Manage-Wise

The power of persuasion

Who wields the world’s greatest power? Who accomplishes their dreams?

The most influential people are those who can effectively get things done. They influence others to agree or comply, to effectively execute goals, objectives and wishes. Success, perhaps survival, for you and your organization hinges primarily on one skill: the power of persuasion—the ability to persuade people to say “yes,” to willingly concur or follow your directions or act on your behalf. Power may be granted from bosses above you, yet execution and results are accomplished through your success in influencing others.

Persuaders rule. They always have and always will. Great persuaders have enormous power. They motivate change. Build successful teams. Revitalize entire organizations. They create growth and profit. They lead others to new heights. And they achieve personal goals for wealth, power and influence. Every human interaction requires persuasion: the ability to influence cooperation, collaboration and results. Great leaders motivate us. They ignite passion. They persuade us to act. The world’s greatest achievements have been accomplished through persuasion.

OK. So persuasion is critical to success. We all know that. They question is, what do we know today about the process of persuasion that we didn’t know before? What’s different? What can we learn to become better persuaders? The difference is simple, dramatic and, indeed, exciting. With the recent advent of live, real-time brain imaging technology, and with the resulting disciplines emerging in neuroscience, we have actually learned, for the first time, how the human brain processes information. Finally we know how we make, and how we influence, decisions that determine behaviors and actions. And what we’ve learned will forever change the way we interact with others.

In his book and five-part PBS TV series, The Secret Life of the Brain, Dr Richard Restak, M.D, neurologist, neuropsychologist, researcher, and clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University Medical Centre in Washington, D.C., offers us a real eye-opener. Restak, one of the world’s top neurological scientists, recipient of the Linacre Medal for Humanity and Medicine and of the Decade of the Brain Award, uses his chapter, “The Adult Brain,” to distill our current brain research into the following blockbuster shown in the book’s opening: “We are not thinking machines, we are feeling machines that think.”

In another of his books, Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot, Restak puts the new knowledge in overall context, summing up the best information we have to date about brain function and how we actually process sensory input to the brain:

Despite popular notions to the contrary, the brain does not operate like a computer or any other machine. That’s why we have to stop forcing it to act in ways that are unnatural and unproductive. Your brain is not a logic machine. As it turns out, emotions and feelings about something or someone occur before you’ve made any attempt at conscious evaluation.

This is strong stuff! For several thousand years we’ve primarily been taught, at least in educated society, to use logic and reason to influence decisions and actions. Yet all this time even the most sophisticated among us have typically been forcing the brain to act in unnatural, unproductive ways. Not smart! The good news is there’s a better way to persuade, to influence, to gain compliance, to obtain commitment on decisions and actions that are in the best interest for all concerned.

Hit or miss, trail and error

Sure, salespeople, advertisers, and others have been using emotional appeals for years. But it’s been hit and miss. We’ve been working on instinct or hard-fought trial-and-error efforts. Now we have solid facts to help us become consciously competent in the science of persuasion. The better we understand how our brains process information, the better we’ll be able to communicate with others—doing so not in a manner that works against the brain but in a way that employs our natural brain process.

As science evolves we’re coming to realize that our standard approaches to persuasion have been completely wrong. Most of us have learned to persuade by using the best arguments, the best data, and the best information available; all presented in a logical and rational manner to generate the thinking, decisions, and actions we seek. Business leaders—actually most of us—believe that our peers rely heavily on logic and reason to make their decisions and inform their actions. Suddenly, to everyone’s amazement, we’re learning that the brain just doesn’t work this way.

In ‘Business to Business’ magazine, Emory University business school professor Joseph Reiman writes:

Neuroimaging technology allows us to measure brain activity and it does so more accurately because neurons don’t lie. The little guys, neurons, all ten billion of them, prove there is a chemical and biological basis how we behave, and their message is: business behaves wrongly.

Wow! That’s quite a statement—that we now know the chemical and biological basis for how we behave.

And with that knowledge, we know what we’ve been doing wrong—and more important, we know what we can do better to influence others. So if we are not thinking machines, if we are not primarily influenced by logic and cognitive reasoning, how do we make decisions? And more important, how do we influence the decisions of others? Simply put, we each have internal databases that provide us with the ability to immediately feel the right response to outside stimuli.

From birth, we build our own internal databases that form our personal self-guidance system. This system automatically triggers our best responses to external stimuli. Our triggers are embedded in our brains; they belong specifically to each of us. Triggering “yes” is a process in which we help others—our persuasion partners—activate their own decision-making navigation system.

Who needs persuasion skills

Dr. Condoleezza Rice graduated college cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at age 19 from the University of Denver. Her experience in positions of power led her to claim: “Power is nothing unless you can turn it in to influence.” Her thoughts are echoed by Harvard Business School Professor Michael D. Watkins: “Formal authority and other resources of leadership are never sufficient to get things done. Leaders need the power to persuade.”

Leaders, executives, managers, line and staff each succeed or fail in proportion to the individual’s skill of persuasion.

Each must influence and gain compliance from those up, down, and across every strata of the organization. And yes, let’s include suppliers and clients among those we need to persuade.

We often think we can get results by telling people what to do. Can’t CEOs, executives and managers do that? Don’t we tell our kids, spouses what we want done? Can’t the president of the United States just tell people what to do and get it done? Not according to President Harry S. Truman who said, “I sit here all day trying to persuade people—that’s all powers of the president amount to.”

Richard Neustadt, in his book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, writes, “In these words of a president, spoken on the job, one finds the problem now before us: ‘powers’ are no guaranty of power.”

Neustadt adds, “There is a widely held belief in the United States that a reasonable president would need no power other than the logic of his argument.” But logic just doesn’t cut it—even for the president. And when Neustadt wrote: “Presidential power is the power to persuade,” he forced us to reconceptualize the presidency.

Excerpt from ‘The 7 Triggers to Yes’ by Russell H. Granger. Reproduced with permission © 2008, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs. 299. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com