10
Become an Influencer
I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?
—Ronnie Shakes
This book started with a bold assertion. We claimed that if you bundle the right number and type of influence techniques into the right influence strategy, you can change virtually anything. At first blush this claim seems both cocky and unbelievable. Obviously there are thousands of things out there that none of us will ever change. Take gravity, for example. It’s been around for a while and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. From there we explained that we’re referring to the behaviors that cause most of the profound and persistent problems that we’re currently experiencing.
There is a growing body of knowledge as well as an impressive supply of real-life success stories that teach exactly how to change almost any human behavior. Read the scholarly works of Dr. Albert Bandura. Then watch what Dr. Mimi Silbert does at Delancey Street. These two influencers alone demonstrate that, if you know what you’re doing, you can indeed change remarkably resistant behaviors.
For example, today at Delancey, 500 former criminals and drug addicts are willingly immersed in an intense environment that employs every influence strategy we discussed. The strategies have been put into place to help each resident transform from a habitual offender into a productive citizen.
Naturally, bringing about the profound transformation of these 500 people isn’t easy. It’s never easy to get people to change deeply entrenched behaviors, and when you’re working with people whose résumés include an average of four felony convictions, you’re dealing with a population that has one unhelpful characteristic in common. The residents may come from different gangs, ethnic groups, or even criminal portfolios, but they have all failed to turn their lives around.
Before joining Delancey, each time these criminals matriculated into the penal system only to return to a life of crime, the penal system failed them. Each time some may have sworn to their family members that next time they’d get it right—and then got it wrong—they let down their loved ones. Each time some may have vowed to break their vile habits and promptly returned to their old ways, they let themselves down. And each time they failed to transform into a new person, they failed because not one of them brought together a comprehensive enough influence strategy to remake themselves.
All 500 of them had repeatedly failed before showing up at Delancey Street.
Yet Dr. Mimi Silbert’s approach routinely transforms 90 percent of these habitual failures into law-abiding citizens. Dr. Silbert succeeds more than others not because she cares more than other change agents or because she spends more money. In fact, the operation funds itself through its own efforts. To date, Silbert has succeeded in turning around over 14,000 lives because she is a genuine card-carrying, four-star influencer. She knows how to help people change their thoughts and actions.
In 1992 when Dr. Don Berwick and IHI started the 100,000 lives campaign, they too were taking on one of the most entrenched establishments in the world—the U.S. health-care system. At that particular time in history, an estimated 100,000 patients were dying each year in hospitals as the direct result of a variety of preventable human errors. Berwick and his team set out to prevent these errors. That meant that they’d have to find a way to both enable and motivate health-care professionals to act in new ways.
As you might imagine, when Dr. Berwick and his colleagues started their campaign, some people in the health-care system were unconscious of how their own actions might be contributing to harm. Even those who were conscious of the dangers lurking in their systems were often incapable of building the influence strategies necessary to bring about profound and lasting change.
Fortunately, Berwick and his staff stuck with their campaign until they learned exactly what it would take to change deeply entrenched behavior. During the 100,000 lives campaign, 3,100 hospitals reduced total in-patient deaths by an estimated 122,000 over eighteen months. Today Berwick and his team are working on a 5 million lives campaign. Imagine the grief they’ll be preventing and the joy they’ll be bringing to the world. They’re taking on a target that’s 50 times larger than their original goal because they now know a great deal more about exerting influence.
For one final update, let’s head to sub-Saharan Africa. For several decades well-intended anthropologists and health-care specialists did their best to encourage locals to read their worm brochures or attend their lectures or simply to follow their heartfelt advice. If the villagers would only listen to their ideas, they could rid themselves of the dreaded Guinea worm disease. But alas, few followed their advice, and the ugly scourge plagued tens of millions.
Enter Dr. Donald Hopkins and other influence masters from The Carter Center. Since the beginning of their campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, this small team of change agents has reduced the level of Guinea worm cases by 99.7 percent, completely eradicating the disease from 11 of the 20 endemic countries it originally targeted. The team is on schedule to completely eradicate the scourge by 2009. Team members have done this not through a medical breakthrough but by learning how to motivate and enable absolute strangers to alter their behavior. Like other influencers we’ve studied, these devoted change agents stepped up to an enormous challenge, left behind old and failed methods, and decided that if they wanted to solve the devastating Guinea worm problem, they would have to start with themselves. They would first have to learn what it would take to exert influence over human behavior.
