Chaos to calm: Influence and persuasion S2 E10

Influence and persuasion are essential no matter what role you’re in. In this episode, Jenni explores some theories about influence and persuasion and the potential links to chaos. She also shares five things to consider when it comes to influencing and the potential risk of crossover into manipulation.

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Books recommended by Jenni Field

You are not so smart: Why your memory is mostly fiction, why you have too many friends on Facebook and 46 other ways you’re deluding yourself by David McRaney

The Social Dilemma on Netflix

Robert Cialdini

Podcast: Chaos to calm: Building trust and credibility S2 E7

Podcast: Chaos to calm: How to listen to employees S2 E5

Join the Redefining Communications community

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast:

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, we’re talking about influence and persuasion. I want to discuss the importance of influence and persuasion, no matter what role you’re in. 

Now, often I talk about influential internal communication, and for me, that’s all about using internal communication to create an efficient and an engaging organisation. It’s about making sure people have the skills in communication to lead and manage, no matter what role they’re in. And it’s about ensuring that we are addressing the real issues inside the organisation and not papering over the cracks.

But today, I want to start by exploring the chaos linked to influence and persuasion and some of the theories around it. And then I’m going to share around about five things for you to think about if you’re looking at building your influence and persuasion. 

And I want to kind of explore how to develop that. I’m also going to talk a little bit about the potential risks around influence and persuasion and the crossover into manipulation and how the two can often be confused. 

Can chaos be inside organisations when we have got issues around influence?

Now, influence is a tricky one, because we are very easily influenced. And we might not think we are, we might think that all of our decisions are our own, and that there’s, you know, no problem at all. I know my own mind, I know what I’m doing. These are all my thoughts and decisions. But there is so much research out there about how we make decisions, the role of bias, you know, how our memories tell us things that aren’t particularly true. There’s lots, and I can share loads of books and resources on this, but my team will kill me if I put them all in the show notes.

So, I’ll pop a link to the bookshop that we have, where you can see all the different books that I’ve read over the last few years, because there’s a few in there that will really help if you’re interested in exploring more about some of those different areas. But there can be chaos inside organisations when we have got issues around influence. So, if people are influenced by those working against the organisation, so quite often in my work, when we’re diagnosing the root cause of chaos, we will sometimes come across people that I would often call kind of blockers or toxic people in the organisation.

If you’re influenced by those people, that’s not particularly helpful for the culture of the organisation or the efficiency of the organisation. We can also see chaos where influences are used in the wrong way. So, sometimes

We might think somebody in an organisation has quite a lot of influence, and we might use them in a way that’s not particularly helpful. And sometimes that happens in highly unionised organisations where we think we can use people to, use people sounds really horrible as I’m saying it, where we can work with people to help influence those around them. But sometimes that goes against us, and it can cause quite a lot of friction sometimes in those environments. 

And we’ve also got a bit of chaos where leaders don’t know how to influence or persuade. And I say that because influence and persuasion can sometimes feel like a bad thing. But actually, we’re all doing it all the time. And it’s something that we need to be able to do if we are going to change behaviours, if we want people to do something differently, if we want to have a conversation or a discussion, we’re using influence and persuasion all the time. 

What are the impacts of being unaware of constant nudging in the workplace?

Now, one of my favourite reads of the last few years is the book, You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney. And the book opens with a chapter called Priming. And the book is made up of around about 64, I think, 64 chapters of kind of the myths of why we think we’re so smart. It’s a really good read. 

But the one about priming shares the fact that we have this misconception that we know when we’re being influenced and how it’s affecting our behaviour. Whereas the truth is that we are quite unaware of the constant nudging we receive from ideas that are formed in our unconscious mind. And that’s really important, especially in years where we have been really struggling with kind of a polarisation in society, or where we think we’re, you know, we’re feeling very passionate about certain decisions. 

There is constant nudging from different places to us. And if you’ve ever watched the documentary on Netflix called Social Dilemma, it’s a really good example of how some of that nudging is happening in some of those areas for us.

Now, Robert Cialdini is well known for their model, The Six Principles of Persuasion. It’s around how to influence people. So I mentioned this because it’s really well used in marketing and advertising. And it’s really helpful to know the techniques if you don’t know them around persuasion and influence when it comes to the kind of marketing and advertising space. 

How does this play out in the workplace? What’s the risk around that?

So as I’ve said, we’re all influenced all the time. So when it comes to leading a team or an organisation, or if you’re working in communications, we just have to be very mindful of the power that comes with that role. 

