Top Tips: Influence and Persuasion Highlight Reel [Part 1]

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian, and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at AI, we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. When you think about the difference between persuasion and manipulation, what is it for you?

Well, manipulation. Well, let's just. We'll go this way. Persuasion, to do it ethically, has to have three components. First is we tell the truth. Now, it's not enough to just tell the truth. We also don't hide the truth. We never hold back information that will materially impact somebody's decision making because if they find out about it and come back later, they're going to look at us as unethical. So we tell the truth and we never hide the truth. The second thing that we do is we only use the psychology, the principles of persuasion in ways that are natural to the situation. So we don't force scarcity where there's no scarcity. We don't claim social proof if there's no social proof. And the third thing that we do, we always make sure that what we're putting on the table, what we're asking of somebody, is not just good for us, but it has to be good for them. And I like to say this, good for you, good for, for me, then we're good to go. And if we have those three things, I think we can feel very good about ourselves and how we're interacting with people to try to get them to do the things that we need them to do.

Yeah, and I think on the other side, too, we can feel good about ourselves, but they also can feel good about themselves and feel good about the relationship that they have with you and the decisions that they're making, they're making it fully informed. And after the fact they feel good about the interaction.

Absolutely. You know, Kwame, over time, the more I have learned and studied and talked about this, the principle of liking just keeps coming to the top. Because if we employ that the right way, it's not about me getting you, Kwame, to like me so you'll do what I want. Now, that does work when somebody likes you. But what's far more effective is when I come to like you. Because then when you start to really sense like, hey, Brian cares about me, you become much more open to whatever I might be asking. Because deep down, you believe friends do right by friends, and because I believe that, too, then what I am putting on the table, not that it's always correct for you, but from what I understand, and I'm putting on the table, I'm doing it for your best interest. And we've created this virtuous cycle, so to speak. And it really is the thing that removes manipulation. Because I would never manipulate my friends. I know you would never manipulate your friends. So then we need to go into situations saying, what can I do to come to know and like these people that I'm going to interact with? Because that will change everything.

I love it. This is great.

Very often we begin a negotiation without a handshake. It's a mistake by shaking hands. What you signal is a willingness to cooperate. That's what a handshake signals to your partner. And that mindset, again, you're pre sueding that person to be more cooperative because they see you as. As willing to be more cooperative. Here's what my. So that's what the research shows. Here's what I think the research failed to show. Even when you do begin a negotiation with a handshake, why do we leave it as the only time we shake hands? Why wouldn't we? If that's the signal that leads to mutual beneficial outcomes, better outcomes for both parties. Why don't we do that again after the lunch break? Or why don't we do that again at the start of the second day of negotiation? Every time we signal that intent, we enhance the system. We energize the system for cooperation, collaboration, and mutual success.

I started out as just an ordinary kind of generic social influence researcher with a professor I was working with at Columbia when I was a graduate student. And we were doing a typical influence study where we had to get participants and we wanted, you know, a nice diverse and adult demographic. So I went down to Penn Station as opposed to doing it on campus with students, as we tend to do. And I would go down to Penn Station every day and basically ask people to fill out a survey. And I would go up to these strangers sitting there in Penn Station waiting for their trains one after the other, and say, will you fill out my survey and see what happened? And at the end of all this. So I had to do this for day after day until we had enough participants that we could actually look at the data. And when we eventually looked at the data, my professor and I, we realized that the study didn't work. And so all of this kind of survey asking had been in vain. And I was just so distraught because I was like, this was such a horrible experience, like going. Asking strangers to do this thing day after day. It was traumatic. And he looked at the data and he was like, you know, what you're describing does not fit what I'm seeing in this data. Because I recorded how many people actually agreed each time I went up to them and asked them to complete a survey. And it turned out that most people were actually saying yes. Most people were, even if they said no, quite kind about it. And so there was this disconnect between how I thought. Thought influence was happening and how I was experiencing this situation of asking for something and how the other person was experiencing it, and the reality of how influential I was. And so we talked through that kind of this disconnect between what was in my head and what was really happening and realized that maybe even though our initial hypothesis didn't work in the study we were running, maybe that was the interesting finding. And that maybe we could see if other people similarly had this sort of overly pessimistic view of whether they could get other people to do things and how sort of awkward the interaction was going to be. And we could kind of see if their reality wound up being as sort of positive and more positive than they expected, just like mine was. And so we started running these studies where we brought people into the lab and basically put them in the same situation I was in and sent them out into the world to ask for things and had them sort of guess how the interactions were going to go, then keep track of how that interactions actually went.

Oh, this is great. This is really interesting. So what kind of things were you asking the people to do in your study?

