What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Influence
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University of Pennsylvania
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Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success
From the lesson
Module 3
This module was designed to help you develop your persuasive tactics and rhetoric to increase your influence. By discussing historical examples of classical principles of persuasion—from Aristotle to the six SUCCES factors—you’ll learn what makes ideas memorable and be able to craft effective messages of your own. You’ll assess your own strengths and weaknesses in influence tactics by taking the Leverage Inventory survey. You’ll also explore statistical analysis examining the relative effectiveness of soft, hard, and smart power strategies. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to employ a toolbox of approaches to gain power and influence, and be prepared to bring the right leveraging skills to any situation.
Meet the Instructors
Cade MasseyPractice Professor
The Wharton School
The leverage inventory is intended to assess you across a wide range of
influence strategies.
So let's look at what these are.
You can think about it in a few different buckets.
First, this persuasion bucket.
Logos, pathos, and ethos.
These are the components of Aristotle's rhetoric.
We've seen them in our section on persuasion and we'll talk about them in
a little more detail as we go through the individual tools.
The second bucket is relationships.
Dyadic relationships, you might think about them as negotiation relationships.
This set includes Exchange, Might, and Allocentrism.
And then, the last bucket you might think of more as the structure of relationships,
more the macro look at your relationships.
And these include Networks, Coalitions, and Team building.
So this set of nine comes from kind of a common framework,
almost conventional wisdom out there on what the influence strategies are.
So we've listed them here in three columns.
One is the Leverage Inventory, and then another is the Hay Group's tool.
This is one of the early industry tools that assesses influence tactics.
And then, a third column with McKinsey, the consulting firm.
They train their consultants on influence tactics.
And we've lined them up so
you can see how common each of these rows is basically tapping into the same thing.
So you only need ten rows to cover the nine topics that all three groups
are covering.
The point here is that there's pretty much a canon,
a conventional wisdom around what the key influence tactics are.
We're going to go beyond this but this is our starting place.
These are the first nine.
So what I want to do is go through each of these nine and give you just a quick
summary, but also identify the survey questions that are related to each
of these tactics, so that you're going to tie your results to these concepts.
The first is allocentrism.
So this is the opposite of egocentrism.
This is an other orientation.
A person who actively seeks other's interests, and
considers their preferences.
It's related to empowerment and collaboration,
it's related to what Jeff Pfeffer refers to as sensitivity to others.
It's related to the negotiation framework, first put out there by Ury and
Fisher, Getting to Yes.
The survey questions we used to operationalize this concept,
are listed here.
They include looking for solutions that will benefit all the parties involved.
I'm not going to read each of them but listens attentively when others talk.
This is trying to understand where the other side is coming from.
Not necessarily to give them everything they want, but
let's understand where they're coming from, allocentrism.
A second is exchange, this is a willingness to quid pro quo,
but a preference for going beyond it, so it's highly related to reciprocity.
Which we've talked about in previous lectures.
It's highly related to Bob Axelrod's game theoretic concept of tit for tat.
The survey questions here include things like offering rewards to people for
compliance, understanding the need to help others in order to get help from them.
We use six different questions to build a scale to tap into,
to reflect what exchange is.
A third is might.
Might is a willingness to use coercive power.
More generally, an ability to address difficult issues and tolerate conflict.
So in the very beginning of this course, we talked about Frenching & Raven,
and their notion of coercive power, this is tightly connected that.
We operationalize this with survey questions like standing up for his or
her opinion, able to tolerate conflict,
letting people know when they've performed below expectations.
These all group under this umbrella.
It might, in my experience, in the classroom,
this is something that some students really struggle with.
Many of them need to exercise this a little more freely,
even if it's not on a daily basis.
And then, there are some, on the other end of the spectrum, who probably need to dial
it back a little bit, perhaps might be a little too comfortable exercising might.
Another concept is networks.
The idea here is to cultivate a broad and disparate set of informal relationships.
This is connected to the notion of structural holes, researched by Burt and
before him Granovetter, we talked about that earlier in the course.
Survey questions here are things like, maintaining relationships that span
disparate groups or making an effort to become friends with colleagues at work.
Another concept, coalitions.
We had an entire day on coalitions, so you're well tooled on this by now.
Identifying and getting the support of key people.
It's connected in some ways to Cialdini's social influence.
It's connected to animal behavior.
We saw multiple examples from Frans de Waal, the primatologist, and
the concept we talked about, the practice of having the meeting before the meeting.
So we operationalize this with questions like, enlisting the support of
individuals, one by one, in order to build support for an idea.
Another tactic, team-building, this is building groups prioritizing cohesion.
Highly connected to organizational culture, to the concept of socialization,
the questions we use here are prioritizing group cohesion,
helping articulate an inspirational vision for a group, making appeals to values or
principles shared by the group.
All of these are around building teams and keeping people closely connected.
Another concept, logos.
This is back to Aristotle and the notion of persuasion, using logical reasons,
expertise or data to convince or persuade others.
So five quick, punchy ways we operationalize this.
Finding ways to make points as simply as possible.
Gathering data to support his or her position, using arguments,
that are well reasoned.
This is something our MBAs typically do pretty naturally.
So this isn't the hardest part of persuasion, but
many people still need to focus on this.
A second component in persuasion is pathos.
This is conveying message in a way that has emotional resonance, of course,
this again comes from Aristotle and Cicero.
It's connected to the readings we did by Heath and Heath.
Some of the ways we operationalize it, using stories to help make my points.
This is one of the things many people most need to add to their rhetoric.
Tailoring communication content and style to the specific audience.
So we have six different ways here,
we talked about persuasion in some detail a couple of lectures ago.
Ethos, the third and final component of Aristotle's rhetoric.
