If you can’t persuade, you can’t lead. So, just how persuasive are you?

At the heart of leadership lies the ability to influence others and in corporate life, your power of persuasion is not measured by the quality of your big idea, but by the sustainable performance your people achieve because of it.

That’s why persuasion matters.

Persuasion isn’t easy. We know that because we’re not easily persuaded ourselves. But if you want people to back you, support your plan, cut costs, try harder and go the extra mile, you’ll have to know how to persuade them.  It’s your job.

The gap in performance between turning up for work and going the extra mile is huge. It’s your job to close it, but how?

This article gives you 3 ideas collectively referred to as “The Power of Persuasion”.

Here they are:

The Power of Persuasion

Persuasion lies in…

1.    Using the wisdom of rhetoric to get others to:

• See the Sense in Your Idea
• Have Faith in You
• Feel Emotionally Moved to Act

2.    Not just in ‘storytelling’ but in treating your work as a Story in the Making and in Enlisting Others to Make that Story With You

3.    Holding Conversations that Generate Value Every Day

This article gives you practical suggestions for improving your leadership by developing your power of persuasion.

The Wisdom of Rhetoric

Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama moved people by instilling a shared desire for change. These great orators won people over. How did they do it?

They knew about rhetoric – the art of persuasive speaking – and they used it to great effect. It comes from Ancient Greece and it gives us 3 rules for persuasive speaking:

• Logos: Explain your idea logically so that people can see the sense in it.
• Ethos: Express yourself authentically so that people believe in you.
• Pathos: Connect with your audience personally so they feel moved to support your idea.

Follow these rules and you will increase your power of persuasion. But experience tells me that leaders focus their effort on the logic of their argument, hoping their authenticity and human connection will be self-evident. It often isn’t.

If you want to be persuasive, you have to be explicit about all three.

To get it right every time, you can use a simple structure to prepare and present your ideas. It will increase your power of persuasion:

Putting Rhetoric into Practice

Use a simple structure, like this:

‘Let me explain our new plan. I want you to understand the reasoning behind it…’ (logos)

‘I want you to know why it matters to me and why I believe it is the right thing for us to do…’ (ethos)

‘And I will go on to explain the important part every one of you will play in making it work…’ (pathos)

Include these three elements and your audience see the sense in your idea, have faith in you and feel emotionally moved to support it with action. In short, you will become much more persuasive – and a better leader.

The first power gives you the wisdom of rhetoric. It’s a good place to start.

 

Your Work as a Story in the Making

It is popular advice in the world of corporate communications that leaders should use storytelling to amplify the persuasiveness of their idea.

Storytelling encourages leaders to use anecdotal, metaphorical and poignant stories to make their message stick. It works but it is a limited view of what the narrative lens has to offer. It gives you another advantage that is altogether much more persuasive.

The narrative lens lets you see the work you are doing as a story in the making that you need others to join in and make with you.

Look at the achievements of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Jack Welch. They are the inventors, architects, directors and indeed, the authors of great companies.

Great leaders are great authors – authors of a fantastic living story, providing words and phrases that persuade people to be engaged in creating a great social movement.

They do much more than provide words. They imbue their work with narrative structure, meaning and significance using the same features that make a great story.

This is no accident. Our appreciation of what makes a great story did not come from literature, it came from human experience.

‘…narrative form is not a dress which covers something else but the structure inherent in human experience and action.’

David Carr

Human beings need and use narrative coherence to live stable, productive and fulfilling lives. Successful leaders satisfy this human need by providing narrative coherence in their work.

Is it perhaps the unknown secret of their success?

Take a look at the practical tips in the table below. It sheds new light on your work as the production of ‘a story in the making’.

 

A Leader’s Work as A Story in the Making

The Author is you, the leader. You’re also the producer and narrator. Your role is to produce a level of narrative coherence that persuades and enlists others to make your story with you.

The Plot is your purpose, strategy and plan. You have to make it logically sensible, personally authentic and emotionally engaging (see the wisdom of rhetoric, above).

The Characters are people in your team – you must define and clarify their role so as to bring their personalities to life.

The Script comes from your voice. The words you approve and use provide a common language and shared meaning for people to collaborate more easily and achieve success together.

The Beginning, Middle and End is the journey of your work through time. You must maintain continuity even as things change unpredictably: ‘This is where we were… this is where we are now… and this is where we need to go…’

Dealing with Allies and Adversaries is your special way of succeeding against the odds. You must lead this by example and publically recognise others who show the ‘right’ way to behave.

The Moral of the Story is your purpose fulfilled and your values proven in action. You must be passionate in connecting everyday action to a higher purpose or ideal.

It is unusual to think of leadership as authorship but it tunes us in to the leader’s role as a practical, social story-maker. You’re an author now!