Yeah, so we started out trying to keep it as similar to my experience as possible. And so our very first study was really simple. And we brought participants into the lab and we said, you're going to go out and ask people just to fill out surveys. And we said, you're going to get five people to fill out these surveys. How many people do you think you're going to have to ask before five people agree? And so our participants first of all said that, you know, I think I'm going to have to ask about 20 people before 5 will agree. So that was kind of around the average. They also asked us a bunch of sort of illuminating questions. So they'd be like, you know, well, what if nobody agrees? What do I do? What if it takes way longer than you've allotted for the study? Like, what? You know, what if I'm out there for hours? So they clearly just thought this was going to be a really difficult task. They were really anxious about it and thought maybe they wouldn't even be able to accomplish the task of getting five people to fill a survey. And then they went out and did it, and they had this little tally sheet where they kept track of how many people they asked and how many people agreed. And it turned out they had to ask about 10 people before 5 agreed. So they had to ask about half as many. In other words, twice as many people were agreeing as they expected. And so that was our very first study, and we've gone on to replicate it with all sorts of other requests, like asking someone to borrow their cell phone to make a call, ask for charitable donations. We teamed up with Team in Training, an organization that you kind of get someone to sponsor you for a fundraising race. We have had them ask people for directions, and then we could talk later, potentially about. We've also kind of moved on to having people ask other people for unethical things to see if this also kind of translated into those kinds of scenarios.

There's so much to address here. Vanessa. Okay, so a little micro negotiation note. I think when we talk about it from a negotiation perspective, we always say, ask more questions, ask more questions. Improve. The good point where you said that the questions that the participants were asking were quality of questions that you ask, but we don't often address enough the fact that you can learn a lot about the other person and where they're coming from and their perspective from the questions that they ask you. I think that's just an important note to answer there. Now, when it comes to the confidence part, this is something that we've identified as a gap in performance, too, because we have a skills gap and we have a confidence gap, because it doesn't make sense to give recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen because they can have all the skills in the world, but if they don't have the confidence to use the skills, then they're not going to use it. Based on what you're showing in this study that you gave an example of right there, people are twice as effective at having these difficult conversations than they expected.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that is, you're just nailing so many of the takeaways that we talk about when we talk about this research. Because on the one hand, if you think that you are twice as likely to be rejected if you ask someone for something as you actually are, you know, what are you going to do? You're going to, first of all, probably hold back and just not ask half the time. So, as you said, you're not actually going to get in the kitchen at all. So what's the point of having the recipes? And then you also might negotiate yourself down before you actually ask for something. Because we kind of approach other people and negotiation and asking for things in this way where we feel like we're getting past no. Right. We think other people's default is to say no to us, to be resistant and disagreeable. And so we try to often make our ask more palatable to the other person. So, like, I may think I really want this, but they would never agree to that. So I'm going to ask for this thing I think they would agree to. Right. As opposed to. Actually, they're going to agree to whatever I ask. So I'm going to ask for what I think I deserve and what I, you know, actually want. And so this kind of confidence gap, which I think is just a beautiful way of describing it, really does have all these effects on what we ask for and whether we ask for things at all.

This is so fascinating because it reminds me of the negotiation tactic of anchoring. And so anchoring is one of the most powerful negotiation tools at our disposal. Essentially, from a psychological perspective, it's priming where thinking of one thing makes it likely for you to think about another thing, too. I did a whole episode on this back in August 2017. So if people want to reference that, they can check that out. But essentially, the more aggressive the request you make, as long as it's within reasonable parameters, the more likely you are to get closer to that request. It is a psychological impossibility for anchoring not to occur. It's just a question of whether or not we are using it with intentionality. But we're not going to be able to use the technique of anchoring effectively if we are already anchoring ourselves before we make the offer.

Bringing up before the negotiation begins, bringing up commonalities or similarities between yourself and your negotiation partner. There was a study done of online negotiators negotiating online. It's the most bloodless communication channel we've ever developed, right? So it's emails. They were just extremely extending the self into the email, where there's nothing personal there. So one group of bargainers in this study were asked simply to get down to business and start negotiating. And what they found was that in 30% of the instances, they were stymied. They never came to an agreement. They were deadlocked. Nobody won. Both sides walked away empty. The other half of the negotiators were told, before you begin the process, send some information about yourself, personal information, what your hobbies are, your interests, where you went to school, where you grew up. These kinds of things. Send some information back and forth. And what they found was, in those cases, stymied negotiations dropped from 30% to 6%. And the researchers were stunned. They thought, well, what could it have been that had produced this? When they looked into the data, it was the number of times there were commonalities that were revealed in the exchange of information. Oh, you're a runner. I'm a runner. You're an only child. I'm an only child. You have teenagers. I have teenagers. Whatever. It was right, though. It was the number of commonalities that were revealed in this process. So one thing that comes out of this is before you start any negotiation, you get to research, because we have this on the Internet now. The person you're going to be negotiating with, this person has LinkedIn information, has Facebook information. It's not proprietary. They make it public. Find out what might be in common, what might be in parallel with the two of you, raise that to the surface, and suddenly the barriers to a cooperative, mutually successful outcome come crashing down.

