Review: “Influencer” by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler

“Influencer” is one of the books that I was recommended at PayPal. At first, the title reminded me of the “Little Finger” character in Game of Thrones, and I took the recommendation with a grain of salt thinking that it applies more to the big corporations with their internal dynamics and politics. However, the book is about changing the undesired behavior in general and being an effective change agent — one of the important skills for any leader. The authors provide a well-structured framework on approaching a behavior change in the same way as they did in “Crucial conversation”.

Summary

The authors suggest the three keys to influence based on their research.

Focus and measure — you need to be crystal clear about the results that you want to achieve and be disciplined to measure your progress.

The most common early mistakes that an influence can make are:

1. Fuzzy, uncompelling goals (vague goals — “empower our employees”, “build the team”)
2. Infrequent or no measures
3. Bad measure — drive wrong behavior by measuring the wrong variable.

For example, your goal is to increase innovation at the company. The obvious measure is the number of new product proposals per quarter. To understand the reasons behind the lack of innovative ideas, you gather feedback from the employees and conclude that people don’t speak up because they are afraid to be ridiculed or punished. In that case, measuring the number of product proposals alone is insufficient to provide sufficient feedback for that problem. Therefore, you should also measure the number of instances when people speak up. One way to implement the change would be to provide training to the employees on how to share their opinions to be heard and how to make it safe for others to do the same. The combined measures will help guide the change efforts.

Find vital behaviors — focus on high-leverage behaviors that drive results (2–3 max that produces the most amount of change)

Delancey Street Foundation is a great example that the authors use throughout the book. The foundation is focused on helping ex-convicts and ex-addicts reintegrate back into society. It runs with no staff and no funding. One of the core challenges they face is to overcome the gang culture mindset — “care only about yourself” and “don’t be a rat”. So the foundation focuses on two vital behaviors:

• each person is required to take responsibility for someone else’s success
• everyone confronts everyone else about every single violation or concern

Those two high-leverage behaviors facilitate the change that helps the residents of the Delancey foundation to start a new life.

There are four strategies to search for vital behaviors:

• notice the obvious — obvious but underused behaviors
• look for crucial moments — find times when behavior puts success at risk
• learn from positive deviants — distinguish behaviors that set apart positive deviants (people who act as desired in the crucial moments)
• spot culture busters — find behaviors that reverse the required behavior

Engage all six sources of influence — the key is to overdetermine the change

All forces that have an impact on human behavior work on only two basic drivers of behavior: “Can I do what’s required?” and “Will it be worth it?”.

The six sources of influence are defined based on the combination of two basic drivers (motivation and ability ) and three dimensions (personal, social, structural). Each source of influence answers a specific question:

1. Personal motivation — do they enjoy it?
2. Personal ability — can they do it?
3. Social motivation — do others encourage them to enact the wrong behavior?
4. Social ability — do others enable them?
5. Structural motivation — do rewards and sanctions motivate them?
6. Structural ability — does their environment enable them?

One of the key messages in the book is that many times people are trying to bring simple solutions to a complex behavioral challenge and it seldom works. To be successful, the influencer has to use as many forces as possible to change the behavior successfully.

To avoid sounding superficial and detached from the actual life, the book explores all of these concepts through a series of real-life behavior changes such as — eradicating the guinea worm disease, stopping AIDs in Thailand, running the best customer service in the restaurant, and many others.

My opinion

I posted a few reviews recently on the books that complement the “Influencer” really well. The “Atomic Habit” covers all six sources of influence with the focus on personal change. The “Crucial conversations” can help with mastering the third source of influence. One of the keys to enable the social source of influence is to create an open culture where people speak up about problems and hold each other accountable. It is tough to achieve that unless you have a good communication framework and encourage a proper culture to support it.

The sixth source of influence is one of the best ways to change the behavior as the environment itself either fully removes the questionable behavior or makes it hard to happen. For example, CI/CD pipeline runs multiple checks on the PR request to verify the quality of the change (code compilation, unit tests coverage, integration testing, code style, etc.). It establishes an environment that strictly enforces certain practices that help catch issues earlier in the integration/deployment process.

Verdict

Highly recommended for anyone looking to introduce a change either in the organization or in personal life