The Influential Leader July 31, 2009, 11:45AM EST

Joseph Grenny: Increase Your Influence Tenfold

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We need to turn all six sources of influence in favor of the desired behaviors in such a way that these actions become the path of least resistance.

But before you can make change inevitable, you have to discover why change seems impossible. You have to learn to recognize all the sources of influence that are aligned against your intended change.

For example, let's look more carefully at why seasoned executives would so predictably engage in petty politics during a high-stakes budget process. A careful study of their behavior reveals how each of the six sources of influence are involved.

1. Personal Motivation For 358 days of the year senior executives feel morally obligated to their functions—the people they work with and care about. It's no surprise that the moral inertia they bring to the seven-day conversation about enterprise budgets keeps them oriented toward the needs of those they are most deeply connected to.

2. Personal Ability These executives have been highly trained to think about investments in their area of functional expertise. They have little experience or education in the financial trade-offs and opportunities available in other areas.

3. Social Motivation Human beings crave approval. These executives experience more praise and pressure regarding achievements in their functional areas than for any lofty enterprise-level concerns. A few nudges from the CEO about transcending their silo are a paltry assault on the tsunami of social pressure they get from their functional employees and yes, even the CEO, for "hitting it out of the park" in their own area.

4. Social Ability The executive team did little to enable one another to question, challenge, or contribute to teammates' plans. They were slow to answer each others' questions and they spent little time together in creative development.

5. Structural Motivation Ninety percent of each executives' incentive pay is tied to functional goals. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

6. Structural Ability Our physical environment doesn't just motivate, it enables. To understand an executive's behavior, you need only look at what information and relationships are most enabled by his or her surroundings. These executives' offices were located with their functional teams. Ninety-nine percent of their time was spent with those in their divisions. If they did make contact with those from other departments, it was usually because they got off the elevator on the wrong floor. Likewise, the reports and meetings that dominated their mind-share focused them downward, not upward.

Notice how much more seriously we can begin to think about influence when we acknowledge the reality of all of the sources of influence aligned behind the status quo. And notice how silly it would be for a CEO to give a motivational speech at the beginning of an annual budget process and assume this meager source of influence would succeed in the face of an onslaught of contradictory sources.

Last week, during a scouting river trip, my son coaxed me into the canoe and challenged me to paddle upstream. After 15 minutes I was exhausted. I turned around to see we had made it less than 200 yards upstream. I lay my paddle across the gunwales and in seconds we were back where we started.

The first step to substantially increasing your influence is to stop paddling upstream. Until we get all six of these sources of influence flowing in the direction of change, we'll continue to not only fail, but even more damaging, pin the failure on moral deficiencies rather than mental proficiency—an insufficient understanding of human behavior.

Joseph Grenny is the co-author of three immediate New York Times bestsellers: Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations. He is cofounder of VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and organizational performance, and a consultant to the Fortune 500. Learn more about the Influential Leader at www.vitalsmarts.com/influentialleader.