Leadership: Intentional Influence

Plenty of today's crises are the natural consequence of company leaders' ineffective or misdirected influence on workforce behavior

By Joseph Grenny

It's ironic that when you ask leaders—even good ones—what constitutes leadership, you often get vague, disparate, and vapid responses. You'd think that of all people, this population would offer crisp and concrete definitions of their own crucial work. Instead, you get references to energizing, visioning, pathfinding, modeling, and a dozen other tangents of real leadership—but almost no reference to the central task of leaders: influencing.

This is especially disconcerting in an era where Fortune 500 companies are crumbling under the weight of financial strain and once powerful and confident leaders are crawling to Washington begging for bailouts. The vast majority of today's crises are the natural consequence of ineffective or misdirected influence. Either leaders have been incapable of influencing their employees to create value for customers (e.g. the U.S. auto industry), or they've exerted influence that has driven employees to unconscionable behavior bringing the global economy to its knees (i.e. the financial sector). Today more than ever, we ought to see clearly that leadership isn't a combination of fuzzy concepts and proclivities. Leaders are responsible for intelligently and ethically influencing behavior in a way that creates value.

Fortunately, not all leaders are missing the mark. I recently met one of the few leaders who, in my experience, has a concrete expression of leadership on the tip of his tongue. Tim Tassopoulos, chief operating officer of Chik-fil-A, says it this way: Leadership is intentional influence.

I couldn't agree more. For 20 years my colleagues and I have worked with leaders to help them increase their capacity for influencing change. But it came as a surprise to us that prior to helping them learn how to influence, we had to draw their attention to it as their core work.

Tim, on the other hand, understands that it all comes down to whether one of his 50,000 front-line associates with a few discretionary minutes decides to lean against a wall or walk out to the dining area and clean tables. Tim's success or failure as a leader does not come down to whether he is charismatic, visionary, or inspirational. It comes down to whether, at the end of the day, people behave in ways that improve results. Period.

With that said, the second biggest problem leaders face is that few of them have any systematic way of even thinking about—much less practicing—influence. Oh, we complain about it a lot. All leaders can point to dysfunctional, political, unproductive behaviors in their organizations. For example:

• Fiefdoms. Most leaders complain that people in their companies put the interests of their department over the interests of the company. In one Fortune 500 company, the training department encouraged a vendor to sue another division of the company to prevent that division from cutting separate deals with the vendor, which would have threatened the training department's monopoly.

• Compliance. In U.S. hospitals, 2 million patients will be infected this year by the very caregivers who are trying to heal them. An enormous percentage of these infections could be avoided if leaders could just find a way to influence people to wash their hands consistently. Compliance rates today hover somewhere between 30% and 50%!

• Silence. More than 90% of respondents in a recent study we conducted at VitalSmarts reported they are currently working on a cross-functional initiative that they are certain will fail. Our research showed that the primary cause of these failures is silence. People see lots of problems in their initiatives, but they work in organizations where it's not O.K. to speak up about them. Our study found that this pattern of problem behavior is a root cause of more than 85% of project failures.

Given that few leaders can even define leadership, it's no surprise that their performance is mediocre at best. We recently studied the successes and failures of more than 1000 leaders from 50 global companies to influence strategically critical behavior change in their companies.

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