Real Influence

Mark Goulston: Well, John Ullmen was a real fan of my last book, "Just Listen," and he said, "you know, ‘Just Listen' is about getting through to absolutely anyone, that was the promise and it seemed to be delivered for a lot of people," and he said, "but when you get through to people you actually have to get things done." And what he said, and I agreed with, is we seem to be in a post-pushy, post-hard selling world, meaning very few people like to be pushed or hard sold and even the people who are taught to do it don't like doing it to people. And I think the reason people don't want to be pushed or hard sold is that nearly everyone has been traumatized by someone that sold them something that didn't work out and they don't want to be re-traumatized. And so what was interesting is we thought of, "well, what is the alternative to persuading people when you have to get things done?" So when we interviewed more than 100 influencers and we asked them, "who persuaded you to do anything really important?" a number of them arched their backs and said, "nobody, nobody persuaded me to do anything important." And then when we said, "who positively influenced you to become who you are?" they all had the same reaction, they all kind of paused when we met with them in person, they put their hands behind their neck and they leaned back and said, "ah, that's a different story."

Rachel Salaman: What you noticed was that influencers become gentler, if you like. It's not an obvious push, it's something much more subtle, is that what you're saying?

Mark Goulston: That's exactly where we got to, and, in fact, there have been a number of books written on influence, and some I'm really a fan of. There's a number of books written by Robert Cialdini on influence, but when we looked at them we thought they all practiced what we are calling "disconnected influence," meaning it's really not so much about influencing people, it's more about press these buttons and you will manipulate people to your point of view. It's interesting, in Bob Cialdini's book, he puts in a disclaimer saying, "now all of these buttons will work, now if you're going to take advantage of people don't use them, we only want people to use them for good," which of course made it a best seller, and a lot of the people who learn to press those buttons have no "for good" in mind.

Rachel Salaman: And your book isn't like that at all, one of the central ideas in your book is that we need to move from what you call your "here." In other words, your own here, where you are, to their "there," in other words the "there" that belongs to the other party. Where they are – quite a hard thing to explain in audio. Could you talk us through that using an example?

Mark Goulston: One of my favorite examples involves a woman named Giselle Chapman. And Giselle Chapman, years ago, was applying for a job to work for Bristol Myers Squibb as a drug rep, and so the person she interviewed with said, "you have no experience with doctors, you have no experience with hospitals, you're not right for this job." And so, in other words, he assumed that his here was, "you've got to be experienced in order to succeed in this job." So what Giselle did was she went out the next day to 10 doctors' offices and she didn't have a job with anyone, and she actually got to speak to four of the doctors and she basically said, "what do you like and dislike about drug reps?" and they told her. So she went back to this person who said, "you're not suited for the job," and she said, "well, I might not be suited for the job, but I found out some things that I thought you might be interested in." In other words, going to his there. And she said, "I went to 10 doctors' officers and spoke to four doctors and here's what they said." And the man said, "you don't work for a drug company and you went to 10 offices and you got through to four doctors and you got them to say this?" And she said, "yes." So he hired her on the spot and she became the number one drug rep in the entire company.

Rachel Salaman: That's a great story, and it really illustrates the importance of trying to understand the other person's point of view. The trouble is sometimes you don't know whether you fully understood where the other person's "there" is. How can you tell? How can you know that you fully understood them?

Mark Goulston: When you fully understand another person they become more engaged, you can feel them leaning into the conversation, you can feel that their eye contact is more on you, as opposed to distracted, and, in a sense, really what they want is to extend the conversation. When I've had this conversation with a number of the executives before they hired me, I would say there was a period in which 50 percent of those conversations that executives said to their administrator or assistant, "hold all my calls," a couple of them walked me to my car and it wasn't to get rid of me, it's that they wanted to have a conversation in which they felt understood, because sadly in modern life we're in such a rush. When you ask people, "how many people do you think really understand you?" sadly the majority of people will say, "I don't think anybody." And the oddest ones will say (and that includes me), "I don't understand myself."

