Can You Influence People by Just Raising Their Awareness?
Posted on March 08, 2021 by Sarah Osteen, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Helping someone become aware of an opportunity or a problem is only on step in positive influence. Gather some additional ideas for behavior changes.
Can You Influence People by Just Raising Their Awareness?
I taught a class on negotiations this week and the biggest turning point seemed to occur around the idea of impacting a negotiation by having empathy for the other person. There are many benefits including having greater insight as to why the other person is sitting at the table; leveraging empathy also allows you to better manage your own emotions. I saw the class tune in a little more closely and begin to wonder what that would look like in their own conversations. Does this mean that I influenced them to change behavior? No. As a class we generated a number of concrete ways one can use empathy during a negotiation such as identifying and benevolently labeling a negative emotion from the other party ex.“I’m getting the sense that you are frustrated with the progress we are making.”
It is hard to predict what will happen but I know from the coaching work I do with executives that unless people have a plan it is hard to change behavior. How do you have a plan for having empathy? If someone from my class effectively uses empathy during a negotiation (when they previously hadn’t) it will be because they developed some ideas for how one could go about doing it, not because I told them so. The raising awareness is piece is the first step in a series of steps. Once someone becomes cognizant that empathy is helpful in a negotiation they will need to figure out how to connect with the other person, how to pause and think about how the other person might be feeling, how to reflect on times when they themselves might have felt the same way, etc., etc. If the outcome is that one of my students is able to be empathetic in a negotiation it is the result of trial and error and exploration on their own part. The best I can do is to:
1. raise awareness
2. provide a forum to discuss the relative merits of doing it or not
3. give them the opportunity to generate ideas for how to go about doing it
4. check back in after they have had the opportunity to try
Too often we think that by just telling someone a helpful tip we have suddenly influenced them to make sweeping changes. Unfortunately we are not so powerful and there are many more steps involved.
How have you positively influenced direct reports, peers, and managers?
