Influence, you can truly change anything.

David