I've grown over the years to have an interest in studying what leadership is and what leadership does and how one can grow in their ability to be a leader. And I've come to the conclusion that many, many people think leadership is a position that you hold. You know, whether it's president or head coach or vice president or sergeant or first string or whatever. And I think the first thing that you have to grow to understand that leadership is not a position, but leadership is an action that you take to serve others. And especially with young people, sometimes when they start to try to figure out what being a leader is, they get caught up in, well, I want to be the president of the club, or I want to be the treasurer or I want to have a certain role that I have found it helpful, especially working with the age person I have, which is the college age student for the last four decades, is that you need to continually message and help them remember that leadership is not a position or a rank, but leadership is the action that you take to serve others who happen to be a part of whatever it is you're a part of. And so leadership as service really has been the focus of what I believe about leadership.

Tell us what we need to know about managing up.

Well, managing up is a term that we have all used in the in the service of, hey, how do I get my boss to do what I want my boss to do? Right? And that's how we often think about it. And to the earlier point, it is a bit awkward because we are trying to influence the behavior of the person that ultimately we work for. And so that requires us to tread carefully and to think about mindset a bunch. And I and one of the things hopefully we'll talk a bunch about is the mindset around this, because I think mindset makes a big difference on how you approach this conversation and how you attempt to affect change. I also want to say this, Kwame, if I may, that managing up is not about changing your boss or whoever you're trying to manage up to. I don't know about you, but I have a hard enough time changing my own behavior and trying to change someone else's behavior. If you've ever tried to do that, and I think we all have in marriages with kids, it's really challenging to do. And in the workplace it's even harder. And it's even harder when it's the person you work for. And so I think that our mindset should not be, hey, I am trying to change my boss's behavior or change something about them. My mindset should instead be how do I serve my customer? And I can say more about that in just a bit.

Yeah, that's really interesting and it makes sense. And I know our listeners are not going to be surprised hearing it's about mindset, because a lot of times it comes down to that. And just shifting your mindset can lead to the necessary behavior change before you even talk about strategy or tactics or anything like that. And I think that's a really interesting perspective that you just introduced thinking about your clients. Can you tell us more about that, too?

Yeah, my friend Tom Henschel, who is the host of a show called the look and Sound of Leadership, it's one of My favorite leadership shows, and he's a talented executive coach out here in Southern California. Tom has been on my show a number of times, and he has made the point that your boss is your biggest customer and that you're really there to be able to serve your customer in what your customer needs in order to serve the organization well. And I think that's a really helpful. That's been a very helpful mindset for me and been very helpful for a lot of the leaders in our academy of thinking about, okay, here's my customer, My customer is asking for something, but I'm also here to serve my customer and help them to do well. And I think one of the parts of mindset that's really important for me to think of when I'm trying to influence someone who has more power in the organization is how is that person behavior measured for their success, their results within the organization? And I think to start from a mindset standpoint is I'm not here because I'm trying to. I'm not making this request because I'm trying to change my boss. It's not about me feeling comfortable getting things my way. It's about how do I influence this person in a way that is good for them, to help them to get the results that they want to get, and that is ultimately going to serve the organization well. So thinking about it from the standpoint of I want to serve my customer, if my boss is one of my most important customers, what can I do to serve my customer well? And if I do that in their interests, that I'm more likely to have success at being able to influence change and to be able to do it in such a way that's going to be helpful to the organization.

This is great. And I think it demonstrates one of the issues with the mindset that people often face. They focus on their own needs and their own frustrations, and they say, this boss isn't doing what they need to be doing, and that's what needs to change. Instead, what you're suggesting is you look at it from their perspective, what they need and what they want, what they're trying to accomplish. And then it becomes a lot, lot easier recognizing the difference in different personality types and then trying to figure out what we can do to. To persuade and connect with those types of folks. And so when you think about the different personalities, what is your base? Like, what, which approach are you using? And then where should we start? When it comes to analyzing personalities and.

