The New Rules of Influence for Managers | Mastering the ABCs of Persuasion

Have you ever felt like you were speaking, but nobody was listening? Or like you were trying to get buy in from your team, but they just weren't on board and you couldn't figure out why.

It's frustrating when you can't seem to influence others effectively, but here's the secret. Leadership isn't about authority, it's about persuasion.

As a manager, you're constantly in situations where you need to influence, whether it's your team, your boss, or even a client. That's why in this episode, I'm going to break down the three essential principles of influence that every manager needs to master in order to become a more persuasive and impactful leader.

Hey everybody and welcome back to the channel. I'm Doug Howard, and if you're new here, I help managers and leaders develop the skills you need to lead effectively, build stronger teams, and communicate with impact. If that sounds like something you need, be sure to hit that subscribe button and turn on the notifications so you never miss an episode.

The Art of Influence

Today we're diving into the art of influence. Whether you realize it or not, every interaction you have as a manager involves some form of persuasion. But the good news is that influence doesn't have to be about convincing or pushing. It's about connecting. That's why in this episode I'm going to walk you through the ABCs of persuasion. That stands for attunement, buoyancy, and clarity. These are based on insights from Daniel Pink's book called To Sell As Human. Each of these three principles will help you connect with others, communicate your ideas more effectively, and lead with confidence.

Many managers have this misconception and they believe that influence means being charismatic or having a strong personality, but that's a huge misconception. True influence is really about understanding other people and aligning your message with what matters to them versus what matters to you. When managers rely too heavily on authority, it creates resistance and it limits engagement from other people. Despite most people knowing this, a lot of managers often default to a command and control style for persuading and influencing because it's straightforward, it's familiar, and it's what they're most comfortable with, but it's not the most effective way to motivate a team.

Leadership is about bringing people along with you, not just telling them what to do. If you're a leader who relies on authority alone, you're going to miss opportunities to build trust, encourage open dialogue, and create a collaborative environment throughout your team. That's why it's crucial to shift from command to connection. That's where the new ABCs of persuasion come into play.

Attunement - Aligning with Others' Perspectives

Let's start with the first part of the ABCs of persuasion. That's the A, which stands for attunement. Attunement is about seeing the world through someone else's eyes or empathy. It's the ability to align yourself with another person's perspective, understand their emotions, and connect with what truly matters to them. As a manager, attunement helps you build rapport, it helps you appreciate their reactions, and it helps you adjust your communication to fit the needs of your audience.

I like to think of attunement as tuning into the frequency of the people you're leading. Just to clarify, it's not about changing your message to fit what other people want to hear. It's about understanding their concerns, their motivations, and their challenges so that you can communicate more effectively to them. As I said before, attunement requires empathy, active listening, and adaptability.

To see an example of how this works in action, imagine you're in a situation where you're leading a team that's hesitant to adopt a new process. Instead of pushing the change through and forcing it through and saying things like we're going this direction or not, so get on board or get out of the way. A lot of managers do that when they lose frustration from pushback. Instead of going that approach, the command and control approach, start by asking questions like, what's your biggest concern about this new process? Or how do you think it would impact your day to day work if we made this process change? When you start with asking questions like that, and by understanding their point of view, you can actually address their specific concerns and show that you value their input versus just force feeding them something that they're going to fight and resist every step of the way.

Tips for practicing attunement. Ask open ended questions. You want to get people to share their thoughts openly and also share their feelings willingly. I look at that like you're doing your investigative detective work. You're learning what are the things that they're going to challenge you on so that you can actually put those things at bay instead of forcing it down their throat and letting underlying problems get hidden and swept under the rug without you having a chance to influence them.

You want to make sure you listen without interrupting. Focus on truly understanding the other person instead of just preparing your response in your head while they're talking. You want to adapt your language for them. You want to use terms and examples that resonate with your team's experiences. Don't just tell it from your perspective.

Last but not least, You want to validate their emotions. You want to make sure you're acknowledging their feelings, even if you don't fully agree with what their feelings are, because doing this helps build trust. If they share with you that they're concerned that this is going to create a lot of extra busy work, then you want to acknowledge that and say, no, I understand that you're concerned that this is going to create a lot of busy work, or I understand that you're frustrated about X, Y, and Z, or I understand that you're worried about X, Y, and Z. You want to acknowledge that versus glossing over it.

Buoyancy - Staying Positive in the Face of Rejection

The B part of the ABCs of persuasion is buoyancy. Buoyancy is about maintaining a positive mindset, especially when you encounter resistance or setbacks. In leadership, not every idea is going to be embraced immediately, and you're often going to face pushback if you're in a leadership position. Buoyancy is your ability to stay optimistic, bounce back, and keep the conversation moving forward, even in the face of obstacles. Buoyancy isn't about being naive, and it's not about ignoring negative feedback or pretending that everything is fine. It's about resilience and adaptability. It's the mindset that allows you to persist when faced with challenges and to see rejection as an opportunity to refine and improve your approach. In leadership, it's crucial to model this behavior so that your team knows that setbacks are part of the process and not a reason to give up.

For example, imagine you're a manager and you propose a new team initiative, but your idea gets shut down in the first meeting. Instead of getting defensive, or getting discouraged, or wanting to give up, you want to respond with something like this. Hey everybody, I hear your concerns. Let's explore what adjustments we can make to address those issues. How can we adapt this idea to make it work for everybody? This shows resilience, and it keeps the dialogue open.

