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Influence – or Crash and Burn

The Marketing Director stared at me, hard.
He wasn’t buying the perfect logic of my first-ever corporate strategy board presentation. In fact, he looked positively hostile.

I could see my boss nodding encouragingly. And the Finance and Personnel Directors looked convinced. But the Marketing Director always sat next to the CEO, with the Ops Director on the other side. Without positive signs from those three I knew this was crash and burn.

As a recently-minted Accountant, plucked-out of Finance for a Strategy job half-way through my qualifying studies, I was so surprised by that boardroom reception!

Why hadn’t my logical arguments won the case?

My analysis was deep and thorough. My slide deck was good. The conclusions were inescapable – and expensive for us if we didn’t act as recommended.

I knew as I was watching the Marketing Director’s face that I’d missed some crucial way of getting my point across. Something maybe less about logic and more creative than usual. Click To Tweet

The board sent me back to “do more work on the analysis”. My ego took a real battering, but it was such a useful lesson for a keen young manager.

The next week I found an old copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on a stall in Borough Market and that opened the door to a whole new world for me.

What’s your view – how crucial (or not) is it for managers and leaders to be good influencers too?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or send me a tweet @nickrobcoach

Motivation: Towards Pleasure and Away From Pain

Keep an eye out over the next few days to observe and discover something new about your own motivations and those of the people around you. Here’s how.

Did you know that people tend to operate either a Towards or an Away-From motivation pattern? And that this can change from one context to another?

Motivation Towards tends to show up as positive, goal-seeking reward-based behaviour; focusing on what could go right.
Motivation Away-From tends to focus on avoiding problems and pain; on what might go wrong.

Both are useful in different contexts. When I’m chairing the audit committee in a hospital, it really helps to have people around who can focus on what can go wrong, or on what’s not working. When I’m looking to win a new contract, it really helps that my associates are positive, can-do people.

It used to be thought that these “Meta-programmes” (thought processes that guide and direct the sorting of our perceptions) were fixed and unchangeable. We now know that this isn’t true and that it is possible to choose.

As with almost everything, being aware is what counts. Being aware of what habits we are operating ourselves and of whether other people are in Towards or Away-From mode. Only then can we choose which is actually most helpful for ourselves and for our influence with others.