Now, I talk a lot about the model of how you want people to think, what you want them to do, and how you want them to feel. And the power of words, the power of communication is heavily linked to behaviour change. But if we start to leverage emotions to gain something, that’s where we cross the line into manipulation. Influence isn’t that. Influence is the power to have an effect on people. Manipulation is controlling something to your advantage. So there’s a very clear distinction between the two. And sometimes they can kind of blur a little bit, but it’s important to acknowledge that difference.

For me, influence and persuasion comes back to some of the core things that we’ve touched on in this season. It’s about relationships, it’s about trust, accountability, it’s about change, it’s about listening. And as an individual, you know, I have a duty to check in on myself and where I’m influenced. I have to be self-aware enough to know whether or not it’s a good or a bad influence, and I have to check that my behaviour is something that I’m happy to be accountable for. If I’m leading a team or leading an organisation, I need to make sure that I’m aware of the impact and influence that I can have on others. 

But to move forwards, if you’re looking to build influence, sort of building that skill of looking to influence, persuade your team or your organisation, these are the five things that I want you to consider. 

1. Are you credible?

In episode seven, I talk about trust and credibility and the three things that demonstrate that you are credible. And those three are goodwill, expertise and trustworthiness. And I delve into that in that episode. So I’m not going to do that here. But you’ve got to think about those three areas. All of those link to influence because they all link to trust. Having expertise is so important to be seen as credible. That doesn’t mean that you have to have loads of qualifications, but it means for some people that you might have to have a lot of experience. There’ll be different things that we see as expertise. 

2. Are you going into the conversations to understand rather than to win? 

And that’s something that we really have to consider because we can’t persuade people if we’re trying to win. If I go in to try and understand a perspective rather than try and win someone over, then I’m going to have a much better conversation.

If I go in with a view of I’ve got to win this argument, it’s going to instantly become quite challenging. And I’ve already used the language of an argument. So, if we can go into understand rather than win, that’s a much better position to come from. 

3. Being respectful of people’s time and attention. 

The best gift you can give someone is your time. It’s our most precious commodity. It’s something people talk about all the time, about being busy. And you’ll know from previous seasons about my views on busy. But it’s something to really think about.

Be present with people, be interested in them. And if you can’t make the time, then tell them when you can. But if you’re looking to build influence and persuasion, it goes hand in hand with trust and credibility. So you’ve got to be making sure that you are respectful of people’s time. 

4. Are you really listening to people? 

And in episode five of this season, I talk about how to listen to employees. And it’s a big one when it comes to persuasion. Because if you’re not listening, you can’t persuade. You can’t tailor your responses to what they’ve said. You can’t use the language that they’ve used for you. And I’ve had direct experience of this, where I have been trying to persuade a CEO of the importance of communication.

And in those conversations, I was really struggling. I was using data. I was using lots of different things to try and get my view across and the opinion of the industry across. And nothing was working until I really started to listen to the language they were using. And they talked a lot about value. So I ended up having a conversation about what does value mean to you for communication?

We had that discussion. And I could then tailor all of my messaging or all of my conversations around the word value and what it meant to them. And all of a sudden, it unlocked a huge amount of opportunity for me to move the function forwards and do the things that I needed to do. And that’s the importance of listening, because you can’t really persuade people if you’re just assuming what they need to help them maybe see your point of view. 

5. How are you solving their problems?

And I think that’s really important when it comes to persuasion and influence. You know, a lot of my career has been in organisations as an internal communication manager, up to communications director. But I was always focused on how I could help other departments or help people get things done or do things differently. 

Now, I might not have always got this right. But that focus on solving others problems is really what probably led me to setting up my own consultancy. But it also links really heavily to things like goodwill as the element of credibility, which in turn will lead to influence. 

And I suppose essentially here, I’m saying that we can all build our skills to better influence and persuade. We all do it somewhat naturally. We’ve been telling stories for years. And we have probably tried to persuade people without really realising that we’re doing it. But we can really develop these if we’re going to be leading teams or leading others. And there are strong links to the five things I’ve listed here to empathy and compassion, which will be topics that I will no doubt explore in season three of the podcast.

Thank you for listening!

Now, I’ll be back for season three later this year. And I’ll be reaching out to my community via my newsletter to explore the topics that might be of interest. So, if you haven’t signed up yet, I’ve popped a link in the show notes so you can join the mailing list today.

And as always, thank you for listening. If you’ve listened to other episodes in the season, thank you for listening to those too. And if you can, I’d love you to add a rate or review wherever you’re listening to the podcast, so that more people can find it.

And please, I always say this, but please do carry on the conversations with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.