So they did. They visited their target audience, studied positive deviance, and brought into play many of the methods we describe in this book. As a result, one day soon the very last Guinea worm will have been eliminated from the face of the earth. Forever. The horrible parasite will actually be extinct, and this is an extinction we can live with.
Bandura, Silbert, Berwick, Hopkins—in fact, all of the other practitioners and scholars we’ve studied—have made stunning contributions to the change literature. They have all succeeded where others have failed. They have all demonstrated that if you know how to make use of the right influence tools and bring them to bear on a carefully designed project, you can change anything.
And best of all, each of these geniuses has given us hope. We too can become master influencers—but not without some hard work. We have to stop tinkering with problems and learn how to build a comprehensive influence strategy. This, of course, raises the question of whether everyday people can actually put into play the principles influence masters use all the time. The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. None of the individuals we’ve studied were influencers by training, but all eventually learned what it took to wrestle persistent problems to the ground. To kick-start your personal efforts, you’ll have to use this book as a handbook for change.
FIND VITAL BEHAVIORS
Start with vital behaviors. There’s no use putting together several complex techniques all aimed at the wrong actions. That’s where Dr. Ethna Reid’s work comes into play. Dr. Reid taught us to look for best practice research that compares top performers to others, teases out the unique behaviors that separate the best from the rest, and then teaches these vital behaviors to lower-performing individuals. If they then make significant improvements, you have something worth trying.
When you find yourself sorting through a list of possible influence strategies, demand this same level of scientific rigor. Accept only those recommendations that have been proven through similar comparative analyses. Start your search by looking for scholastic work. Search for university publications, frequently cited research, and renowned practitioners who publish their results. Such scientific work can be found in respected journals and not necessarily in advertising brochures. In any case, take the time to explore the known universe, and don’t merely accept the first plan that comes across your desk.
After identifying the vital behaviors that have worked for others, learn what works best for you by applying the principles of positive deviance. Examine the times when you have succeeded, and try to identify the force or strategy that led to your success. Once you’ve discovered the actions that have worked for you in the past, conduct short-cycle-time mini experiments to confirm your analysis. Don’t head off on a lifelong trek. Instead, set short-term goals, try the behaviors within a low-risk environment, and then see what works for you.
ADD A SOURCE
Behind each vital behavior you’ll find six distinct sources of influence. If you’re lucky, any one of these sources might be enough to put your change strategy over the top. For example, you may have realized that if you simply build deliberate practice into your attempt to help your children love reading, you could make enormous strides. You may have been struck with the insanity of sending people off to corporate training programs and then dropping them back into a social climate where no one reinforces the concepts they were taught. So you’ve added social and structural reinforcement into the mix. Perhaps you have carted your treadmill from the basement up to your bedroom where you don’t have to fight the deadly power of propinquity. In the odd event that your previous influence strategy was short one or two horsepower of what was needed to create change, picking and choosing from the influence concepts we’ve outlined could put you over the top.
DIAGNOSE BEFORE YOU PRESCRIBE
Be warned: If you’re facing a more daunting challenge than those mentioned above, you’d do well to do what influence masters do. Diagnose before you prescribe. Figure out which sources of influence are behind the behavior you’re trying to change. Most leaders fail to take this step and simply throw together an influence strategy they believe should work under any circumstances.
Skilled influencers do otherwise. For example, consider Dr. Warren Warwick of Fairview University Children’s Hospital. He realized that his medicine was no better than his influence strategy. In one rather intriguing case, an 18-year-old cystic fibrosis patient he was treating wasn’t conforming to her treatment plan. Rather than launch into a lecture about how she would suffocate in a few years if she continued to slack off, Dr. Warwick stopped and diagnosed the underlying cause. Rather than asking, “What the heck is wrong with her?” Dr. Warwick tried to understand why she would fail to do something that would save her life. As he probed and listened, he learned that there were several reasons behind the lapse.
The patient had a new boyfriend with whom she was staying half the time. Her mother had typically administered the treatments, but now the patient was often not at home at the prescribed times. She had started a job and was working nights. The school she attended changed policies and now required a nurse to administer her medicine. Deciding that this was a pain, she stopped taking the medicine. Worst of all, in spite of losing 20 percent of her lung capacity in the previous two months, she felt fine and concluded that fewer treatments were okay. The more Dr. Warwick talked with the patient, the more he realized that she was failing to follow standard procedure for several different reasons. When he understood the sources of influence he was up against, he and the patient were able to develop a plan that literally saved her life.
