What My Preschooler Taught Me About Influencing Business Leaders
Posted on March 08, 2021 by Sarah Osteen, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Can you appropriately leverage distraction and loss appeal to positively influence others?
What My Preschooler Taught Me About Influencing Business Leaders
I often find myself trying to persuade my three-year-old to do something; finish the food on his plate, stop crying because I won’t give him apple juice at bedtime, put away his toys, give a truck back to the kid from whom it was stolen, etc. I am not a child psychologist but I know that when it comes to my son there are two primary ways to successfully influence him: a. make the suggested activity seem more appealing b. distraction.
The first technique might look something like – If he is refusing to eat certain food on his plate I reach forward and say “Oh, can I have a bite? That looks really good.” The potential loss of the item from his plate suddenly makes the food more desirable and my little guy is scrambling to shove the rest of his food in his mouth. Once again, I am certain that parenting experts would fall into a variety of different camps as to whether or not this is an approved technique, but I can say that it (often) works in our house. I call this phenomenon “loss appeal.”
The distraction approach is a tried and true technique that generally used when he is upset or frustrated and starting to escalate while digging in his heels. If he is refusing to get off the swing in our backyard and get ready for bed I might suggest that we have a dance party to his favorite song in the kitchen and slowly from there we are able to begin the migration up to bath and subsequently to bed. The distraction has weakened his hold on the former activity and therefore enabled me to present a new idea.
These approaches are used in the workplace consciously and unconsciously. There are the more obvious forms – you get lured away from work with the temptation of a happy hour cocktail (distraction). Or more subtle forms such as when a time intensive and frustrating project is suddenly handed off to someone else leaving you wishing you still had it (loss appeal). Or not working through your meeting agenda because a colleague brings up an issue that is perceived as more pressing therefore influencing the group away from your agenda (distraction).
I am left wondering are there opportunities to capitalize on these ideas without manipulating people?
