204. Influence vs Manipulation: Finding the Balance in Leadership with Mick Spiers

Discover the fine art of influence and persuasion in leadership with insights from Adele Gambadella, a savvy crisis communications expert, and Chip Massey, a former FBI hostage negotiator. 

Imagine guiding others with such finesse that it inspires action without slipping into manipulation. 

This episode sheds light on how leaders can align motivations for the collective good, harness the power of emotions and identity, and master the crucial skill of forensic listening to truly understand and connect with others. You'll walk away with practical strategies for finding common ground and ensuring those around you feel genuinely heard and valued.

Chapters

• 0:00 Influence and Persuasion in Leadership
• 12:52 Leadership Project Subscription and Appreciation

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

What does it mean to convince someone? How do we influence and persuade without it feeling like manipulation? In today's episode of The Leadership Project, I unpack my own personal learnings from the amazing interview with Adele Gambardella and Chip Massey of the convincing company and their groundbreaking book convinced me. Adele is an expert in crisis communications, and chip is an ex FBI hostage negotiator. I finish the show today with my own leadership reflections from the week. Influence and persuasion is at the heart of leadership, but there is a danger of it bordering on manipulation, or being perceived as being manipulative. The art of leadership is to inspire people into meaningful action around a worthy cause because they want to do it, not because they were told to do it. This means we need to harness the power of influence and persuasion, but as soon as it feels like manipulation, people will feel they are being coerced into doing something that they don't want to do, and they will dig in their heels. Paradoxically, you will make it even less likely that they will take action. So the first thing you need to do is check your motivations. Are you trying to convince someone to do something that's in your benefit, or is it for the greater good? Is it for the good of the team? Is it in the bestinterest of the person you are trying to persuade? As Teddy Roosevelt famously said, people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. They want to know that you have their back. They want to know that what you're asking them to do is good for them, and not just in your own self interest. As soon as they start second guessing your motivations, you will start going backwards the interview this week with Adele gambadella And Chip Massey was amazing. Adele is an expert in crisis communications and being able to persuade masses of people around a certain course of action, particularly in a crisis and Chip Massey is an ex FBI hostage negotiator where the stakes are really high when he's looking to convince someone into a course of action that may not be what they actually set outto do. They shared so many tips on how we can do this. The first one was really interesting. Find common ground, find something you can agree on and work from there. Quite often, in a project situation or a negotiation, there is more common ground than there is difference. But we need to explore that common ground and to find it, to show that in the end, maybe everyone has the same common goal. It is best not to assume what someone else wants. This can go horribly wrong if you miss the mark. So my recommendation here is to start with curiosity. Youcan ask questions like, tell me, what does success look like for you, what is most important to you, and what makes that important? And we keep asking these questions to ensure that you uncover what is truly on the person's mind. It might even be a question like, What would you like to see happen. And what you're doing is you're collecting this inventory of understanding what the other person is looking for. As Stephen Covey famous says, Seek, first to understand and then to be understood, to make sure that you're getting everything you might even say, is there anything else? Because they might be building up the courage to tell you what's really on their mind, what's playing on their mind, what is it that they're looking for out of this engagement that you're trying to have with them at this moment, it's also really important to play it back to them. I'm hearing that this point is really important to you. Am I getting that right? So confirm that you understand what is going on. You might also explore boundaries. Is there anything that is off limits for you? What are your must haves? What are your must not haves? So that you truly understand what ground you're working on. From all of this line of inquiry, you're going to find many sources of common ground that you can work from once the person then feels truly heard, seen and valued, they are then significant. Elegantly, more ready to hear about your needs and what you would like to see happen. So I've spent a lot of time collecting their thoughts, their needs, what's on their mind. Now we're ready to play and put on the table the things that we would like to see, but we can do so in a way that shows that what we want is actually quite congruent with what they want. And you can find that common ground and work from there. Of course, there's going to be points of difference, but now you've got some common ground to work from, and there's going to be easier to start, because you've already built some momentum from achieving that common ground, the next key learning from chip and Adele was to never underestimate the power of emotion. People are generally emotional decision makers that justify things rationally. This includes emotions surrounding their identity and how they see themselves in their head, in their own inner narrative. The whole time that they're discussing with you, they're