The Trigger Chronicles

C-Suiters can no longer expect chain-of-command to be enough of an incentive for team dedication and productivity. People today must be persuaded.

Business professionals seeking to climb the corporate ladder face a wide array of obstacles and challenges… Internal candidate competition, market conditions affecting budget, difficult-to-maneuver company policy – all of this and more can trip up fast-rising stars on their way to the C-Suite. Of course, once you reach the corner office, everything is jake, right? Think again.

C-Level executives not only shouldn’t stop learning, they must continue learning even to stay where they are, according to a study consisting of 32 interviews with top talent search consultants at a global executive placement firm. What kind of skill sets should goal-oriented executives focus on? A “strong combination of technical skills and soft skills” comprises the core makeup that recruiting seeks in C-Level players.

Of special note in the survey were team-building skills, which rely on persuasive ability as one of the great building blocks of the executive skill set. Creating common ground and cooperative interaction, as well as providing motivation and inspiration, are leadership attributes that revolve around an understanding – whether instinctual or conscious – of the role the emotional brain plays in human decision and action.

This dependence on the “emotional skill set” has only grown as organizational hierarchies have become flatter. C-Suiters can no longer expect that chain-of-command is enough of an incentive for dedication and productivity. Today’s business team members need to be persuaded. Smart executives will leverage the power of emotion for persuasion and lean on an understanding of people rather than process.

According to the study, though, a natural ability for dealing with people – for emotional intelligence and emotional triggers – may not be enough. Star candidates for the C-Suite are “expected to apply an analytical lens to team management and to be familiar with best practices, as opposed to just managing by gut,” according to the HBR study. In other words, even those executives with an instinctual understanding of how to influence, motivate, and persuade would do well to categorize and quantify that knowledge and skill so as to be able to effectively transfer them to others and help build a culture of competence.

Lifelong learning is an ideal across the organization; C-Suite candidates would do well to add coaching and mentoring to the mix.

This is one of ways 7 Triggers training helps prepare those bound for the C-Suite. When the courses are brought in to an organization, there is invariably a spark of recognition by the seasoned professionals – folks who’ve been there and done that, whether in leadership, marketing, or sales.  “This is what works” is the common observation. Only, with the 7 Triggers formula it’s no longer instinct or trial-and-error. It’s a structured approach validated by science. Practical, flexible, and repeatable.

The jump from team member to team leader can be both subtle and precipitous. As a leader, it’s no longer enough to assume a collegial, cooperative stance, using good communication and conflict resolution skills. There’s an important perspective shift that involves seeing your colleagues as customers, and your ideas and vision as a value proposition. Oarsmen just need to row. Captains have to navigate – and compel the rowing direction not just at a group leader level, but with each individual participant.

As one consultant in the study said:

7 Triggers was recently engaged by a Fortune 200 company to help solve a range of challenges endured by account managers. The issues will be familiar to anyone working with teams comprised of both internal and client-side people with diverse roles and expertise levels:

How to build account momentum and drive growth without the operational authority to hold others accountable.

Everyone agreed that better influencing and persuasion skills would help. And, indeed, Influencing Without Authority was the working title for the training workshops. But skills and tools don’t just leap out of the box and start performing. One doesn’t just launch techniques on a smartphone and solve problems with a few clicks.

Influencing skills, persuasion techniques – emotional triggers – as powerful as they are, are best learned and applied toward a particular purpose, within a specific context. Selling is the easiest and most common example. But crew coalition? Team member motivation? Getting alignment and agreement across a highly diverse group of differently-motivated individuals? Not quite as obvious an application as closing a sale.

How do you set a frame and establish objectives – not to mention measurements and milestones – for what is essentially the quality of a relationship..?