Just like the author of a book, the leader’s primary resource is language. But unlike writers, leaders use language to create a social movement, not just a great read.

Corporate leaders are authors of a special kind. Their words give life to real characters, engaging, inspiring and yes, persuading employees, customers and investors to join in and go the extra mile for the good of a common cause.

Acts of leadership draft a story that shapes people’s lives, providing the narrative context they need for knowing what to do or how to act.

This is why it matters:

 

‘I can only answer the question, “What am I to do”? If I can answer the prior question, ”Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” ’

Alasdair MacIntyre

People will listen to you, hang on your words and later use your most compelling words in their own scripts adding language of their own to make the story relevant and meaningful for their particular audience.

As in the fictional world, so in the corporate world, it’s the persuasive story that captures the imagination and the inspiring author who gathers the committed following.

Whether you like it or not, your work is a story in the making. Your choice is to conscientiously treat it as such and use your skill as an author to persuade others that it is indeed a story worth making together.

This second power of persuasion is to see and under-take your role as a real life, human story-maker and to focus your attention on producing the narrative coherence people need in order to join in and perform their best in creating the story with you.

The rhetorical wisdom of the first power and the social narrative of the second, both call on the leader’s role as a practical author and this view of leadership as authorship is extended in the third power of persuasion - conversation.

Effective Conversation

People are rarely persuaded by a single act of one-way communication. Persuasion occurs through dialogue with moments of presentation and conversation, too.

For leaders, conversations are very frequent – but who taught you how to hold them effectively? No-one probably.

Despite the amount of talking we do, we are still largely unaware of what makes one conversation more effective than another. Unlike other areas of leadership, we have relatively few models for making conversations work.

And yet, at the heart of every human endeavour, we engage in conversations in order to create value. We talk in order to know what to do and how to do it well, to resolve issues, build relationships, make agreements, take decisions and accelerate progress.

Leaders have an effect in these conversations. Simply, you make us want to do either more or less for you.

So, if you want to lead, you have to be good at conversation. That’s why I think it is the third power of persuasion.

But what makes a conversation ‘effective’? Here’s a definition:

An effective conversation creates high and long lasting value for the people involved.

This definition has many applications. It underpins:

• Negotiating and selling
• Agreeing work objectives
• Managing change
• Giving performance feedback
• Building strategic partnerships
• Being a business partner

At the core of an effective conversation is an offer and exchange of relevant and lasting value. But if that’s the defining ingredient of good conversation, the defining moment of persuasion lies in the leader doing what they said they would do to make the transaction complete.

In conversation, your power of persuasion is created as much in what you say as it is what you do when the talking stops. 

Here’s a general framework for authoring effective conversations:

Actions for Authoring Effective Conversations

 

Choose a good moment A time and place when they will be open and receptive.

Know what matters to them Show you know or find out what matters to them, in their language.

Secure their interest Link what matters to them to your idea, suggestion or plan.

Offer something valuable Offer something relevant and beneficial, as they see it.

Make sense of it together Improve understanding of its value for everyone involved.

Clarify the transaction Clarify what you will do to realise value for each other.

Agree what to do Agree the steps in making the transaction work.

Do what you agreed to do THIS IS CRITICAL. As a leader, what you do now authors 1) their trust in you and therefore 2) your further ability to influence, persuade and lead successfully.

Stay in touch and follow up Choose your moment to check the value exchange was satisfactory and sustain it.

Leaders have always had to be good at making conversation. But as with all our human skills, the time has now come for us to be more conscious of this one.

Bringing it Together

This article highlights three things leaders can do to improve their power of persuasion:

·         The wisdom of rhetoric

·         The metaphor of story-making

·         The conscientious structuring of

   effective conversations.

Our ability to use language well is a defining leadership skill. For this reason, I think there is something useful in seeing leadership as authorship.

It’s not familiar to talk of leadership in this way. It’s strange because we are not used to standing back and critically examining the words we use and the conversations we hold in the style of a good, self-reflective practitioner.

But perhaps we should be?

Tim Coburn

October, 2010

 

 

 

Copyright © 2010, Tim Coburn

All Rights Reserved

 

References

 

David Carr, Time, Narrative and History, Indiana University Press, 1986

 

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A study in moral theory, Duckworth, 1985

 

 

About the Author

Tim Coburn is a leadership consultant with a special interest in the link between intrinsic motivation and performance at work, at school and in the community.

 

Earlier in his career, he worked for 20 years with hundreds of leaders in four exceptional organisations: the BBC, Motorola, Rolls-Royce and Kenya Airways where he held senior, global roles in leadership development, talent management, OD and learning and development.

 

He provides leadership development services through his company, Flourish Ltd.