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Kindle Notes & Highlights
what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results.
success relies on the capacity to systematically create rapid, profound, and sustainable changes in a handful of key behaviors.
After years of your employees’ bringing in projects late or riddled with bugs, you 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. When your software designers do these two things consistently, products get completed correctly and on time. When they don’t, they don’t.
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.
Our review of the past 30 years of change literature reveals that fewer than one in eight workplace change efforts produces anything other than cynicism. When it comes to creating changes in behavior, we’re equally challenged at home. For instance, every year we spend millions on diets and lose little more than our money. Fewer than 10 percent of us succeed when setting out to change our excessive spending, inadequate exercise, and other bad habits.
three keys to success—keys that all influencers adhere to and that you can use to your own benefit: 1. Focus and measure. Influencers are crystal clear about the result they are trying to achieve and are zealous about measuring it. 2. Find vital behaviors. Influencers focus on high-leverage behaviors that drive results. More specifically, they focus on the two or three vital actions that produce the greatest amount of change. 3. Engage all six sources of influence. Finally, influencers break from the pack by overdetermining change. Where most of us apply a favorite influence tool or two to our
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Hopkins took an interest in the Guinea worm because he concluded that it could literally be eradicated from the planet. All he had to do, he told us matter-of-factly, was change the behavior of 120 million people spread over 10 million square miles. Think about it. How would you approach this kind of problem? With a team of two dozen people and a few million dollars in the budget, how could you even think about getting millions of strangers to change? The difference between Dr. Hopkins and the rest of us is that he (like all the influencers we studied) knows how to think about these kinds of
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“I think it’s unacceptable,” Berwick told us, “that the 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.” Now watch how Berwick uses a clear and compelling goal to lead change. One December day in 2004, Berwick stood in front of a group of thousands of healthcare professionals and issued an audacious challenge by setting a crystal clear and compelling goal: “I think
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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. Research reveals that a clear, compelling, and challenging goal causes the blood to pump more rapidly, the brain to fire, and the muscles to engage. However, when goals are vague, no such effects take place.*
We’ve all made this mistake. Perhaps we’ve set a goal of consuming X number of calories per day, and then we track our efforts by keeping a running guesstimate in our heads. Later when we log our exact food intake, we learn that our estimates were off by as much as half. Or maybe we think the morale in our office is just fine because everyone seems happy enough. Nobody has caused a scene or anything. And then one day we’re surprised to see someone quit because he or she “hates the place.” Then another person takes a job across the street for less pay and worse benefits. “What’s that all
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Surprises like this often take place in corporate settings because 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. So leaders don’t take “soft measures” more often than, say, every two years. This schedule is typically kept against a backdrop of measuring quality every 10 minutes and discussing cash flow measures every two hours. A measure won’t drive behavior if it doesn’t maintain attention, and it certainly won’t
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For example, what do you think would happen if our friend Danny Meyer measured restaurant revenues daily but customer experience only annually? Revenue would drive management attention, and customer experience would get a ritualized yearly review—as is the case in most of Danny’s competitors....
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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...
