Tag Archives: Influence

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

Most people underestimate the likelihood that requests for help will be granted, particularly after previous refusals, according to Stanford’s Daniel Newark and Francis Flynn with Vanessa Lake Bohns of University of Waterloo.

Francis Flynn

In fact, most people agree with a subsequent request, possibly to reduce discomfort of rejecting others’ overtures for help.

Vanessa Bohns

Participants estimated they would need to ask 10 people to get three people to lend their mobile phones for brief calls.
Results showed that volunteers only had to ask six people for help before it was given, 40% fewer than expected.
Most people have a pessimistic bias about the likelihood that others will provide assistance, they concluded.

In another study, volunteers requested two favours from people they did not already know: Complete a brief survey and take a letter to a nearby post office.
Help seekers predicted that people who refused the first request to complete the survey would be less likely to take the letter to the post office.

More people agreed to the second request than to the first request.
Requesters tended to “anchor” on the first refusal, and hesitated to make a second request.
This finding suggests that requesters have a greater chance of agreement after initial refusal, so it’s advisable to persist.

Requesters and help-seekers analyzed requests using different implicit criteria: Requesters focused on the magnitude of the “ask,” whereas potential helpers considered the inconvenience costs of saying “yes” compared with the interpersonal and self-image costs of saying “no.”

Requesters benefit from expanding the pool of those they ask, not just those who consistently agree.
Potential helpers to can assist by reducing help-seekers’ subjective discomfort even if they decline the request.

Mahdi Roghanizad

Bohns analysed interpersonal discomfort when people decide whether to commit an unethical act in research with University of Waterloo colleagues Mahdi Roghanizad and Amy Xu.

People who observed the unethical act but didn’t participate in it underestimated their influence over those who committed the actions.
Interpersonal discomfort caused participants to commit the asocial act to avoid conflict, they concluded.

Volunteers asked people they didn’t know to tell a small untruth or to commit a small act of vandalism after predicting the ease of enlisting others in these acts.
In related investigations, online participants responded to hypothetical vignettes about buying alcohol for children, and taking office supplies home for personal use.

These results suggest that most people underestimate their influence, particularly in situations that can evoke interpersonal discomfort.
Bohns and Flynn also reported that employees’ systematically underestimate their influence over others in the workplace.

This pessimistic bias can limit employees’ willingness to:

Lead business transformation initiatives,
Recognize personal contributions to others’ performance issues,
Voice concerns about unethical workplace practices.

This underestimation bias may be reduced by:

Eliciting comparative judgments,
Objectifying an influence target,
Comparing actual degree of personal influence compared to perceived influence,
Considering the means of influence, including incentives, suggestions, reinforcements, punishments,
Invoking organizational culture.

These findings suggest the benefit of asking for what you want, even after rejection and that you have more influence over others than you expect.

-*How do you assess your likelihood of getting what you want when you ask?

-*How likely are others to influence you by evoking social discomfort to increase your compliance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Air Time Matters: Speak Up in the First Five Minutes of a Meeting

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More than thirty years ago, University of Florida’s Marvin Shaw observed that participation in small group approximates the 80/20 Principle:

Marvin Shaw

In a 5 member team, 2 members make 70% of comments
In a 6 member team, 3 members make 70% of comments
In a 8 member team, 3 members make 67% of comments

Most of the comment contributors were men, and those who speak most are typically viewed as most influential, according to Melissa Thomas-Hunt of University of Virginia.
This suggests that women can be at a disadvantage in groups if they don’t speak up.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt

Thomas-Hunt found that women were less influential in small groups even when they possessed specific expertise in survival skills, a stereotypically male endeavor.
Further, women with elite knowledge were judged as less expert by others.

Conversely, men who possessed expertise were more influential than expert women.
Overall group task performance was affected by these dynamics: Groups with a female expert made less accurate assessments than groups with a male expert, perhaps because females’ expertise was discounted or ignored due to gender-related expectations for specific competencies.

Christopher Karpowitz

Women spoke less when there are fewer women in a group, but not when women predominated and decisions were made by majority rule, according to Christopher Karpowitz of Brigham Young University, Princeton University’s Tali Mendelberg and Lee Shaker of Portland State University.