ADD MORE SOURCES
When the behavior you’re trying to change is currently supported by several sources, you’ll have to load up your influence strategy to address everything you’re up against. The world is perfectly organized to create the results you’re currently experiencing.
Draw on All Six Sources of Influence
To achieve new results, you’re probably going to have to change several elements in order to both motivate and enable the new and healthier behaviors.
However, that’s not how people tend to operate. Over the years we (the authors) have worked with corporate leaders who knew that they needed to change the very culture of their organizations. They knew that people’s behavior across the company was sapping productivity, driving away customers, and swallowing profits. When we described the breadth of six-source strategies that would be required to create the results they wanted, the leaders often concluded that they could select from the various strategies we were recommending like so many items in a catalog. They wanted to purchase influence on the cheap, but the changes they were attempting to bring about couldn’t be had at bargain-basement prices.
But desperate times lead to desperate actions, and people, more often than not, seek simplistic solutions, even when they’re studying the world’s best influencers. For example, Dr. Silbert explains that over the past three decades she has invested a great deal of time with people who have traveled halfway around the world to learn what she’s done to help criminals and drug addicts become productive citizens. Silbert tells those who visit Delancey Street the whole story—emphasizing each of the elements required to make the venture succeed. She clarifies the exact vital behaviors the organization tries to encourage. She notes how she purposely creates direct and vicarious experiences to help residents change their minds. She goes to great pains to ensure that the influence strategy makes good use of all six sources of influence.
More often than not, the travelers leave Delancey Street filled with hope. Then they go home and select one idea to add to their existing ineffective effort. Of course, this single element rarely adds enough horsepower to create change, so their “new and improved” strategy fails, and the earnest change agents wonder why their effort didn’t work.
These cafeteria-style change efforts—where people pick only a few elements from a broader array—happen all the time. For example, if you look at the diffusion of the North Carolina second-chance strategy we described earlier, you’ll find that it follows a predictable and lamentable path. Remember the clever crime-reduction strategy where soon-to-be-arrested drug dealers were brought into a room filled with pictures of them committing crimes? At one point the local district attorney shows a video montage made up of criminal scenes taken of each of the subjects in action and then asks the subjects to raise their hand when they see themselves committing a felony. And they do.
This method for creating a sense of impending doom is coupled with family support, job training, and several other essential ingredients that have yielded encouraging results. In fact, the designers of second-chance programs go to great pains to ensure that all six sources of influence are affected by their change strategy.
The impressive results of the comprehensive effort have since been reported in the press. Police leaders enthusiastically read about the strategy and select a few of the elements they think their city council will approve, or a couple for which they can secure funding. Or perhaps they give extra attention to a strategy they are already implementing but can now call a second-chance program. And sure enough, after employing only one or two elements from the overall intervention, the change effort fails. In the end, eager would-be influencers search for another change plan that they then choose from selectively and implement poorly—thus failing all over again.
If One Source Doesn’t Work, Try More Sources
The simplistic strategies that most people adopt from the cafeteria of choices are almost always the same. People realize that when it comes to motivating humans, a single motivator can be powerful enough to trump all other sources of motivation. For instance, say you don’t like your job and aren’t very fond of your coworkers, yet you show up to work every day. That’s because you need the money. The money trumps your tedious job and abrasive colleagues.
In a similar vein, when people have power over others, they often trump all other sources of motivation by relying on threats. Now that others have been warned, surely they’ll be motivated to do the right thing. Unfortunately, negative reinforcement yields mixed results and needs to be constantly monitored. Worse still, all abuses of authority transform those who rely on them into the parent or leader they swore they’d never become.
Ineffective influencers compensate for their weak influence repertoires by putting a megaphone to the one source they’ve already put in place. In contrast, influence geniuses tap new sources of influence rather than trying desperately to pump up their anemic single source.
For example, people who develop a change strategy based on a single extrinsic motivator typically miss the importance of creating circumstances in which intrinsic rewards carry their share of the motivational load. Savvy influencers increase their likelihood of achieving success by building in multiple sources. That means they co-opt rather than fight peer pressure. They link vital behaviors to the formal reward structure. In short, they align all the sources of motivation with the desired vital behaviors.
When it comes to ability problems, the importance of stacking the deck for success is equally essential. With ability barriers, no single enabling source can trump the other sources. In fact, quite the opposite is true. One barrier that disables a change project trumps all other enablers. For example, at work you may be able to complete your part of the job, but if those who provide you with materials and information you need can’t do their part, you’re stumped. If others can do their part but the computer system fails them, you’re all stumped.
