Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Author:Daniel Goleman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

INFLUENCE

Wielding Effective Tactics for Persuasion

People with this competence

Are skilled at winning people over

Fine-tune presentations to appeal to the listener

Use complex strategies like indirect influence to build consensus and support

Orchestrate dramatic events to effectively make a point

A representative of an American company in Tokyo was taking his visiting boss to a series of meetings with their Japanese counterparts. On the way to the first meeting the representative, who spoke Japanese fluently, advised his American boss not to ask him to translate in front of the Japanese, but to rely instead on the translator. His boss readily agreed.6

Why?

“They’ll think I’m just a mouthpiece to send things back to New York. I wanted to make sure they saw me as having real power to make decisions on the spot. I wanted to be seen as the person who did most of the talking. I had the answers, not New York.”

That sensitivity to the impact of such a seemingly trivial matter bespeaks competence at influence. At the most basic level, influence and persuasion hinge on arousing specific emotions in the other person—whether that be respect for our power, passion for a project, enthusiasm for outdoing a competitor, or appropriate outrage over some unfairness.

People adept at influence are able to sense or even anticipate their audience’s reaction to their message and can effectively carry everyone along toward an intended goal. Star performers at Deloitte & Touche Consulting, for example, know that a simple good argument may not be enough to win clients over, and they have the ability to sense what kinds of other appeals will persuade key decision makers.7 Critical in these skills is being able to notice when logical arguments are falling flat and when appeals that are more emotional may add impact.

This emotional competence emerges over and over as a hallmark of superior performers, particularly among supervisors, managers, and executives.8 At every level, however, a sophisticated understanding of influence is called for. “In entry-level positions, being too highly power-driven and overly concerned with having an impact can trip you up, especially if you try to put on airs and take on the trappings of power,” Richard Boyatzis tells me. “If you were just made sales manager and you try to impress people by imposing distance or by feigning status—you start wearing expensive three-piece suits or tell subordinates to stop calling you by your first name, for example—you can alienate people.”

The stratagems used by top performers include impression management, appeals to reason and facts, dramatic arguments or actions, building coalitions and behind-the-scenes support, emphasizing key information—and on and on. For instance, one outstanding manager was put in charge of quality control at a large manufacturer. The first thing he did was to change the name to quality services, a subtle but crucial shift of emphasis: “The image I wanted to create was that it’s not just a policeman organization, but it provides technical input, too. Now we have an iron grip on tracking down quality complaints from customers, and the production people don’t get defensive right away.

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