Tali Mendelberg

They also found that women spoke equally in small groups when there were few women but the decision required unanimous vote.
One implication is that women benefit from building consensus when they are in the minority.

Powerful women who talk more than male counterparts incur backlash from both male and female observers, according to Victoria Brescoll of Yale.

Victoria Brescoll

In an experimental study, both female and male volunteers read about a female CEO who talked longer than others. They judged her as significantly less competent and less suitable for leadership than a male CEO who was reported to speak for the same amount of time.

A high-power woman who talked much less than others was judged as equally competent and capable of leading as a high-power man who talked much more than others.
Raters were less generous in their ratings of a high-power male who talked much less than others: He was judged as equally incompetent and unsuitable for leadership as a high-power female who talked much more than expected.

This suggests that both men and women are punished for behaviors different from gender-role expectations.

Lee Shaker

Women’s tendency not to speak up in groups begins well before they enter the workplace, found Harvard’s Catherine Krupnick.
She and her team investigated differences between male and female students’ participation in classroom discussion and the impact of the instructor’s gender on students’ participation.

They reviewed videotapes of 12 women and 12 men instructors, and concluded that male students talked two and a half times longer than female students when the instructor was male and the majority of the students were male — a frequent situation in many educational and work organizations.
On the other hand, female students spoke almost three times longer when instructors were female.

Women students were interrupted more frequently than their male counterparts, most often by other women, and leading them to withdraw from the discussion for the remainder of the class.

Krupnick posited that women’s lower participation in classrooms – and perhaps in other small groups – may be explained by their:

Unwillingness to compete against men,
Vulnerability to interruption,
Unwillingness to interject into men’s and other women’s long uninterrupted statements, known as “discourse runs,”
Individual differences in assertiveness, confidence, and speed of formulating responses.

Elizabeth Aries

Amherst’s Elizabeth Aries noticed that groups composed entirely of women students tended to have a participatory style in which women took turns and spoke for about equal amounts of time throughout the class hour.

In contrast, male groups appeared more contest-like, with extremely uneven amounts of talk per man.
They competed by telling personal anecdotes or raising their voices to establish hierarchies of participation, and this competitive style persisted in mixed-gender groups.

Kathleen Welch-Torres, then of Yale, compared women’s and men’s assertiveness in class discussions at Yale and Brown (mixed-gender institution) with women’s class participation at Wellesley and Smith (single-gender).
She reported that women at both of the mixed-sex institutions were verbally less assertive than men, by using “hedges,” qualifiers and questioning intonations.
However, women at the single-gender institutions Smith and Wellesley were more assertive than women at Yale and Brown and more assertive than men at the coeducational institutions.

Larraine Zappert

Kendyll Stansbury

Welch-Torres linked these behaviors to measures of self-esteem and her findings are similar to those of Stanford’s Laraine Zappert and Kendyll Stansbury who reported that female graduate students held lower self-esteem, less trust in their judgments, and greater fear of making mistakes than male graduate students.

Recommendations to help women move toward fuller participation in small groups from Melissa Thomas-Hunt and Margaret Neale of Stanford include:

Margaret Neale

Before a meeting:
- Ask trusted attendees to:
  - Support your ideas during the meeting,
  - Solicit your input in the meeting,
- Refer to your specific expertise during the meeting,
- Set a goal for number of contributions in the first five minutes of a meeting.
- In a meeting:
  - If interrupted: Restate, rephrase and provide specific evidence based on expertise,
  - Showcase others’ expertise by soliciting their input,
  - Create environment in which other participants have equal opportunity to participate,
  - Urge members to consider each alternative, rather than disregarding suggestions presented by “lower status” individual.

-*How do you ensure that your expertise is recognized and influential in small group settings?

–*What “best practices” do you apply to ensure active participation by women and minority-group members?

©Kathryn Welds

Most Effective “Calls to Action” Are Aligned to Audience “Construal Level”, Psychological Distance”

Laughter May Not Be “The Best Medicine”

Spreading Good News Feels Good, Especially When It’s About You

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Christian Science Monitor has long provided a counterpoint to mainstream media’s “If it bleeds, it leads” approach to providing shocking, scandalous, depressing, or scary news.

Jonah Berger

Wharton’s Jonah Berger and Katharine Milkman found that the Christian Science Monitor might have a savvy business model: they found that good news spreads more widely than bad.

