The 3 Things Influential Leaders Do Differently
Posted on December 28, 2016 by Hunter Post, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
What does research and experience show are the keys to effectively influencing others, within an organization or as an independent thought leader?
Leadership is all about influence. There are many ways to influence others, but what has been proven to work best and most sustainably, even when the boss isn’t watching?
INFLUENTIAL LEADERS DO 3 THINGS BETTER:
(1) They are clearer about the results they will achieve and how they will measure them. Clarity is energizing and makes every task surrounding the goal easier to complete.
(2) They focus on small number of vital behaviors. In other words, they identify the bottlenecks or tipping point behaviors.
(3) They over-determine successful change by aligning 6 sources of influence.
THE 6 SOURCES OF INFLUENCE ARE:
(1) Personal motivation – Focus on getting them to WANT to do it, rather than on making them do more of what they don’t want.
(2) Personal ability – Help them learn to do it better.
(3) Social motivation – Engage the opinion-leaders of the group to create gravity toward the goal.
(4) Social ability – Help the team. Facilitate their successful interaction and mutual support.
(5) Structural Motivation – Modestly reward early successes. Only use punishment and incentives last and sparingly. The key difference between rewarding successes and using incentives is that the former makes the benefit a RESULT of the correct action, not the cause of it. In other words, the correct action becomes the focus, not getting the reward.
(6) Structural Ability – Change the environment to make good behavior easier and bad behavior harder. Simple changes to the physical environment can have big effects here. For instance, one may change what is in plain site, how far people need to walk to find something, or use visual reminders. Simple changes to the digital environment (organization of electronic forms, databases, or platforms, work prioritizing systems for employees, etc.).
Using this powerful framework, you can consistently create positive change, whether as an Executive, Leader, or Entrepreneur. As an Executive Coach, I can help you to effectively implement this and other frameworks to create the future you want.
References: The skeleton for this framework was derived from Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change; Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