Consequently, when it comes to enabling a change effort, the common error made by naive influencers is not that they try to trump all the other disabling sources with one powerful megasource. Instead, the common mistake lies in surfacing a single barrier, fixing it, and then believing they’re done. With six separate sources of influence behind any one barrier—and with dozens of forces lying behind each source—it’s fairly likely that more than one disabler lies behind any persistent problem. That’s often what has made it so persistent.
For instance, when it comes to your own health care, here’s an interesting best practice. It’s wise to talk with your personal physician with the idea that any lingering symptoms you experience might have more than one underlying medical cause. Recent research into how doctors think reveals that patients who say, “Yes, it sounds like I might have X, but could there be something else going on as well?” are more likely to resolve their overall health problems than those who hold to the belief that if they treat one source of the problem, they will be fine.
Left to our natural tendencies, most of us make poor use of the vast array of the tools that can help improve performance. When it comes to complex interpersonal skills, we rarely think to make use of deliberate practice. For instance, in the fields of leadership and interpersonal influence, students are rarely taught specific behaviors that they can then rehearse while receiving detailed feedback from a trained coach. Instead, students are taught “from the neck up” a set of ideas that rarely leads to changes in behavior.
The ability to withstand yearnings and temptations is rarely viewed as a skill. Instead, the ability to overcome enticements is routinely attributed to inherent, DNA-driven personality characteristics. Consequently, almost nobody actually practices methods for delaying gratification. When people don’t believe that the ability to withstand cravings is skill based, they rely on every source of motivation imaginable. Eventually their inevitable failure leads to depression and helplessness rather than a search for newer and better skills.
Social capital also remains a largely untouched resource for enabling change. Often we’re led to believe that battles need to be won within the confines of one’s own heart. Heroes have first and last names, not collective descriptors such as “team” or “group.” Consequently, asking for help is seen as a weakness rather as than a savvy strategy. Master influencers know better. They identify those who need to be added to the change effort in order to succeed. They make use of peer influence and ensure that social circles support the effort rather than get in its way.
When it comes to enabling performance by making use of the physical world, most people typically fail to even think about this powerful and yet largely untapped source of influence. Dr. William F. Whyte came up with the idea of building the restaurant order spindle when he was dealing with restaurant arguments, but nobody else thought of it. Dr. Frederick Steele explained this mental gaff by suggesting that most of us are environmentally incompetent. We rarely see the effect the physical environment is having on us, nor do we make use of environmental features when crafting an influence effort.
In short, you must address all six sources of influence when designing an influence strategy. Stop thinking of influence tools as a buffet, and recognize them as a comprehensive approach to creating systematic, widespread, and lasting change. Diagnose both motivational and ability sources of influence, and then lock in the results by applying individual, social, and structural forces to the solution. You now have a powerful six-source diagnostic tool at your fingertips. Use it liberally.
MAKE CHANGE INEVITABLE
Let’s end on the concept of making change inevitable. More than anything else, this characteristic sets effective influencers apart from everyone else. Individuals who routinely hit their change goals overdetermine vital behaviors in order to make change inevitable, meaning that they routinely look at all six sources, find methods from within each source, and continue adding new influence strategies well after others have stopped searching for change levers. They do this for a good reason. Typically the change they’re attempting to orchestrate is so audacious—so completely hopeless—that they pull out every influence tool available.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
To see how the principles we’ve studied can be used in combination in an actual business case, let’s take a look at what we (the authors) once did when working with an executive team to solve a particularly destructive problem. The leaders attempted to use each influence method we’ve discussed to deal with the company’s inability to deliver on commitments.
In this company, employees were good at making promises; it was keeping them that gave them fits. With each new project, senior managers set clear objectives, department heads agreed to detailed specs and deadlines, and then one or more groups fell miserably short of their goals and delayed the project. This habit of always missing deadlines caused enormous problems with customers. Delays and crisis recoveries caused costs to spiral out of control. And the company’s growing reputation for being “long on commitment but short on fulfillment” was beginning to cost them dearly in the marketplace. Old customers were fleeing while new ones were becoming increasingly difficult to find.
To identify the self-defeating behaviors that were leading to failure, a team consisting of several senior managers and the authors conducted interviews with project managers and project team members. The research team quickly discovered that people were completely aware of consistent failures, as well as the reasons for them.
