CAN I PERSUADE YOU?

CORPORATE CAPSULES: Can I Persuade You? - February 7, 2012

For a large part of this morning, I was trying to recollect and find an article that I had read many years ago, but which had stuck in my head. It had to do with communicating and how there were different ways of communicating. I remember the author talking about 3 or 4 ways that you could get people to do something for you;

• You could either demand it: but when you demand something, you will often come up with resistance.
• You could coerce people to do it – throw your weight around the label you have, the badge you wear, the office you represent – you could get people to do it but they would resent it.
• You could try and persuade people and if you’re able to persuade people, then they would be more likely to comply willingly with what you want them to do.

I’ve often thought about that in my journey. It’s so true! We can demand things of people; often we fight the resistance that they have to doing something. We could coerce them; put pressure or emotional blackmail on them, but there’s always resentment. Or we can spend the time trying to persuade people, help them to buy into what we are trying to accomplish and then have them come alongside and commit to that particular task.

Robert Joss, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business, says, “Many years ago, Jack Welch, General Electric CEO, visited Stanford and made a comment that stayed with him. ‘Leadership is not about you; it’s about the people who work for you. The day you become a leader, it becomes about them. Your job is to walk around with a can of water in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other hand. Think of your team as seeds and try to build a garden.’” That’s a wonderful analogy.

I came across an article entitled ‘The Necessary Art of Persuasion’ by Jay A. Conger, printed in Harvard Business Review, says, “If ever there was a time for business people to learn the fine art of persuasion, it is now. Gone are the command and control days of executives managing by decree. Today, businesses are run largely by cross-functioning teams of peers and populated by baby-boomers and their ‘Generation X’ offspring, who show little tolerance for unquestioning authority.”

The article goes on to say, “People today don’t just ask ‘What should I do?’ but also ‘Why should I do it?’ It is incumbent on leadership to be able to do or get people to do what we want to do by allowing them to be a part of the journey of understanding why it is that you want them to do something.”

Aristotle, many, many years ago, wrote about persuasion. He said, “There are 3 facets to persuasion:

• Logos: has to do with facts and reason and evidence. You try through reasoning to be able to persuade. Reasoning refers to the internal consistency of the message – clarity, the logic of its reasons, the effectiveness of the supporting evidence that you bring.
• Pathos: (Greek for suffering or experience) is an appeal based on emotion. The intent of pathos is to motivate people to action. Pathos is so important. But it can also be used in wrong ways. Emotional persuasion has led many people to disaster. Hitler was a great persuader. Emotion also covers up a lot of untruths and Hitler used that. Jim Jones, who led about 900 people to mass suicide, was another example.
• Ethos: the demonstration of the communicator’s character and credentials. This lays the foundation for people to listen to you, which is why I think introductions are so important. Introductions help lay the foundation for good credentialing; for people to say ‘Ok, so this is the reason why I need to listen to you.’ And so often, we’re so poor in our introductions. We don’t introduce well and so miss an opportunity to lay the foundation or to talk about why it is that this person is worth listening to.

But what Aristotle says is that it’s not one of these that we need to use, but all 3 together. Use reasoning, use your character and your credibility and use emotion; all 3 together, in different forms and proportions depending on your audience.

All of us at some point or the other, during our days use persuasion. We have to get people around us to do jobs that need to be done. The question arises: how do we get them to do it? Do we throw our weight around? Are we trying to overcome resistance? Do we coerce people and increase the resentment around? Or are we able to persuade people and get them to commit and walk alongside of us?

Jack Welch went on to say that there are 3 recurring themes of leadership:

1. Transformation
2. Persuasion
3. Competence

He says, “It is so important – the day you become a leader, your job is to take people who are already great and make them unbelievable.” That’s a great way to look at the work we do and the people who work with us and around us – not to try and demand work or coerce them to work, but to be able to take them and look at them as people who are already wonderful people, great people and make them unbelievable people by spending time in persuading them to do a job and to do it well.

God Bless Us All.