Members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Organization: Take note…

Katherine Milkman

Berger and Milkman evaluated a random sample of 3,000 of more than 7,500 articles published in the New York Times online from August 2008 to February 2009.

They judged each article’s “popularity” based on number of times it was forwarded to others, after controlling for online publication time, section, and degree of promotion on the home page.
Independent readers rated each article for practical value or surprise, and ratio of positive vs negative emotion words in each news item.

Most-forwarded posts were positive, funny, exciting and featuring intellectually challenging topics, like science, that “inspire awe” (“admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self”).

Readers shared articles that typically provoke negative emotions like anger and anxiety, but not sadness.
-*Why this bias against sending “downer” messages?

Emily Falk

Michigan’s Emily Falk, with UCLA colleagues Sylvia Morelli, B. Locke Welborn, Karl Dambacher,and Matthew Lieberman found that people consider what appeals to others, possibly as a means of building relationships, indicated by increased activation in brain regions (temporoparietal junction, or TPJ and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) associated with “social cognition,” or thoughts about other people, measured by fMRI.

When those regions were activated, people were more likely to talk about the idea with enthusiasm, and the idea would spread by word-of-mouth.

Falk noted that the team mapped brain regions “associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good ‘idea salesperson.'”
She plans to use these brain maps “to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them.”

Diana Tamir

People also like to spread good news about themselves.
Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, then of Harvard, illustrated that brain regions associated with reward (mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area) are activated when people share information about themselves.

Jason Mitchell

Self-disclosure is so pleasurable that people will sacrifice monetary rewards for this opportunity.

Mor Naaman

In fact, Rutgers’ Mor Naaman with Jeffrey Boase, now at Ryerson University and Chih-Hui Lai, now of University of Akron found that 80 percent of Twitter users tweet primarily about themselves.
One reason may be that people say more positive things when they’re talking to a bigger audience, like Twitter followers, according to Berger’s research suggests. As a result, social media users are likely to convey positive information about themselves.

Jeffrey Boase

However, this positive self-presentation may not result in a positive mood if communicators spend longer on social media platforms like Facebook.
Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge of Utah Valley University found that those with longer visits to Facebook say they are less happy than their Facebook Friends.

They found that Facebook users tend to form biased judgment based on easily-recalled examples (availability heuristic) and erroneously attribute positive Facebook content to others’ personality, rather than situational factors (correspondence bias), especially for those they do not know personally.

Hanna Krasnova

Corroborated by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Hanna Krasnova and her team from Technische Universität Darmstadt, these researchers observed “invidious emotions” and “envy” among people who spend longer time on Facebook.

These findings have relevance to members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Organization: Spread the good word – or at least the emotional word – and spend less time on Facebook and other social media that might invite social comparison and the potential for envious dissatisfaction.

-*How you build “buzz” via “Word of Mouth”?

©Kathryn Welds

Mastering the Power Sandwich with Skillful Upward Influence

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David Bradford

Employees’ advancement in organizations is based on preventing problems before they develop, and pre-emptively uncovering opportunities to add value, according to Stanford’s David Bradford and Allan R. Cohen of Babson College in Influencing Up.

Allan Cohen

Complementing their Influence without Authority, they distilled common-sense win-win approaches to influence those over whom one has no formal authority or control: one’s manager and others higher in the hierarchy.

Organizational power discrepancies can be accentuated when the employee is female or a member of a minority group.
Cohen and Bradford’s suggest six elements to reduce power differences, and improve influence and negotiation outcomes:

Clarify needs and priorities
Consider others as potential partners rather than adversaries
Establish trustworthiness by sharing information and develop understanding of the other’s perspective, concerns, and “care-abouts” — empathy in a business setting
Determine reciprocal value exchange in “currencies” that matter to others: information, budget, removing obstacles, brokering agreements, support
Gain access to others by showcasing your potential value exchange
Negotiate a win-win outcome

Robert Cialdini

Bradford and Cohen’s work complements influential research by Stanford colleagues Margaret Neale and Deborah Gruenberg, as well as Robert Cialdini’s classic investigation of influence.