Fact-Free Planning. One manager told us that corporate executives would lay out plans without gathering facts about what the team was actually able to accomplish. If they did ask for input, it was just a joke because they already had the deadline in their heads. The manager explained, “More often than not, we know from the onset that we’re going to fail because we don’t have sufficient resources. Watching one of our projects unfold is like watching a ‘slow-motion train wreck.’ You know that your project is going to end in disaster, and all you can do is sit back and watch it tumble off the track.”
Project Chicken. Another manager explained how the team played the same pernicious game we discussed earlier. “In every planning and follow-up meeting,” she said, “project managers say they’re right on spec and schedule, while in truth they’re quietly praying that someone else will admit that he or she is behind schedule so that person will take the heat while everyone else is given a reprieve. It’s a deadly game that pits managers against one another in a way that eventually crushes our customers.”
AWOL Sponsors. Finally, we found that the organization’s projects suffered when project sponsors were absent without leave. Each project was assigned a senior leader whose job it was to sponsor the project. The sponsor was supposed to help guide the project through the organization as they and other leaders competed for resources. If there was a problem, it was the sponsor’s job to seek additional resources as required, update key personnel, and otherwise smooth the skids.
The trouble in this organization was that sometimes sponsors wouldn’t show up for meetings, wouldn’t enforce agreements with other departments, and would fail to align other leaders behind the teams’ decisions. The project team was left hanging, and the project would inevitably come to nothing.
One project, for example, burned up thousands of person-hours and over a million dollars in precious resources, but ended up on the scrap heap at the end. The most painful part of the failure, however, wasn’t just the loss of time and money. It was that halfway into the project everyone knew it was doomed because the sponsor was doing nothing to enforce commitments, gain support from stakeholders, and maintain accountability. Everyone would show up to project meetings, but they’d just play with their BlackBerries because they knew the meetings were irrelevant!
Search for Vital Behaviors
To discover what it would take to turn around this culture of fear and failure, we asked if there were any project managers or team leaders who consistently hit their deadlines, and if so, if we could watch them in action. It turned out there were. So we and the executive team studied these positive deviants.
While studying these accomplished project managers, we began to see why they hit their goals when others didn’t. For instance, in one key meeting we watched a positive deviant deal with Fact-Free Planning. A senior executive had committed to a deadline without ensuring that the organization could deliver. When confronted with her misstep, the executive became very defensive. She threatened to outsource the project if the internal team “didn’t have the commitment required.”
That was when the magic happened. We watched this skillful project manager deal with the defensive executive, refuse to respond in kind, and calmly create a sense of shared purpose between the project team and the executive. The manager left the room with the backing of the executive for a far more realistic plan and, more importantly, with an agreement on how future project commitments would be made.
Watching this woman along with other positive deviants showed us that the vital behaviors for project success involved dealing with what we later called “crucial conversations.” In fact, we’ve found that being able to successfully hold crucial conversations is frequently the vital behavior behind change. (Our book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High teaches a very common set of vital behaviors—the ability to speak and be heard and encourage others to do the same, no matter how controversial, political, or unpopular one’s views.)
Having found our vital behaviors in this particular organization (the ability to hold crucial conversations about Fact-Free Planning, Project Chicken, and AWOL Sponsors), it was our job to use every means within our control to ensure the results they wanted. What would it take to get everyone to enact these behaviors and eventually turn the culture around?
Change How You Change Minds
We knew one thing for certain: Verbal persuasion wasn’t going to offer much help. Telling people that they needed to speak up when they disagreed with a person in authority or had bad news sounded more like, “You need to naively expose your problems, put your career at risk, and be seen as a whiney non-team player. So go ahead—who wants to be first?”
What we needed to do was find a way to help people change two specific views. First, they had to believe they could indeed speak frankly without looking like rebels or wimps. Second, they had to believe that if they did effectively share their contrary or controversial ideas, they and their colleagues would make the right choices about deadlines and resources, and eventually they’d be able to actually hit their goals.
MAKE CHANGE INEVITABLE
To replace their existing fears with a growing sense of confidence, employees didn’t need a lecture; they needed to improve their actual skills (Personal Ability). To do so we took the rather complex behaviors demonstrated by those who knew how to make it safe to talk about just about anything, and followed the tenets of deliberate practice. We broke the skills into learnable parts and provided positive examples. As individuals practiced the new skills within a protected training environment, they were given immediate feedback from a coach. Finally, as they grew their competence they began to believe that they could indeed speak their minds without taking a huge risk.