Here's some tips for you to help you develop your buoyancy. First, you want to learn how to reframe setbacks. So instead of seeing setbacks as failures, you View them as an opportunity to learn and improve and reflect by asking, what can I learn from this? How can I handle this differently? What's something I could do different the next time? What is something I didn't consider that I should have thought of before? Ask yourself a series of thought provoking, self probing questions like that when you face setbacks like this because this will get you out of the defensive mindset and it'll shift you in a mindset that's more focused on problem solving and moving forward, versus dwelling.

You want to make sure you're staying solution focused. So whenever you encounter resistance, shift the conversation to possible solutions. You never want to put a period at the end of that statement. Look at it, there's always a few dots. When there's a setback, look at it like dot, but what about this? What if we tried this? How could we explore this? If we did this, what impact would that have? Have some go to type of phrases and ways to keep these conversations moving.

You also want to use pre and post self talk. You want to prepare yourself with positive self talk before difficult conversations. Let's face it, a lot of times, if you're making a tough pitch and you're trying to persuade someone, that you're going to get tough feedback on, you know, that going into the situation. Very rarely are you caught off guard, not expecting people to push back on something. So if you do, do some positive pre self talk before that, and mentally imagine, okay, here's how I see this scenario going. Here's what I imagine this person doing. Here's what I expect them to say. Here's how I expect them to react. By mentally rehearsing that, that makes you feel more calm in the situation versus letting that jolt you in the moment. You want to do positive self talk afterwards. You want to reflect on what went well, ask yourself questions like what went well? How could I have been more prepared for that? What are things I could have done differently? Again, this shifts your mind out of that dwelling mindset and figuring out, how can you always be improving in these situations? The more and more you get in the habit of doing this, the more you're going to build that resilience and resistance for future situations that come up.

Last but not least, a great tip I recommend for you to build that buoyancy is to find humor in the challenges, right? Keeping a lighthearted attitude can diffuse tensions and keep things in perspective. I know you might have a very serious job but most of us aren't doing brain surgery. We aren't curing cancer. At the end of the day, it's good to just take a step back and remind ourselves that we're not working at the Pentagon or something like that. If you are working in the Pentagon, maybe you don't want to add humor to your job but my point is, try to look at a little bit lighter instead of taking things too seriously. That'll help you be more resistant and more buoyant as well.

Clarity - Making Your Message Clear and Actionable

The third and final part of the ABCs of persuasion is clarity. Clarity is the ability to communicate your message in a way that is simple, specific, and actionable. It's not just about having a clear vision, though. It's about being able to articulate that vision so that others understand it and know what steps to take. In leadership, clarity cuts through the confusion, reduces ambiguity, and ensures that everyone is on the same page.

Clarity involves eliminating unnecessary complexity and focusing on what's truly important. It's about highlighting the problem, presenting a solution, and outlining the steps that are needed to achieve it. A clear message is not only more persuasive, it's also easier for your team to act on, which is going to reduce misunderstandings and increase alignment.

For example, let's say you're rolling out a new goal for the quarter, and you want everyone on your team to understand what success looks like. Instead of using vague language like, we need to improve customer service, which could be misinterpreted or could mean anything, you want to use specific language like this. Our goal this quarter is to increase customer satisfaction scores by 15%. We're going to do this by implementing weekly training sessions. Tracking feedback and reducing response times by 25 percent. By adding this level of clarity to your communication, it makes it crystal clear what's expected and how to achieve it.

Here's a few more tips for communicating with clarity. Always use simple, direct language. You want to avoid jargon. You want to avoid beating around the bush. You want to avoid using unnecessary words. You want to just get straight to the point. Avoid using jargon and technical terms unless absolutely necessary.

Also, when possible, you want to provide concrete examples. Illustrate your points with real world scenarios or situations that have happened. Break down complex ideas. Use bullet points or step by step instructions for clarity, to break that down so that people have an easier time processing that information.

Last but not least, and I do this all the time still with everyone I work with. You want to summarize key takeaways. A lot of times, you've thrown a lot of information at people in a meeting or after you made a pitch or something like that. So what I like to do is follow up at the end by summarizing key takeaways. End with a clear summary of the main points and the next steps. I do this in each one of my YouTube episodes. Depending on the context or the situation that you're in, it's good to send a follow up email to the group or to the person you were talking to summarizing the next steps. That way they got a paper trail of it that they can go back to.

Applying the ABCs in Leadership Situations

Now that you understand the ABCs of persuasion, let's talk about how you can put them into practice in your leadership role. These principles aren't just for big pitches or formal presentations. They're tools that you can use in everyday interactions from one on one meetings to team discussions.

So let's look at a few examples of application. You want to use attunement during team feedback sessions to understand what's working and what's not from the team's perspective. For buoyancy, you want to apply buoyancy when dealing with a challenging project, and you want to use that as an opportunity to find ways to stay positive and stay focused on finding solutions rather than dwelling on setbacks. For clarity, you want to utilize clarity when assigning tasks. Make sure everyone understands the goals, the deadlines, and specific expectations to avoid confusion.

A few more tips on applying this effectively. Start by practicing these in low stakes situations to build confidence with it. After you do it, ask for feedback on your communication style to see where you can improve. Last but not least, make sure you incorporate these principles into your leadership toolkit for more effective influence.

And there you have it. The new ABCs of persuasion for managers. Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity. These principles are about more than just communicating. They're about connecting, understanding, and inspiring your team. The more you master these skills, the more effective you'll be as a leader in building trust, engaging your team, and driving meaningful results. But remember, persuasion is just one part of effective leadership. In order to truly influence at every level of your organization, you need to know how to communicate with impact, whether you're speaking to your team, your boss, or a cross functional group. That's why I encourage you to check out my next episode called How to Influence Upward, Downward, and Cross functionally at Work. I'll see you in the next video.

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