Set Goals and Define Roles

The precursor to change is a shift in perspective, which can often be achieved by characterizing organizational roles according to relationship parameters rather than operational frameworks, or roles. To be in an ideal position for influence and persuasion, account managers need to see themselves as leaders, yet treat their cohorts as both customers and as engines of potential. If “mentor” feels too presumptuous, account managers still need to adopt the role of guide and even guru, remembering always the wisdom of Lao Tzu:

To lead people, walk behind them.

See others. Observe. Ask questions. Support, feed, and fertilize as much as, or even more than, setting an example.

The marvelous Margaret Heffernan offers great insights into the importance of social capital to leadership and team success, based on her consulting experience with companies around the world. Her essential premise is that although we tend to lionize the stars of a business, those who she refers to as the “super chickens” (based on a famous experiment by William Muir at Purdue University), extraordinary organizational achievement is actually driven by the trust, rapport, and values shared by everyone.

Heffernan draws perspective from looking at many different pursuits and professions, and found particular insight at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, of all places:

I went there to watch and I was just amazed because, actually, what all the teachers there were looking for were not these spectacular fireworks of individuals. They were looking for actors who had something to give each other because, of course, in drama, it is what happens between people that is really exciting.

Influence and persuasion is about getting beyond the obvious to the things that really matter to people. About getting beyond the facts and features and data that don’t connect with the emotional brain, and which demand a level of analytical energy the brain is reluctant to expend. With colleagues and teams, the level of interest and motivation needed to drive commitment and success must be based on goals and roles that really mean something.

“What’s the driving goal, here?” Margaret Heffernan often asks when she’s invited to consult with client companies. “And they’ll say $60 billion revenue next year. And I’d look at them and I’d say, you have got to be joking. What on earth makes you think that everybody is really going to give it their all to hit a revenue target? You know, you have to talk to something much deeper inside people than that. You have to talk to people about something that makes a difference to them every day if you want them to bring their best and do their best and feel that you’ve given them the opportunity to do the best work they’ve ever done.”

You may have to do some digging to learn what really drives each individual, and a company has to stand for something more than just revenue generation, but with emotional triggers as guideposts we have a way to communicate that’s more personal than vocational, and with forms the foundation for influence.

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You can immerse yourself in the complexities of psychological and behavioral analysis, or you can use some brain-science basics and just start getting results.

One of the most interesting and useful aspects of learning and activating emotional triggers for the purpose of influence and persuasion is that they tend to cut through more intricate or complex approaches; those offered by, say, behavioral or sociological observation. The neurological mechanisms of the human brain are not subject to external constructs like cultural cues or personality styles.

One of our consultants tells the story of a senior sales vice president at a large and well-known corporation who had invested in an elaborate and costly process of customer segmentation as a way to improve selling performance. I wish I could report that our consultant didn’t have to heart to tell him that from a customer persuasion standpoint, the effort and expense was a waste. But he told him. We didn’t get the account.

The research reported by Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe in a Harvard Business Review article on “Influencing Styles” is an example of how, without a central neurological framework to use as a reliable driver for what actually works in persuading others, we are relegated to interesting but ultimately vague classifications.

These categories are behavioral, not neurological – useful, perhaps, in determining what our “go-to” approaches might be, assuming we lack any real knowledge or insight into the science of emotional triggers:

As a self assessment I think this is potentially useful. “We are all aware that people use different influencing tactics,” the authors suggest, “but did you realize that we each naturally default to the same tactics every time?” Yes, humans are habitual. And it takes effort to develop new and more effective skills and techniques.

If you see yourself in this list, just know that any success you have in persuasion and influence comes not from your style itself but from the emotional triggers that are likely to emerge from, or be employed as a result of, that particular style.

The “Inspiring” style for example, is very likely to be activating one or more of the Friendship, Contrast, and Hope Triggers. Even “Rationalizing,” which we know from neurological studies is definitively not influential on its own, can nevertheless play an important role in activating the Authority and Consistency Triggers if properly deployed.

HBR’s “influencing styles” is an interesting exercise, but hardly applicable if your goal is to actually become more influential and persuasive.

Read the entire article here.

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