Rachel Salaman: If you do manage to make this move completely from your own position, your "here," over to the other person's position, their "there," how are you doing any influencing, how does influence work in that situation?

Mark Goulston: Well, I think what you're going for, the way we see influence, positive connected influence, is finding a mutual goal or a mutual opportunity or a mutual possibility that you can both head towards, and what happens is you're influencing them to join you, or you're even influencing yourself to join them to create something much better.

Rachel Salaman: But in the book you talk about four human nature traps that get in the way of what you've been calling "connected influence," can you talk us through those?

Mark Goulston: Well, by human nature traps we mean these are human tendencies and they are hard wired into us, and the first one is our fight or flight response, meaning that when we feel threatened or when we feel aggravated, something inside our middle brain (which I talked about in my last book, "Just Listen"), which is something called the "amygdala," and anyone who knows about neuroscience or neuro leadership knows that the amygdala is part of our emotional brain and it can hijack us in a way from thinking rationally. And one of the things we do in fight or flight, and what we've come up with, is an acronym called "PUSH," which is counterproductive. And "P" stands for when you "press" your case too hard. "U" is when you "understate" all the options in your own favor, meaning you're really stuck in you're here. "S" is you have a "short-term focus," you go for just winning the business for today, even if you alienate the other person. And the "H" is you "hassle" the other person, you get into a discussion, it's not going in the direction you want and you get into a fight, so that's fight or flight. The next human nature trap is habit handicap; we get into certain habits – and it's tough to break habits – and that can often cause us to push back anyone who is trying to have us do something that would cause us to have to rethink something which we don't want. The third is what we call error blindness, meaning sometimes we will keep doing the same thing. What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, so we will often stay stuck in an error that's not working but we will just keep trying to believe it will work. And the final thing is what we call the double curse of knowledge, and the double curse of knowledge means that when we think we know something we tend to tune out anything that is against that. I would say the real double curse of knowledge is we can often come off as know-it-alls, and know-it-alls go along with our view that pushiness is no longer an option and hard selling is no longer an option, and often pushy and hard selling people have a tendency to sound like know it alls and they often trigger negative reactions in other people.

Rachel Salaman: Great, so those are the human nature traps, and as a counterbalance your book outlines four steps that will help people master connected influence. The first of these you call, "go for great outcomes" – so how does this build influence?

Mark Goulston: Imagine you're in a transactional conversation, and when you're in a transactional conversation hopefully it's going along, the person is meeting with you because they want to do a transaction, but there's nothing special about that. The danger of purely transactional conversation is you might get a sale, but you're going to be commoditized, meaning they're going to try and get the most from you for the least. Whereas a great outcome, if that's just where the person wants to be, which is to get the sale or make the sale, it's talking about where they could be, and when you can find that out in the conversation. What will happen is people break eye contact, they look up to the ceiling to think about something that's very tantalizing and they will often smile when they discover what that is, and when they look back at you it's no longer a transactional conversation. So, an example of a great outcome is when JFK in the ‘60s said to the aerospace industry, because we were lagging behind the Russians who had gotten satellites up first, he said, "we're going to put people on the moon and get them safely back to the earth by the end of the decade." And what happened is these cowboy aerospace engineers who aren't known for their co-operation, suddenly stopped in their tracks and thought, "this is H.G. Wells, this is the adventure of a lifetime, this is what I'm going to tell my grandchildren," and so what happened is that amazing outcome pulled everyone together, and it not only influenced those people, it influenced the world to wonder if we could actually put people on the moon.

Rachel Salaman: The second step is listen past your blind spot. What do you mean by blind spot in the context of influencing?

Mark Goulston: Imagine that you're driving down a highway and you check your rear view mirrors, you go to move to another lane and then you nearly kill a motorcyclist, and you didn't see the motorcyclist because you had a blind spot, and a lot of times we have the same blind spots, we just don't see the other person and we can sometimes hurt the other people. Also, I think one of the blind spots is that after we've been generous with another person and we've created a great outcome we often tend to say, "well, we've got to get something out of this." And sometimes after someone has lowered their guard and opened themselves up to you there's a human tendency to want to sell them or up sell them, and people will experience that as a bait and switch, and if you have been successful in getting someone to lower their guard and open themselves up to you and then you try and sell them something they're going to treat you worse, they're going to say, "OK, there you go, you're just like everyone, here I thought we were going to do something special and you're just as manipulative as everyone else."

