Our research-driven methodology, called the “influence process,” delivers a coherent and portable model that help organizations develop powerful strategies to create rapid, dramatic, and permanent change
The key to successful influence in an organization lies in three powerful principles:
- Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change.
- Use personal and vicarious experience to change thoughts and actions.
- Marshall multiple sources of influence to make change inevitable.
A key insight at the heart of our book, Influencer, is that a few behaviors can drive change. Even the most pervasive problems will succumb to a handful of high-leverage behaviors.. Behaviors, not values or outcomes, drive the ability to create change.
Next, influencers never relied on speeches or the typical written communications (such as advertisements and billboards) to convince others to change the vital behaviors. They replaced verbal persuasion with innovative ways to create personal experiences. When they were unable to create personal experiences, they used stories and media to create vicarious experiences.
Finally, influencers succeed where others fail because they “overdetermine” success. Instead of looking for the minimum it will take to create culture change, they combine a critical mass of six different kinds of influence strategies. They help motivate and enable individuals to engage in the vital behaviors at three levels: personal, social and structural. Rather than rely on a single strategy to change long-standing and persistent behaviors, influencers used at least 4 of these strategies in combination. In one study we conducted, we asked senior leaders to describe the influence strategies they relied on. Nearly 40% reported using only one strategy; only 20% combined more than 4 strategies. The few leaders who combined four or more influence strategies were dramatically more successful than those who used one strategy (click here for a copy of the Influencer Training Position Paper, based on the MIT Sloan Review article, “How to Have Influence” by Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg).