Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition

by Joseph Grenny

Danny Meyer. Danny had earned the title of “influencer” by fostering a unique culture of customer service. Every one of his restaurants had been in the top 40 of Zagat’s ratings of customer preference—practically since the day they first opened. We soon discovered that the reason behind his unparalleled success was his capacity to influence 1,500 ordinary employees to consistently create extraordinary experiences for their 100,000 daily guests. Actually, extraordinary is too small a word.

looking for the common thread that connects all successful leaders—no matter the objective or the setting. We’ll be exploring a common set of principles and skills that help create quick, profound, and lasting change. We call this ability to create changes in human behavior influence and the people who do it influencers.

At the end of the day, what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results.

as you hear the word “influence,” you might think that we’re referring to the less impressive and more suspicious tool called “persuasion.” We’re not. This book is not about solving problems or hitting new targets by applying the right combination of verbal tricks. If you’re looking to reach rather modest goals by stealthily exerting your will over others, this book i...

examine in detail why people do what they do and what it takes to help them act differently.

success relies on the capacity to systematically create rapid, profound, and sustainable changes in a handful of key behaviors.

discover that the key to consistent high-quality performance is getting them to practice two vital behaviors: (1) admit when they have problems, and (2) immediately speak up when they won’t meet a deadline.

they think intentionally about their ability to help others act in unprecedentedly effective ways. They think about influencing behavior, talk about it, and practice it, and all of them have created remarkable changes in domains where failure has been the norm—often for decades.

Learning how to motivate and enable others to change their actions may be the most important skill you’ll ever acquire. It’s not merely curiously engaging (and it is); it also sits at the center of what ails most of us. The lion’s share of the problems that really bother us don’t call for additional technology, theory, philosophy, or data (we’re up to our necks in that); instead, the problems call for the ability to change what people do. And when it comes to this particular skill, demand far exceeds supply.

review of the past 30 years of change literature reveals that fewer than one in eight workplace change efforts produces anything other than cynicism.

Fewer than 10 percent of us succeed when setting out to change our excessive spending, inadequate exercise, and other bad habits.

Two-thirds of the felons who are released from our “correctional” system return within three years—completely uncorrected—while having earned an advanced degree in crime.

“Why aren’t people doing what they should be doing, and why can’t I get them to change?”

We studied people who had succeeded where others had failed.

Influencers exist, and what they know and do is learnable.

Focus and measure. Influencers are crystal clear about the result they are trying to achieve and are zealous about measuring it.

high-leverage behaviors that drive results.

two or three vital actions that produce the greatest ...

overdetermining change.

identify all of the varied forces that are shaping the behavior they want to change and then get them working for rather than against them.

fuzzy objectives are anathema to influence. Equally important, they know that clear, consistent, and meaningful measures ensure that they’ll actually track their efforts and genuinely hold themselves accountable.

Fuzzy Objectives are anathema to influence

Unsuccessful agents of change make one of three early mistakes that undermine their influence: 1. Fuzzy, uncompelling goals:

Infrequent or no measures:

Bad measures:

drive the wrong behavior by measuring the wrong variable.

Fuzzy, Uncompelli...

Their objective, after all, is the voice that calls out for change in the first place.

too vague to exert any real influence.

sixth leading cause of death in the United States is healthcare.… We inadvertently kill the equivalent of a jumbo jet filled with passengers every day of the year. We know how it happens, and we know how to avoid it. The challenge is influencing people to stop it from happening.”

issued an audacious challenge by setting a crystal clear and compelling goal: “I think we should save 100,000 lives. I think we should do that by June 14, 2006.” Pause. “By 9 a.m.”

weren’t just going to “try to reduce problems.” They weren’t going to “improve safety.” They weren’t going to “help a bunch of people within the next few years have better lives.” They weren’t going to save an impressive number of lives “as soon as they could.” They were going to save 100,000 lives by June 14, 2006—by 9 a.m.