Changing our approach, I use something that's analogous to Disc. But I call my model Deal and I like that because we deal with people and in sales you hope to close deals. And Deal stands for driver, expressive, amiable and logical. So the driver personality is that task focused, like to be in control individual. The expressive would be like to be in control, but more relationship driven. And then the amiable is a relationship driven individual who's very self focused in terms of they're not trying to control people, situations, et cetera. And then you have the Logical, which again is a very task focused individual. But they're not about controlling others. They're really more thoughtful in terms of introspective and controlling themselves. So I use that as a four step model for people to try to make a quick analysis of who they're dealing with. There's lots of other personality models out there, but when you're in sales, you don't have a lot of time to try to make assessment of your potential client. You've got to have something that's quick and easy. And I think if people can focus on task oriented or relationship driven, like to be in control or self control, that's a pretty simple model. And then we start talking about which principles would be most effective for those different four personalities.

Right.

Some models really focus on you as an individual and there's tremendous value in understanding yourself and how you come across to people. My model really focuses on, hey, you're going into this sales situation, can you make a quick assessment of this individual? And one of the things that I do that I think is really helpful for people. It's one thing to try to think about task oriented and relationship driven, et cetera. But I usually have people say, who do you think would be that person who loves to be in charge? And they're just about getting things done. They don't like focusing on relationship. And when people start coming up with, for example, Steve Jobs is a really good example of a driver, then you've got that visual comparison point and you can say, oh, this guy or this lady I'm dealing with. They're like a little Steve Jobs. That's who they remind me of. So you're not having to remember all of these terms and definitions. You can make that quick mental assessment as an example of an expressive person. I think Oprah is the ultimate in the expressive. Right. She's totally relationship focused. She wants to know about you and your story, but she is in control of her media empire. There's no doubt about that. She is someone who likes to be in control. So those are a Couple of examples where people could go, oh, yeah, this person does remind me of, of Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton or whomever that other expressive might be. And then they can have a better gauge when they're dealing with that individual.

Makes a lot of sense. And now when we think about the adjustments that we need to make persuasively with each individual, what is the danger of not tailoring our approach?

So some people, when you realize what your strengths are, you can overplay your strengths and then those strengths can become weakness. It's really about understanding that other person and what they will probably respond to. So as an example, we talk a lot about how important it is to build relationship when you're selling. And that is true the vast majority of the time. But when you're thinking about a driver, and I'd ask people, Donald Trump used to be somebody that we would talk about. Now it's taboo. But he was ultimate driver, Steve Jobs driver. Do you think either of those guys cares about being your friend?

Not at all.

Right.

So going in and trying to connect on things that you have in common and pay them compliments, they're going to just be looking at their watch saying, quit wasting my time. But when you go in and you talk to somebody in that position and you learn about scarcity and how people respond to scarcity, and you reframe what you're talking about and you say, instead of saying to, potentially if Steve, Steve Jobs were still here, hey, Steve, I've got this idea. Could make us a million dollars. And he's like dime a dozen. But you go in and you say, steve, we're losing a million dollars. And he says, what? And now you've got that platform, it's just reframing, but it's understanding. Somebody who's a driver will respond much more to scarcity than a lot of other people.

Absolutely. It makes so much sense. And again, it shows the power, like you said, of framing the message. You say the exact same thing, but you say it differently depending on who's on the other side. Now, we're in a time where we're doing a lot of this online. And so let's say you find yourself in this position where you want to address a situation with your boss, but you're remote. You haven't seen your boss physically in months. And so that disconnect can often create a little bit of awkwardness, especially when you're having difficult conversations. So what changes when we are having these conversations online?

I think it's a lot of the Things that change online with many of our conversations, which is it's a lot easier in the physical space to hang behind on a meeting for a few minutes or catch someone in the hallway or to, as an adjunct to a regular meeting, say, you know, I just want to ask you a quick question. You know, here's something I'm noticing that's harder online because you have to create the opportunity for that. So I don't think the conversation's much different. And by the way, I don't know if I would in most situations set up an entire meeting to talk specifically about the thing you're noticing that's causing a challenge. I think that that is often helpful as a, oh, by the way, as part of a conversation, here's something I've noticed over the last couple of sessions. And that way it comes from a place of curiosity, it's coming from a place of service, it's coming place of you wanting to learn. So I'm sure there's exceptions to that. But I think the key is finding a place within an existing conversation to bring that in, whether it's your one on one, whether it's a meeting, whether it's a conference call, whatever it is. And the key is to make the space. And that's the hard thing in the online environment because we're all used to, or at least a lot of us are used to, getting to interact informally. So you may have to make that space intentionally. And this could be as simple as say you're on a zoom session and you're having a regular interaction with your boss. And maybe it's a small team of people. You could say something like, hey, hey, Maria, I have a quick something for you to chat with offline. Do you have two minutes after the session and that. And then you get that two minutes and you say, hey, I just wanted to, I'm curious about something. Here's something I noticed last week at our meeting and I'm noticing this caused this issue. Hey, I've got a question for you about it. And it could be that simple. But the difference here is you really do have to carve out and make the space for it. And I think you can do that in a way that's, hey, could you stick around for a minute or two or as part of an interaction you're already having, or maybe there's something else that's part of that meeting too, but you're building it around having that interaction and having that learning conversation.