Rachel Salaman: So what happens if you really do want to sell someone something, you mean it in the best possible way, should you still hold back so that you don't alienate the person?

Mark Goulston: I don't think you should enter any conversation with your people or with customers or clients unless you really thought about how whatever you're trying to influence them about is at least as much in their best interest as yours. Now you can say, "well, I don't care about that" – then our book isn't for you, and what will happen is maybe you will be short-term successful, but as we said, we think the world is shifting away from people who go for the short term and they don't care about the relationship.

Rachel Salaman: You talked there about the importance of listening, and in the book you outline four levels of listening, what are they?

Mark Goulston: The four levels of listening are: you can listen over someone, and we call that "avoidance listening." And what that means is you're with someone and you're not even making eye contact, you're going, "aha, aha." You're at a networking thing and it looks like you're looking for something better than the person you're speaking to, and it's really quite offensive, and by the way it's something that pretty common in a lot of marriages, and you do that long enough that marriage is going to end in divorce, so we call that avoidance listening. The second is: "listening at someone," and that's when you're really not listening at all, you're being defensive and so you get into a defensive conversation and you're really not listening, you're becoming defensive and you go on the offensive. The third level is listening to people, and that's "problem-solving listening," and that's business as usual, that's the worst way you should listen, over listening is just going to drive people away, and that's problem solving listening. The problem with problem solving listening is you don't distinguish yourself from anyone else, again you will then be commoditized, so people will nod but really but what they're going to wonder is what they can squeeze out of you, what's the most they can get out of you for the least, and what you really want to practice is what we call listening into people, and when you listen into people it's what we call connective listening, and when you do that you really have a great advantage of moving this from a transaction into a successful relationship, successful whether you're trying to lead people, successful whether you're trying to sell people, and it's really much better than the other three levels.

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Rachel Salaman: Intriguingly you say that in order to influence you need to be influenceable, could you explain that?

Mark Goulston: If you've never been influenced by a caring parent, teacher, coach, or mentor, it's much more difficult to know what it is, but if you've had the good fortune to be influenced by someone like that and also remember how it was life changing, it will make it much more easy to pay it forward. In fact, one of the surveys we've asked in the past year, we've set this out on the internet and we've done this in webinars, we asked people, "what would be the effect on your people in terms of productivity, loyalty, perseverance, if you could do unto them what someone did unto you?" Who influenced you by standing up for you when you couldn't, standing by you in a crisis and not letting you fail, and standing up to you in private to push you to do something you didn't think you could do, but they thought you could and you did it, or to stop you from doing something foolish, what would be the effect on people if you paid that forward, and in our surveys we have never had anything less than huge as an answer, little or moderate or huge, it's been 100 percent huge.

Rachel Salaman: So the third step in mastering connected influence is engage them in their there, in the metaphorical place or state of mind that the other person is in, and this is where you talk about the three "gets" of engage, could you explain what these are?

Mark Goulston: The first get is when you "get it," meaning the situation that they're in. The second get is you "get them," you get where they are in that situation. And the third get is "getting a possibility" of where they could be, which again is something way beyond where they just want to get to. So, with that I want to bring up a quick example of this person I know who sold his company, it's a medical products company, to a huge pharmaceutical company, and what he was telling me is that the CEO of this huge pharmaceutical company called him and said, "you know we've been thinking of doing something with your company, why don't you come and visit us in New York and let's talk about it." So my friend said, "well you're the one with the corporate jet, why don't you fly and visit me in Orange County, California?" And so the CEO of this big company flew to Orange County and met with this friend of mine, and what happened is the CEO of this huge company didn't mention anything about the company, what he did mention was where my friend's company was, the situation, where my friend was in his career, namely he was in his early ‘50s and he would like an infusion of money to grow it, would not like someone to control how he grew it, would like a good stock price and would like a thought out way in which if he wanted to exit to other things he could. And so what happened is that the CEO of that large company got it, got the situation, they got my friend where he was in it, and they got where he wanted and could be beyond there, and so I said to my friend what did you do and he said what could I do, I sold him the company.

