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The Influencer: Increasing Influence with Dialogue
October 20, 2009
By Kerry Patterson
Someone cuts in front of you in line at the movies. What do you do? If you’re like most of the people my colleagues and I have interviewed in our research over the years, you’d claim to step up to the problem and address it directly and professionally. However, when we, as researchers, actually cut in front of people in line, few said anything. In fact, after we cut in front of 50 different moviegoers, not a single person spoke up. Some muttered under their breath or quietly complained to others, but nobody said a word.
Consider what routinely happens in hospitals. Each year, tens of thousands of people acquire potentially fatal diseases at hospitals. These easily preventable illnesses are passed around primarily because health-care professionals don’t wash their hands for the prescribed length of time. Often, doctors, nurses, and professionals observe someone fail to adequately wash and don’t say a word. People remain quiet because confronting a strong-willed peer or an authority figure could be viewed as offensive or even insubordinate. Such a risky act could be career-threatening. Better to stay quiet and let the germs fall where they may.
Let's take another example—and I’m not kidding about this one. The president of a small, successful IT firm decided for the holidays to mail employees and customers rice-filled sacks displaying the company logo. It’s the kind of thing you heat in the microwave oven and put on your sore neck.
Unfortunately, instead of paying to have the gifts tailored, the president decided to make the bags in-house. And, as it turned out, it was easier to purchase wheat than rice, and the staff didn’t have any certified bag sewers. Soon, inadequately prepared employees were trying their best to sew together tiny sacks of wheat. At first, the sacks broke, so the president suggested purchasing an expensive, specialized sewing machine to move things along. Then, one day, the wheat warmed to some critical temperature, and the office became infested with weevils.
Eventually, upset employees completed the bags at a cost that was ten times the tailored version’s, and morale took a real beating. But not one person ever said a word to the president.
You might wonder what kinds of weakling moviegoers, silent health-care employees, and deferring IT specialists shy away from speaking up, in what could have been a simple conversation? Surely these passive souls don’t represent how the average person handles high-stakes, potentially touchy discussions.
Actually, people generally don’t sit quietly and watch the world around them collapse. When the stakes get high enough, humans move with amazing alacrity from quietly observing to employing threats and other harsh tactics. In short, when faced with high-stakes situations, people move from silence to violence.
You see it happen when meetings take a turn for the worse as competitors begin to argue. The discussion quickly degenerates, as participants either sit silently waiting to see which way the political winds blow or fire opposing views that are liberally overstated and littered with inflammatory terms. In these moments, people are no longer trying to make the right choice; they’re trying to win or at least escape unharmed.
Dialogue Resolves and Heals
Fortunately, not everyone toggles from silence to violence. Many routinely engage in healthy dialogue, and such gifted folks are both a delight to work with and highly valued. We learned this two decades ago, when my colleagues and I were hired by senior managers at a company to study their most influential employees. Our goal was to learn what top performers did and then teach their skills to the rest of the staff.
As the research unfolded, we discovered individuals who had been identified as the most influential people shared a surprising characteristic. Not all were leaders, so it wasn’t their authority. Not all had the same type or level of schooling, so it wasn’t education. Influential people were better at mastering crucial conversations than others.
We discovered the importance of crucial conversations while observing Kevin, someone who had been singled out as an opinion leader. As we watched Kevin and his colleagues enter a discussion over where the company would move corporate offices, the president weighed in with his opinion about a particular city. From that moment on, people stopped talking and tried to align with the president. Unfortunately, the majority didn’t want to move to where the president appeared to support, but they didn’t want to publicly disagree with him.
While others sat by nervously, Kevin spoke directly to the president.
“Robert, I’m not sure you intended to do this, but I think you just broke your own ground rules on how we’d discuss this issue,” Kevin said.
All eyes turned to Robert to see if he was going to hand Kevin his head on a platter. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Robert replied.
Kevin then explained that Robert and the senior vice president had agreed not to express their opinions until all of the proposed cities had been discussed. However, Robert weighed in early and spoke favorably of one city in particular and effectually shut down the discussion.
Robert agreed that by offering his opinion, people then tried to sing the praises of the city he supported. He then apologized for setting the discussion off course and asked that the staff return to the original plan. The group eventually selected a different city than the one Robert hinted at.
As we exited the room one participant said to us, “Did you see what Kevin just did? He spoke when the rest of us just sat there. He turned the whole meeting around, and it took a lot of guts.”
Later that day, we asked Kevin how he mustered the courage to speak up as confronting a person in power could put him at risk. Kevin explained that he saw no risk other than what would have happened if he did not speak freely and honestly. He believed everyone’s ideas needed to be heard, so when he thought the free flow of meaning was put at risk, he spoke his mind.
When it comes to expressing your views, even controversial ones, it’s not a matter of courage but rather a matter of skill. If you know what to say and how to say it, no person or topic remains untouchable. But without the right dialogue skills, you’re likely to move from silence to violence and back again and put yourself and your ideas at risk.
The take-away here is important to individuals, teams, and organizations alike. Learn how to be persuasive, not abrasive, and you’ll be highly valued. Learn how to speak honestly and encourage others to do the same, and you and the people around you will make the best choices and then act on your decisions with unity and conviction.
We distilled this high-leverage skill of speaking up in a way that not only gets heard but makes it safe for others to do the same in our book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. By mastering these skills, you’ll learn, like Kevin, how to speak up to nearly anyone at nearly any time to increase your personal influence and secure the results you’re after.
Kerry Patterson is co-author of three New York Times bestsellers: Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations. He is also an acclaimed keynote speaker, consultant, and co-founder of VitalSmarts, www.vitalsmarts.com, an innovator in corporate training and organizational performance.
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