But we didn’t stop there. We took care to connect the newly acquired skill set to the trainees’ sense of who they wanted to be as well as to their core values (Personal Motivation). People weren’t being asked to learn skills merely because it was the latest “flavor of the month;” they were being given the chance to become the person they preferred to be. Nobody wanted to play project chicken—essentially lying about their readiness while wishing the worst on their peers. Consequently, as part of the training experience people openly discussed the existing culture, how it violated their values, and what it would take to become a functioning team composed of professionals rather than, well, a group of people who had originally described their culture as one built on lies and deception.
In addition, we gave team leaders a firsthand view of the human consequences of AWOL sponsorship and fact-free planning. We had them spend a weekend in development—seeing the problems thoughtless deadlines and lack of support from leadership created for the personal lives of those who had to meet the deadlines. At one point, an operations manager confessed that his marriage was about to collapse because he had not been home a full weekend for over a year. Members of the leadership team left with a whole new level of moral engagement.
To provide additional motivation to learn and implement the vital behaviors, we tapped into the social support system (Social Motivation). First we identified opinion leaders and asked them to help lead the influence effort. They were the first to go through the training. By learning firsthand that the training could help them resolve real problems they had been fighting for years—and then seeing the enormous benefit of learning and implementing the skills—opinion leaders openly encouraged their coworkers to take part in the training and put the skills into play. To transform mere words into a vicarious experience, several told stories of how the skills had helped them work through a touchy discussion.
To further enable each employee to routinely use the skills, the training was always taught in intact teams by the team’s immediate supervisor (Social Ability). The supervisor would begin by forming participants into teams of three. After the training was complete, the teams met and discussed what they were doing to catch and solve problems early. They often gathered over lunch, where members helped each other prepare for an upcoming high-stakes conversation.
Managers provided additional incentive to routinely step up to and master the vital behaviors by including the target behaviors in performance reviews linked to the annual bonus (Structural Motivation). Employees were now measured against the skills that were taught in the training. In addition, 25 percent of senior executives’ bonuses were pegged to whether or not they measurably improved the vital behaviors across the organization. That put real teeth into the intervention.
Finally, to make good use of the physical environment, every meeting room displayed a poster that reviewed the skills employees were supposed to bring into play when they faced problems with project management (Structural Ability). Leaders also included a short list of the vital skills at the top of their printed agenda as a way of reminding themselves to review one or more elements in each meeting. And then, to make good use of the power of propinquity, two groups that routinely went at it hammer-and-tong were moved to the same work area where constant interaction helped them become far more collaborative.
By carefully considering each of the principles we’ve covered in this book, this particular change team was able to overcome what had been an overwhelming problem. We know that they succeeded because we measured the results. By taking a pre-measure of the vital behaviors and then correlating improvements in the behavior with key performance indicators, the research team discovered that not only did the use of vital behaviors increase substantially, but for each percentage increase in the use of the vital behaviors, there was a $1.5 million improvement in productivity. Quality and customer satisfaction measures were similarly affected by improvements in the vital behaviors. By applying each of the influence principles and strategies we’ve studied—and not just one or two methods—the change team was able to resolve what had been a massive and resistant problem. They had become genuine influencers.
AN INVITATION FROM THE AUTHORS
Influencers not only overdetermine their results, but they also rarely work alone. Massive problems require a community of influencers working in concert. As an increasing number of people apply the works of Bandura, Silbert, Hopkins, Berwick, and other influence experts to problems of every kind, new and vibrant influence communities are springing up each day.
By working with others to bring every influence tool imaginable to bear on their problems, this growing community of experts has taught us not to be too quick to pray for serenity. They have shown us that the combined power of their influence tools is far greater than the sum of the individual parts. While turning criminals and addicts into healthy citizens, saving millions of lives, turning companies around, and annihilating deadly diseases, they have taught us one of the most important lessons we can ever learn. When you understand the forces behind any behavior, along with the strategies to change it, you hold within your grasp the power to change anything.
You too can find strength in numbers by joining the growing community of world-class influencers. Start by visiting our Web site at influencerbook.com, where we’ll provide you with a worksheet to help you prepare for and organize your next influence project. At this site you can blog with other students of influence who are working to solve challenges similar to yours. You’ll also be able to learn more about vital behaviors and six-source strategies, and view short segments of interviews with a few of the influencers you’ve already met in this book.
Finally, if you’d like to take a measure of your existing influence skills, the site offers a self-assessment that not only gives you a view into your existing influence repertoire but can also help you develop the next steps for becoming an effective influencer. Enjoy!