I just finished reading a book which I found very interesting. It’s called “Influence” by Robert Cialdini. The book is about how people can be convinced into doing things they would not normally do. You might think it’s an evil book because it teaches people techniques they can use to influence other people. But what usually happens is that the compliance professionals (politicians, sellers, retailers, beggars, etc) already know and employ the techniques. It’s the common people that do not know them and fall victim to the professionals. So the book uncovers the tricks and helps people like you and me to defend themselves against them.
The book was particularly revealing for me because I had a low opinion of influence. For me influence meant convincing people into doing things gainful for you against their will. Oh, how wrong I was!
The most important thing that I have learned is that you influence people regardless of your intention especially of you are a leader. There are all kinds of leaders (managers, mentors, gurus, teachers, parents, etc.) and they have a big influence on their “followers”.
A few years ago, during a corporate training the trainer told us that the team resembles its leader. At first it seemed strange but then I realized it was true. The teams in my company, their working habits, the atmosphere in the team and the interactions between its members were very similar to their managers. Back then I did not understand the mechanism that leads to such resemblance but this book gave me an idea about why it’s happening.
A leader can influence its followers using almost all methods described in the book, but I am a manager in the software development field and from my perspective two principles stand out: “Commitment and consistency” and “Authority”.
The first principle, “Commitment and consistency” states that we tend to adjust our current and future actions so that we are consistent to another statement or action we have done in the past. The easy employment of this principle is to get a team member (or all of them) to commit to something (usually by making them take part in the decision). If you succeed, they will adjust their future actions to comply with what they have committed to.
But there is an even more powerful side of this principle. It seems that we also tend to adjust our behavior in order to be compliant to a certain image we have of ourselves and to an image others have of us. Combine this with the “Authority” principle and you realize the great power the leader has on his followers. The “Authority” principle says that we tend to comply more with a request coming from someone we perceive as an authority figure than if it comes from a regular person.
How can a leader use these principles? If the principles are correct, the leader needs only to create in his mind an image of how a team member should behave like and then to show this image to him. Because the team member perceives this image the manager has of him and because the manager is seen as an authority at work, the team member will most likely behave accordingly.
So, dear managers, create wonderful images of your team in your heads and act as if you are working with wonderful people. Eventually they will become wonderful.
There is a catch though, in order for the team member to adopt the image or to make a commitment, he must not feel pressured in any way. This is why the technique does not always work. The pressure that the manager usually puts on a team member is either a punishment (if he does not comply) or a big reward (in this case the team member may think he is doing all the changes for the reward and not because he agrees with them). Also, the leader must understand that he cannot choose entirely what that person will become, he can only help him achieve a higher potential in the direction the team member chooses.
I found out about this mechanism during training where it was presented as it can have a negative effect. The trainer was talking about biases and more specifically about a bias called “self fulfilling prophecy”. That is, if you think of a person that she is good, she will prove herself to you as being good. If you treat the same person as if she is bad, she will behave differently and prove to you she is bad. So beware of the situation when you do not like a person, most probably you did not even give her a chance to prove you wrong. Putting a label on someone because of one or two characteristics is very common and very dangerous for a manager.
As a conclusion, do not underestimate the influence you have on others and remember that the influence can be good or bad depending on the aim of the influencer.