Roger Fisher

William Ury

Their emphasis on crafting a win-win negotiated outcome echoes earlier work by Roger Fisher and William Ury in Getting to Yes and Linda Babcock’s consideration of negotiation challenges faced by women and minority group members in the workplace.

-*How do you manage the Power Sandwich, requiring skillful 360 degree influence in your organization?

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©Kathryn Welds

Extract More Value from Meetings with Effective Questions

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Shane Snow

Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently.com advocates asking incisive questions to extract more value from meetings, mentors’ guidance, and chance encounters with thought leaders and influencers.

He notes that expert journalists, researchers, innovators, and therapists are trained to ask effective questions, and their common “best practices” include:

Listening more than talking
Asking open-ended questions to avoid suggesting responses: “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “How?”, “Why?”
They use closed-ended questions sparingly: “Is?”, “Would?” and “Do?”
Posing one concise question at a time.
They avoid multiple choice questions
Waiting for an answer without interjecting more questions or comments.
They rarely interrupt themselves or others
Tolerating the other person’s silence for several seconds before talking
Directly, repeatedly probing for insightful, revealing replies
Nodding only when the response is intelligible, logical, and understandable
Interjecting questions or rephrasing the original question to redirect tangential responses
Cross-checking information and following up possible inconsistencies with more probing questions

Sakichi Toyoda

Nearly a century earlier, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries introduced an iterative problem-solving approach based on posing “Five Whys” to uncover the root cause of an issue.

This technique is now-widely applied in Lean Manufacturing, and is advocated by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses .

‘”Five Whys” were reduced to “Three Whys” to uncover customer objections in sales situations, and was modified Judith Beck in cognitive therapy to identify underlying Core Beliefs that lead to negative automatic thoughts.

Judith Beck

Beck softens the “Five Whys” by repeatedly asking “If that were true, what would it mean?”
Her model that suggest connections among:

Early experience->Core beliefs (schemas) ->Underlying assumptions (if/then – conditional) ->Automatic thoughts-> Physical Experiences->Self-Limiting Behaviors

Lois Frankel

Therapist and writer Lois Frankel illustrated the similarity of effective questions in psychotherapy sessions with those used to spur inquiry and innovative breakthroughs.
She advises interviewers and consultants to:

Use questions to define your purpose:
What do you want to gain from this conversation?
- Help
- Advice
- Information
- Commitment
- New ideas
- Clarification of opinions or attitudes
- Decision
- What is the “real” problem? Engineers and business people answer this question using a “Root Cause Analysis”
  - What are the options?
  - What are the likely consequences?
  - What results will justify the invested time, effort or money?
  - Ask specific questions:
    - What could we do differently?
    - Why is this important?
    - How can we best meet our objective?
    - What do you want to happen?
      - What don’t you want to happen?
      - What is the best thing that could happen?
      - What is the worst thing that could happen?
      - How will you react if you don’t follow this course of action?

Frankel advises to

Maintain eye contact:
Focus full attention on the interviewee
Repeat and summarize important points to verify accurate understanding

Listen for:
Content (facts)
Intent (feelings)
The way these are expressed (process).
Warren Berger

Journalist Warren Berger applied refined questioning in Design Thinking processes to produce innovative solutions in Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your World .

He advocates continued exploration of meaningful “big” questions in his blog, A More Beautiful Question.

-*What effective questioning practices have you found most helpful in achieving business results?

Related Posts:

Tim Hurson recommends New Questions, “Senses” for Innovative Thinking and Problem-Solving
John Miller, Dennis Matthies, David Cooperrider suggest Effective Questions as Change and Innovation Catalyst

Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Blog: – Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary
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LinkedIn Open Group Psychology in Human Resources (Organisational Psychology)
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Memorable Business Stories: Ideas and Numbers

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Chip Heath-Dan Heath

Chip Heath of Stanford and Dan Heath, Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, distill principles that make messages memorable in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Citing urban legends and advertisements as examples of tenaciously “sticky” messages, they argue that unforgettable ideas can be recalled with an acronym that means “success” in French:

Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness, with many details to act as “hooks” to “stick” to memory’s many “loops” (Velcro theory of memory)
Credibility
Emotion-laden stories.