Rachel Salaman: The fourth step in connective influence is when you've done enough, do more, and this is where we hear about the three so-called value channels which you label the insight channel, the emotional channel and the practical channel. Could you talk us through an example that illustrates this idea?

Mark Goulston: I'm going to get a tad emotional but hopefully I'll stay focused, my greatest accomplishment in life, probably professionally, maybe personally and I don't know anyone who has ever done this, is I dropped out of medical school twice and finished, and I don't know anyone who has done that. And I didn't drop out to see the world, I dropped out because my mind stopped working, I dropped out, took a leave of absence, worked at blue collar jobs, came back and then my mind stopped working again, and so I asked for another leave of absence. And the medical school wanted to kick me out, they asked for me to withdraw, but there was a leader of students, Bill McNary, who pulled me aside (and this was a low point of my life), and the insight he gave me was you may not understand this but your kindness and goodness is worth something even though you think you're worth nothing, and the world needs it and will one day need you. And that was an amazing insight when I was at a low point of my life, and the emotional is that I think he sensed something in me and in the conversation I was tearing up and I'm pretty close to that now, and he said, "look at me, Mark," and I looked at him and he said, "you deserve to be on this planet, do you understand me?" And I didn't think he was lying to me, and I can feel it right now Rachel, right in my stomach and in my cheek bones, and the practical, he said, "you won't know how important kindness and goodness is until you're 35, but you have to make it to 35," and so the practical was, "do whatever it takes to make it to 35 and you will realize that the world will value this." And he was absolutely right. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until I was rounding 60, so I'm really pedaling to the metal now trying to deliver that in this community that I co-founded called Heartfelt Leadership.

Rachel Salaman: You talk in the book actually about the positive effect of gratitude. It's a very interesting passage; you point out how that makes people feel so much better if they can express their gratitude or feel it. How does it actually help with influence?

Mark Goulston: What's really interesting is when you are grateful to someone, completely grateful, and we do leadership training in which that's the main thing we get people to focus on and telling stories of gratitude. When we do that, and we have people talk about someone who stood up for them, by them and to them, to make them better, about of a third of the room is crying with gratitude. And here's what's fascinating, is when you feel grateful nothing is missing in your life at that moment and nothing hurts, what's really transformational is we'll select a person who seems to be crying the most because they're just so grateful, and we will have that person share their story and then we'll ask that person, "do you have any pain in your body, your neck, leg, back, head?" and they'll say, "oh yes, I've had chronic back pain," and we say, "can you feel it right now?" and nobody can feel physical pain. And I think what it is, is that when you're in a state of complete gratitude there's an outpouring of endorphins, but it's fascinating to do that. So, I think why, when you do feel grateful, you come from your least needy, your least desperate and your least offensive and your most generous and your most positive place.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that sometimes pushing other people's buttons can help you influence them. How does that work, and isn't it a bit risky?

Mark Goulston: Well, it's always a little bit risky, but I think the best way to push buttons is to actually put into words the negative thoughts that people are having towards you. It's not that difficult, all you have to say is, "if I was them, why would I be skeptical or negative towards me?" So I recently was asked to do two talks at a conference, and on the second talk, it was early on the Saturday morning and I think at least half the room was hung-over from staying out late, and what I said to them is, "I was going to do something inspiring, but it's 7.30 in the morning on Saturday, I can see in some of you that you were out till two in the morning, so here's what I was thinking, if I was you," I was pushing their buttons, "if I was you on Saturday morning I wouldn't want to hear from an expert outside your industry, what I'd really want to hear from is, I'd like to get my biggest concerns and challenges and opportunities out into the room and have the smartest person in the room who has solved them give me an answer, one of my peers. So what I've done is I've thrown away my presentation, I threw it away 15 minutes ago, and what I'd like you to do is write down what those biggest challenges, opportunities, whatever you want, and I'll collect them. There'll be five minutes of silence and I will read them and we're going to get the best answers from the smartest people in the room, and by the way if you happen to be one of those people who gives a great answer it's going to make your convention easy because people from this room are going to come up to you and they're going to want to find out what else you know because you were so smart answering this, so let's do that." So that kind of pressed their buttons when I said, "the last person you actually want to hear from is me."