Establishing personal credibility through credentials, commonality and
decorum, you meet others' expectations for your role.
So it does connect to some of Cialdini's concepts, Similarity and Authority.
It connects to the French and Raven idea of expert power and
we operationalize it with a couple of items, four items.
Presenting ideas with confidence, making his or her efforts and
accomplishments known.
This is one of the things that adds some flavor to this particular concept.
Many people struggle with this.
What we know is that people will be more persuasive
if the audience understands their credentials and their credibility.
The challenge though is we know we don't like to be told by other people
what my credentials and credibility are.
So how do you get that across so
that you'll be more persuasive without being a jerk and turning people off?
It's one of these wonderful little challenges in influence.
So that is an overview of the first nine.
And that is, again, kind of the conventional wisdom,
the canon in the field and that's where we started.
When we first started using this tool, building this tool years ago.
But in working with executive MBAs and studying the literature,
we thought there were a few components missing.
And we've added three.
And we think of them as meta-tools,
they are kind of tools to figure out how to use the other tools.
They are agency, intentionality and situation awareness.
So let's spend just a little bit of time understanding what these three mean.
Agency is shaping situations, influencing circumstances to suit needs,
challenging status quo, accepting nothing as fixed.
It's connected to the ideas of initiative and control.
It's connected to research in sociology on rule breakers.
We've seen many examples in this course, Robert Moses,
Janette Sadik-Kahn, that illustrate this.
Some of the behaviors we assessed through questions.
Creating new alternatives, acting before being asked to.
And, again, Janette Sadik-Kahn, she is a great illustration of this here.
She is Transportation Commissioner, or was.
In recent years, Transportation Commissioner in New York.
And she gets credit for these pedestrian only zones in New York.
She really transformed the landscape in New York, in a way that no one would
have thought possible, cutting through red tape, largely on the heels of her agency.
She did other great things, but she was not willing to take anything as fixed.
Most folks think she was the most influential Transportation Commissioner
since Moses.
And we mean Robert Moses there.
And if you look at our data, which we will in a minute, this always shows up.
Every group we've ever tested,
it shows up as the most important strategy empirically.
The second of the new tools is intentionality.
Intentionality is acting with the goal in mind.
Relentless pursuit of goals, eschewing distractions and secondary rewards.
This is connected to, Jeff Pfeffer talks about it as focus.
There's obviously decades of research on goals.
We've seen examples in this course from Robert Moses and Sergio de Mello,
which I'll elaborate on, again, in a minute.
The survey questions we use to assess this include things like,
is careful to understand the steps necessary to achieve goals.
Is resilient in the pursuit of goals.
And again, Sergio de Mello illustrated this for us.
We saw Sergio in the very first lecture in this course.
He is the late UN Ambassador.
And when he died, he was thought of as probably the top diplomat in the world.
We studied him while he was running, essentially, East Timor.
And some of the things we read about him, in the book by Samantha Power about him,
is that he was, quote, ruthlessly pragmatic.
That with experience in his career, he learned to trade lesser evils.
This all means that he was making tradeoffs,
he was sacrificing lesser goals in pursuit of his bigger goals.
One way to think about it is that if you're not sacrificing some of your
preferences and some of your lesser goals,
you're probably not working with enough intentionality towards your biggest goals.
Finally, situation awareness.
Attending to situational power, uncertainty and importance, and
especially how these factors change over time.
This concept comes to us from the military.
Those of you who have been in the military, the U.S. military at least,
know how often you're trained and drilled in SA, Situation Awareness, SA.
The aviation industry has picked it up and from there,
other industries are adding it to their training repertoire.
It's connected also to psychological research on things like change blindness
and change detection.
We talked about it some in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
that we talked about early in the course.
Some of the survey questions here are recognizing when circumstances change,
recognizing when uncertainty is high, seeing opportunities that others miss.
One of our favorite examples comes from President Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States in 1861 to 1865.
We can use Lincoln to illustrate any of these leverage inventory concepts.
He was one of these guys that was extraordinarily adept at the full range.
He played the full range.
But he gives us a nice illustration of situation awareness,
especially around knowing when to wait, and knowing when to double down.
So when he was about to give the emancipation proclamation,
freeing the slaves in the United States, there was a big debate.
Even in the North, the part of the country he was from, and among republicans.
Even though they were fighting a war against society,
everyone wasn't on board about the Emancipation Proclamation.
There was great debate there.
He himself debated it for a long time and eventually came to believe that it was
time to issue this proclamation and free the slaves.
It was the summer of 1862, they were one year into the Civil War, and
he came to his cabinet and said, it's time to do this,
I've debated it, what do you guys think?
And they all went around and gave their reactions.
It is said that he had thought of all them, except for one, his Secretary of
State Seward said, I like the idea but it's a bad moment to do it, bad timing.
We are presently losing the war.
If we do this now, it will look like the desperate act of a weak government.
He encouraged Lincoln to set it aside until the war had turned, and
then it would be received better.
Lincoln saw the wisdom of the suggestion and did, in fact,
put it in his desk drawer and sat on it for six months or so.
And then, on the hills of Antietam, which was the bloodiest day in American history,
the North beat the South in that battle.
And turned the tide of the war.
He gave the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves.
The remarkable thing to me about this story, is that here's Lincoln
on the eve of making one of the grandest gestures a government has ever made.
And he decided the timing wasn't right.
He realized that what mattered was the effectiveness of this thing.
It didn't matter how morally right he was.
In order to be effective, timing mattered.
The situation mattered.
And he was willing to postpone this big gesture, grand gesture,
as big a gesture as a president has ever made.
He postponed it in order to wait for the right situation.
So those are our 12 tactics.
That's what we assessed you on in the leverage inventory and
in the next lecture, we'll go into some detail into what the data looked like.
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