Clear goals aimed at a compelling target can have an enormous impact on behavior because they engage more than simply the brain. They also engage the heart.

clear, compelling, and challenging goal causes the blood to pump more rapidly, the brain to fire, and the muscles to engage.

influencers don’t merely start their change efforts with their ultimate goal in mind. They take care to craft that goal into a clear and compelling goal statement.

You can talk about results all you want, but they remain nothing more than ideas until you decide exactly how you’re going to measure them.

when you’re trying to track morale, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, or, as was the case with the boot camp, confidence, such items have to be operationalized into something you can measure. You have to pick something to represent the idea.

often leave out this step—not on purpose, but because they think they already have a firm grasp on the results they care about. But they don’t. Their conclusions are based on anecdotal evidence and gut impressions rather than reliable measures.

leaders see satisfaction, engagement, and other human metrics as not only difficult to measure but as “soft.” Meaning, they don’t believe the measures matter in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t trust the measures.

measure won’t drive behavior if it doesn’t maintain attention, and it certainly won’t maintain attention if it’s rarely assessed—especially if other measures are taken, discussed, and fretted over a hundred times more frequently.

The wolf you feed

Of course, frequently gathering data consumes enormous resources. Leaders often complain that it takes as much effort to measure an influence campaign as it does to deploy the campaign itself. And within this complaint lies the real problem. Leaders assume measurement is completely separate from influence. It isn’t. Measurement is an integral part of the change effort, and done correctly, it informs and drives behavior. Bad Measures Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail

Measurement = change

Of course, frequently gathering data consumes enormous resources. Leaders often complain that it takes as much effort to measure an influence campaign as it does to deploy the campaign itself. And within this complaint lies the real problem. Leaders assume measurement is completely separate from influence. It isn’t. Measurement is an integral part of the change effort, and done correctly, it informs and drives behavior. Bad Measures Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail

Examples of measuring thee wrong things drivi ng production wrong direction

If it’s true that as many as 90 percent of assaults go unreported, then the first sign of making progress might be that the number actually goes up. An increase could mean that you’ve made it safer to speak up and then go get help. Assaults are decreasing, but more are being reported more frequently so, in the net, the number increases.

But how can you know whether the increase is good news because reporting has gone up or bad news because the actual incidents have increased? By measuring the real target you need to change: people’s thoughts and actions. A useful measure would tell you (unit by unit) how safe people feel. It would tell you (1) if they feel safe from harassment or assault and (2) if they feel safe reporting harassment or assault. If you gather these numbers frequently, you’re in a much stronger position to properly interpret an increase or decrease in reported assaults.

good measures don’t merely inform us. They also drive the right behavior. Sometimes it may take awhile to figure out exactly which measures you should be taking, but it’s worth studying in detail. The measure of a measure is its actual influence. If there’s a chance that the very process of measuring results might drive the wrong behavior, then be sure to faithfully measure the actions you need to produce those results as well.

(We call these actions that lead to important results vital behaviors.) So, start every change project with a clear and compelling statement of the goal you’re trying to achieve. Measure your progress. Don’t leave it to intuition or hunches. Measure your measures by the behavior they influence. And finally, measure the right thing, and measure it frequently.

ABCD, or “Always Be Collecting Dots.” Dots, in Danny’s world, are pieces of information about a guest’s needs and desires that his staff can collect by astutely observing and interacting with that guest. Danny found that the employees who were best at collecting dots were also the ones who were most capable of connecting them in creative ways to create unique and special experiences for their guests. For

ABCD always be collecting dots

searching for and finding vital behaviors as well as the methods they use to influence each. The good news is that the key of finding no more than a handful of high-leverage behaviors works with almost any problem.

engage all six sources of influence. Influencers succeed in creating change where others fail because they overdetermine success.

Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) system that Levin and Feinberg founded in 1994 had

know the results they’re after, and they measure them mercilessly.