Rachel Salaman: How did that go? Did you get some good answers?

Mark Goulston: Oh it was terrific, not only was it terrific, it took all the stress out of me because what I realized is it really is true that people don't really have much bandwidth in their head for new stuff, but everyone has problems, challenges, and opportunities, and what they really want is to get the best answers from someone like them who has solved them, and they'd much rather hear that. Now the problem is when you have a meeting or a convention, you've got to have a speaker out there, because if you said, "700 of us are going to go have a meeting, have breakfast and talk about stuff," you need someone like me to be a place marker, but what I realized is they didn't want to hear from me, they wanted to hear from each other.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned earlier a new venture which was Heartfelt Leadership, could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Mark Goulston: A partner of mine, Deb Boelkes who is the CEO of two organizations, Business World Rising and Business Women Rising, we got together after she attended one of my keynotes, and we came to the conclusion that we need more leaders that dare to care and we don't mean it in just the soft way, because Heartfelt doesn't mean soft, the heart of a champion is what makes a champion much stronger than a winner, but our mission is daring to care even when the world tells you you're a fool if you do. And what we're going to do is expand it to events around the world in which we gather the most heartfelt leaders and successful leaders, they have to be successful, they can't just be nice people, and then we're going to have gatherings around the world and have those people speak and share their story of becoming heartfelt, and then we're going to have an international summit, bring them together and then have them support each other so that they can go back to each of their countries and continents and infuse the world with daring to care.

Rachel Salaman: And people can keep track of this at heartfeltleadership.com, is that right?

Mark Goulston: Yes, I hope they will join us and check us out.

Rachel Salaman: Well we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation, what one or two key ideas would you like people to take away with them today, what are the key points for you?

Mark Goulston: I think a key take away is be mindful of those moments when you're really tempted to push and up sell someone, because the other person is really expecting you to do that and they're about to put their guard up, and at that moment if you can feel, "ooh, I'm about to push them so hard," what you should do instead is stop, pause, and ask questions to have them go deeper. Instead of giving someone a solution or instead of selling someone, pick out the most important or emotionally charged phrase they said and say, "say more." And when they say more, after that say, "really?" and they'll go deeper. And one of the final things that really helps people and helps you influence them is what we call, "taking it to the ICU." So after people have said more and gone deeper, and ICU stands for "important, critical, and urgent," and if you were to say to the other person, "of all the things we've spoken about today…" and I think maybe you were maybe asking me that on this final question, "what's the most important thing that we've talked about and why that?" and then listen to the other person and they'll say, "hmm," and "what's the most critical thing to your success for this year about your company and yourself, and why that?" And the final thing is, "what's the most urgent thing that really you need to take care of today, or you should have taken care of a week ago and why that?" and then listen for that. Then, whatever the most urgent thing is, you help them in it, you follow up within 24 hours, and that will be highly influential because what you've done is you've had them open up as you listened and had them go deeper, you learned about a great opportunity or something risky coming their way, and then you brought it to a focus in terms of what was important, critical and urgent for them, you really got to their there, and then if you can be of service that relationship will be a relationship, it won't be a transaction.

Rachel Salaman: Mark Goulston thanks very much for joining us.

Mark Goulston: It's been my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Mark's book again is "Real Influence: Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In," and it's co-written with John Ullmen. You can find out more about it and access some useful resources at www.getrealinfluence.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.