Robert Cialdini

The Heaths’ principle of credibility draws on the three elements of persuasive messages outlined by Robert Cialdini in his best-selling Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Credibility is enhanced by liking, authority, and social proof in Cialdini’s model:

Liking – Appealing public figures or personal friends endorses
Authority – Well-respected role model or respected authority provides testimonial
Social proof – Others like me endorse it, and others provide justification: “because…”, though the actual reason is immaterial
Reciprocity – “I know you’d do the same for me,” recommended by Guy Kawasaki to convey that “You owe me…”
Scarcity – “While supplies last…”, “Limited time offer!”, “Act now, don’t wait!”
Commitment, consistency – Draws on people’s desire to appear consistent, and even trustworthy by following through on commitments: “I do what I say I will do…”
Contrast principle – Sales people sell the most expensive item first so related items seem inexpensive by comparison: Real estate transaction fees may appear minimal in contrast to a large investment in a house.

Both memorable messages and persuasive messages take advantage of habitual reactions to typical situations.

These automated and sometimes unconscious processes are a heuristic to help people to deal rapidly and efficiently with routine activities and tasks.
However, “auto-pilot” reactions may lead to being persuaded to act in ways that might not be helpful, such as excessive eating, drinking, spending, or engaging in risky activities.

Jonah Berger

Wharton’s Jonah Berger formulated an acronyn, STEPPS, to describe narrative elements that increase the likelihood that a story, idea, or product will spread like a contagious virus:

Social Currency – Passing along the information makes the sender appear “good” – knowledgeable, helpful or other
Triggers – The message evokes a familiar, frequent situation
Emotion – The story evokes emotion, so will strengthen the emotional between the sender and receiver
Public – Similar to Social Currency, passing the message reflects favorably on the sender
Practical Value – The sender provides actionable value in sharing the message
Stories – Memorable, surprising elements increase the likelihood that others will convey the message

Randall Bolten

Finance executive Randall Bolten draws on similar observations about human cognitive and perceptual processing to recommend ways to tell a memorable and motivating quantitative story.

His Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You, discusses “quantation” as another type of business storytelling that affects “personal brand image.”

Edward Tufte

Even more practical than Edward Tufte’s breathtaking examples of effective “information architecture” in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, Bolten provides coaching on designing memorable, persuasive presentations and “pitches” featuring quantitative information as “proof points.”

His book demonstrates the Heaths’ principles of simplicity, concreteness, and credibility while drawing on Cialdini’s proven approaches of authority, commitment, consistency, and contrast.

-*What principles do you use to tell stories that motivate others to act as you hope?

Related Posts:

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Blog: – Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary
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©Kathryn Welds

Making Magic Meaningful as a Life Metaphor

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Kim Silverman

Kim Silverman is Principal Research Scientist at Apple, and holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Cambridge University.
Before his academic credentials, he sharpened his skills as a magician and cultivated an appearance similar to that of Hogwarts’ Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.
He is a president of the Society of American Magicians (Palo Alto), and a Magician Member of the Academy of Magical Arts.

He describes his “hobby” as “performing magic in a meaningful way that gives people something they can take away with them, to make them feel better about themselves and their lives, and thereby thrive more effectively.”

Silverman believes that magic can change the way we think about our lives:

-Things that seem impossible may be possible
-Things that are separated and broken may be rejoined
-There is always a way
-We can get free from something that holds us back
-When we feel trapped by a problem, it is just an illusion.

He asserts that magic provides a change of perspective from negative thoughts, and provides a broader perspective.
He acknowledges that suffering is an intrinsic part of human life and that it brings us together, and through it all, we can experience magic through our relationships.

Silverman concludes that things might not be as they appear, so there is hope, and this is an idea worth sharing.

-*How can the metaphors of perceptual illusion accelerate problem-solving in complex situations?

LinkedIn open group: The Executive Coach
Twitter: @kathrynwelds
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Blog: – Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary

Business Influence as “Enchantment”

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: Influence

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

Most Effective “Calls to Action” Are Aligned to Audience “Construal Level”, Psychological Distance”

Laughter May Not Be “The Best Medicine”

Mastering the Power Sandwich with Skillful Upward Influence

Extract More Value from Meetings with Effective Questions

Memorable Business Stories: Ideas and Numbers

Making Magic Meaningful as a Life Metaphor

Business Influence as “Enchantment”

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