asking themselves questions. If I say yes to this, what will it say about me? What will others think of me? How will I explain this to others in a way that is congruent with the story I tell myself about myself? Don't underestimate the power of emotion and don't underestimate the power of identity and ego. When someone is making a decision as to whether they're going to follow your course of action, this thing that you're trying to influence and persuade them around, they're going to ask themselves a lot of questions about what it means about them. Finally, we explored the concept of forensic listening, and you can do this either in real time, if you get very clever at it, or it might be to unpack the conversation afterwards, to look for clues, looking for what is not said as well as what is said, looking at how it was said and what language was used. These clues and breadcrumbs can include all kinds of things, including body language, their tone of voice, their intonation. Did they get completely agitated or excited at a certain point? Did they show disinterest at other points of the conversation? These are all signals and clues as to what is most important to them. Their choice of language is another key signal. Are there words showing conviction on certain points but more flexibility on other points? From here, we can unpack our curiosity again. You are saying that you cannot do this under the current circumstances. You can reframe that into a question, under what circumstances would you do this? Or what about these circumstances is holding you back? Once we have them talking, we use our curiosity to make sure that we're forensically finding what is really most important to them. Once we know what is important to them. This is where we can start influencing and persuading. The key threads in all of this is that influence and persuasion is not about you, it's about the other person. Use curiosity to understand them. Find the common ground. Look for the key signs that forensic listening, and then you can propose actions or solutions that achieve your goal at the same time as keeping them whole, including their identity and how they see themselves. If you haven't yet caught the full interview with Adele and Chip, I do encourage you to go back to episode 203, there are many more tips in here. I just wanted to share with you my key takeaways from that discussion. Now onto my self reflections of the week. For anyone that is new to the show, I've asked myself the same five questions every day for the past 11 years, and they are what went well today. What didn't go well? What would I do differently? What did I learn about myself and what did I learn about others on this weekly solo cast, I also then reflect on some of my weekly reflections that have come from that process. So what went well this week, time with Thomas, my son, and the time was very precious when I was fully present and he had my full attention and focus. What didn't go well? Well, guess what? It. Go well every day when things got quite busy, and say, and I, my wife, didn't spend time with him and we were not fully present, we noticed that his behavior shifts noticeably. So what would I do differently? The key points is to carve out that time. To carve out the time to be there and to be feel fully present, to put your phone away and to make sure that he feels that the most important person in the world at that very moment is him, and that's you can see the joy and the pleasure on his face when he knows that we're fully present with him, what did I learn about myself? Well, multitasking really doesn't work. My focus and presence is the superpower that enables me to have great relationships and to achieve more. You can put this into the work context, not just with Thomas and being at home. It's also when you're on that teams call. When you're on a teams call, are you fully focused? Is your camera on? Are you looking down the barrel of the camera? Are you paying attention to the other people? Are you noticing their body language? Even on a teams call so you can notice the shifts in energy, the shifts in attention. If you're fully present and you're fully paying attention, you notice so much more, and you can make better decisions, and then the other person notices. What did I learn about others? People soon notice when you are not fully present, and you'll notice their behavior shift. If they feel it you're not really listening to them, they drift and they start disengaging. So for those that are in the workplace and you're on these virtual meetings, or it could be face to face meetings, put your phones away, look the other person in the eye, show them that you're truly present, and then from that presence, you can have a deeper understanding as to what's really going on. You can make better decisions, and you can make the other person feel seen, feel heard, and feel that they're valued. So all of my self reflections this week were about presence and whether I'm distracted by other things on my mind, if I'm still thinking about the last meeting that I had when I'm having this meeting, all of these things are intentional, things that I'm working to get better at. Okay, that's it for this week on The Leadership Project. Thank you so much. If you are getting great value from our content, we would love it. If you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcast or your preferred podcast service. You can also subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel for our weekly videos, video podcast and our live stream shows. I also encourage you to subscribe to our weekly newsletter by going to mickpiers.com where we share a weekly newsletter of some of the most important leadership lessons we're learning from our guests, but also from the broader world of leadership. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care. Look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.