Note: This resource is part of our Moving the Bar in Your Career and Your Life, a unique approach to professional development series: My 3 Ps: Passion, Purpose, Potential. Click here to see the entire series.
This book very effectively demonstrates that everyone has the capability for significant change, outlines just what it takes to change, and provides practical and incredible case studies that have literally made the world we live in a much better place.
Influencer presents readers with the tools they need to solve ongoing problems and make positive, systemic changes in their business lives, their personal lives and globally by implementing proven influence strategies. If you want to make change inevitable, you need to know how to motivate and enable the right behaviors – not just alter the processes, technology, or the organizational structure.
The real success behind any change effort is knowing which sources of influence most affect people’s behaviors: 1) values, 2) skills, 3) support, 4) teamwork, 5) incentives, or 6) the environment. The authors contend that it is not the strategies in-and-of themselves that make the difference, it is how many of the strategies you choose to employ at one time; the more strategies, the more successful the odds of changing the behavior.
Influencer provides readers with the knowledge to successfully pinpoint and affect these six sources of influence in order to achieve profound results and solve even the most resistant problems:
1. Personal Motivation – overcome reluctance and resistance;
2. Personal Ability – learning to master necessary skills for success;
3. Social Motivation – enlist the help of others;
4. Social Ability – teamwork;
5. Structural Motivation – reward yourself early;
6. Structural Ability – surround yourself with supportive physical environments.
These strategies are rooted in the following three principles:
1. Identify a handful of vital behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change. Changing resistant, persistent, and profound problems requires a precise focus on a few high leverage, or vital, behaviors.
2. Use personal and vicarious experience to change minds. Changing behavior requires changing minds. Personal and vicarious experience allows people to see, hear, and feel that behavior changes are needed.
3. Marshall the six sources of influence (above) by utilizing every possible source of influence.
As the authors write, "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."