Yeah, I really love this approach because it's so Simple, Right? And again, the more simple it is, the simpler it is, the more likely people are going to execute. But I know they're probably going to be people out there who are skeptical, who are saying, well, it can't be that easy. Right? What if it's harder? What if it doesn't work out? So what happens if this simple strategy doesn't work? What adjustments do we need to make then?

You do the best you can with what you've got with your boss. You're not going to change your boss. You're just not in almost every situation. And if you push back and you fight to try to change your boss, that is probably not going to go well for you in most situations. So I think you're better off with a simple, curious, learning approach. It shouldn't be that complicated. And I don't think in most situations there's always exceptions, of course, but I don't think in most situations it's probably useful to book a half hour meeting with your boss and to say, you know, I'm frustrated by some of the things you're doing and I want to sit down and really kind of hammer it out with. With you. Of what the things you're doing that are causing issues on my team. Right. That's not the way to approach your customer. If I'm serving a client, I'm not going to set up a meeting with them and say, I want to talk through with you all the problems you're causing for me and my organization and how difficult it is to work with you. Right. I'm going to approach that from a, you know, here's what's working, here's what's not. Here's the issues we're running into. And I'm going to set aside my emotion if I'm talking with a client and we're going to address how do we move forward for them to get the results they want. And that's the same thing I want to do with my boss. So I think keeping it simple is the best way to go. The hardest part of this is setting aside your emotions. And I think that this is where we can really practice of, you know, being able to think about this through the business lens. And this is the. And I say business, Kwame. I'm conscious there are folks in nonprofits and many kinds of organizations listening, but all of us have things we're trying to achieve and results we're trying to aim for. And that's the focus of a conversation. And that's also, by the way, the lens that a lot of senior executives tend to look at things. They tend to look at things like, less from the lens of emotion, and they tend to look at things more through the lens of numbers and data. There are, of course, exceptions, but if you look at the distribution of executives and their personality preferences in a lot of organizations, the people that are the data people, the thinkers, tend to be a lot of times in the senior roles. And so when you're running into a tough situation, managing up or otherwise, being able to meet. Meet them where they are, to speak their language, to be able to approach it from the business case is the place I almost always default to start.

Right. And really, even if it's not, if the person listening here isn't in the business world, you still come from a world where results matter. Right. It's just in the business case, oh, it's clear money.

Right.

Pretty easy, right. But other things, there are other outcomes and results that we're going for. And so the question becomes, how does this situation impact the results that we're trying to accomplish? Right. And as long as you keep it focused on the results, I think it makes it a lot easier for people to accept, especially from the boss's perspective, because the boss wants to meet those goals. And it's funny now, as the team here at the American Negotiation Institute grows, I'm thinking about them hearing this episode and wondering how they would approach me with their concern. And now, from that perspective, it makes a lot of sense because I might have some kind of emotional tie to doing something a certain way, not necessarily a strategic tie that is narrowly tailored to meet a specific business outcome. And sometimes the person who is actually doing the work is in the best position to see it. And the boss, just because of that distance, they can't see it the way that you do. So how have you managed dealing with people with big egos and getting them on board to your agenda?

I think one of the things, Kwame, that you need to work extremely hard on is helping people keep things in perspective and helping people understand that they individually are insignificant without every single other person around them, regardless of their role or their notoriety. And so helping people keep perspectives, I think, has really been a mainstay and yourself included, sometimes as the leader, the head coach, the president, whatever. Sometimes you can lose perspective about your relative importance and forget about the fact that every single person that's a part of the organization or the team or the university or whatever, every single one of their roles is important. And they, as humans, are important. And I have found that. That at times it can be more difficult with that person of high notoriety or high ego or whatever, because throughout their lives, everyone has, you know, kind of patted them on the back and told them they're wonderful and all those kinds of things. And if that's the bulk of the messaging you're getting, as humans, sometimes we believe it. And not to say that they're not important and they're not wonderful, but to keep in mind that, you know, none of us are wonderful without everyone else.

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