Joseph Grenny: Increase Your Influence Tenfold

The key is understanding behavior. If we attribute the wrong causes to it, then attempts to change it won't be successful

By Joseph Grenny

"That's it. If they're going to act like children, I'll treat them like children."

I was sitting in the office of the CEO of a financial services company when he said this. He had asked his senior executive team to cooperatively develop a capital spending plan for the coming year. He had challenged his team to take off their functional hats and propose a plan that put the enterprise's interests above their local needs. But the budget proposal he got back called for 150% of available capital and was loaded with low-value investments more suited to building fiefs than to creating shareholder value.

The CEO's face flushed as he summarized his theory of behavior: "These guys just flat out don't care about anyone's interest but their own."

This lament was caused by the CEO's lack of influence over the behavior of his executive team. His hope was that a logical and sincere plea for change would evoke profoundly different behavior than the team had exhibited in previous years. Obviously, he was wrong. But the kind of hope and subsequent disappointment he felt is extremely common. Over the past 25 years, my colleagues and I have repeatedly heard similar laments and conclusions—and not just from businesspeople.

The "Fundamental Attribution Error"

Almost all of the chronic problems we face in business, in our personal lives, and in our communities are this same kind of problem. They are problems of influence. They are issues that will never improve until we become more effective at influencing behavior—our own and others'. And yet, in spite of the need for greater influence over persistently problematic human habits, when it comes to our most crucial behavioral challenges, few of us are competent to address them.

One of the most important reasons we lack competence is illustrated in this CEO's ultimate conclusion. Our study of influence has shown us that you can't influence behavior you don't understand. The quality of our "theory of behavior" determines the quantity of our influence. This CEO's theory was that the bad behavior he needed to change in his executive team was simply selfish interests, and his influence strategy was to "treat them like children." Like a parent sending a kid to bed early, he'd remove their authority in the budget process and take control.

One of the primary reasons for our influence failures is our naiveté about why we and others are locked in bad behavior. Most often, we commit the Fundamental Attribution Error. We decide people do what they do because they're evil (personal motivation problems), stupid (personal ability problems), or both.

Nonsense. The real drain on our influence is not simply people's bad attitudes or lack of skills (although these can play a part); it's our ignorance of the complex causes of human behavior.

We live in a quick-fix world where leaders look for silver bullets to solve complex problems. We want a single influence trick to stop chronic bad behavior and replace it with behavior that improves quality or causes customers to gush with appreciation. Unfortunately, quick fixes don't work because bad behaviors rarely have a single cause; usually there is a conspiracy of causes.

When you don't develop an influence strategy as robust as the multiple sources of influence that cause today's bad behavior, you'll fail to generate real and lasting change tomorrow.

The Six Sources of Influence

Our research points to six unique sources of influence that account for both successes and failures. We've found that when people use four or more of these sources of influence in combination, they are 10 times more likely to produce profound, rapid, and sustainable change in behavior. Whether you're attempting to change a personal habit (like contributing more to your 401(k) (than to Gucci) or alter entrenched organizational habits (such as silo-oriented budgeting practices), attending to all of these sources of influence is key to your success.

So what do we have to do in order to gain a tenfold increase in our influence? We have to overdetermine change.

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