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Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail to create measures that generate the right kind of influence. They do so by measuring the wrong variable. For instance, during the Cold War, Soviet leaders didn’t have or measure such a capitalistic thing as profits, and nobody tracked customer satisfaction (who even cared about such nonsense?), so they decided to improve productivity—something they did measure—by tracking weight. In short, production facilities were required to produce more tonnage. Nail factory leaders responded to this demand by switching
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What do you predict would result from the following strategy? You tell every military officer, “Look, we’re now tracking reports of sexual harassment and assault. Your job is to make that number go down in your unit.” The number will drop. You give your senior military leaders a serious command, and they will move heaven and earth to “make it happen.” But if the number drops, it won’t necessarily be good news. 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
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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. For instance, you want to improve innovation (as measured by the number of new product proposals per quarter), and you have decided that the reason you’re not as innovative as you would like to be is because people aren’t comfortable raising new ideas. You interview employees, and they tell you that they get ridiculed or otherwise punished when they make suggestions, so they clam up. You put together a course
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Every year over 3,000 Americans drown, many of them in public pools. This problem remained unchanged for decades until a team of tenacious leaders from the YMCA and Redwoods Insurance got serious about influence. It wasn’t long before they had reduced the portion of these 3,000 deaths that happened at YMCA pools by two-thirds. How did they do it? They studied tragedies and successes until they found one vital (high-leverage) behavior that made the difference. They discovered that traditional lifeguards were spending much of their time greeting members, adjusting swim lanes, picking up
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Let’s see how this concept of focusing on high-leverage actions applies to Danny Meyer, the restaurant mogul we visited. He didn’t demand dozens of actions of his staff. Instead, he focused on one vital behavior captured in the acronym 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
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consider the work of a couple of educational influencers, David Levin and Mike Feinberg. They didn’t stumble into a way of getting tens of thousands of inner city youth to—and through—college. They studied their way into it. As of the date this book was written, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) system that Levin and Feinberg founded in 1994 had 133 free public college prep schools serving over 30,000 students. Their teachers are paid no better than public school teachers. Their budgets are no larger. Their work hours are much longer. And they go out of their way to recruit kids with the
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Source 1. Personal Motivation We’ll start with the source people most frequently include in their influence attempts: personal motivation. As you watch others not doing the right thing while repeatedly doing the wrong thing, ask: Do they enjoy it? In most cases—particularly with deep-rooted habits—this source of influence is an important factor in propelling and sustaining behavior. For instance, when it comes to education, far too many students find school both boring and pointless. At KIPP, you’ll find the opposite. Hard work is constantly connected with bright futures. People constantly
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Source 2. Personal Ability Of course, motivation isn’t everything. When trying to understand why others don’t do what they should do, ask: Can they do it? Just because individuals enjoy something doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. They have to have the skills, talent, and understanding required to enact each vital behavior or they’ll fail. For instance, Levin and Feinberg learned that kids drop out not simply because they’re more interested in hanging out in the neighborhood but because they’re routinely failing their assignments and courses and they feel incompetent and bad about themselves.
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Source 3. Social Motivation Next, you need to examine the social side of influence by asking: Do others encourage them to enact the wrong behavior? When half of your colleagues drop out of school, quitting becomes the norm. And this is the norm most low-income youth experience. Unless your peers value scholastic achievement, you’re unlikely to value it yourself. At KIPP, college pennants are ubiquitous. Not hypothetical ones—but pennants from the colleges students from their school are already attending. Students frequently talk about where they’ll be going to college, why, and what they
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Source 4. Social Ability Others not only provide a source of motivation but they can also enable vital behaviors. To examine this important source of influence, ask: Do others enable them? Students who typically drop out have few resources to help, coach, and mentor them. One of the strangest experiences parents and students have at KIPP takes place when they first meet the teacher. It happens in their home. The KIPP administrators want the family to know there is nothing they won’t do to help the student succeed. So the teacher visits with the parents and child and concludes the visit by
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Source 5. Structural Motivation Most burgeoning change agents think about both individual and social factors, but they leave out the role “things” play in encouraging and enabling vital behaviors. To check for this source, ask: Do rewards and sanctions encourage them? There is little perceived incentive to stay the course at most at-risk schools. In fact, some inner city youth see far more benefits from getting a job (legal or illegal) than from getting an education. At KIPP, fun rewards are offered to kids who have done everything on time for the month. ...
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Source 6. Structural Ability Finally, “things” can either enable or disable performance. To examine this source, ask: Does their environment enable them? When your school is dismal, your learning tools are antiquated, and your home environment is insecure, you have a hard time focusing on abstract learning. At KIPP both the home and school environments are seen as important parts of the learning experience. Levin, Feinberg, and others routinely visit homes, assessing what’s helping and what’s hurting learning, and then they take action. For example, Feinberg describes how a mother in a tough
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It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. —W. Edwards Deming
Typically one or two vital behaviors, well executed, will yield a big difference. This is true because with almost any result you’re trying to achieve, there are moments of disproportionate influence. These are times when someone’s choices either lead toward great results or set up a cascade of negative behaviors that create and perpetuate problems. And now for the really good news. These crucial moments are often easily spotted. For example, when Danny Meyer’s restaurant guest has a problem, it’s obvious that the actions of staff members in that moment will disproportionately affect that
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It didn’t take Wiwat long to realize that 97 percent of all new HIV infections were coming from heterosexual contact with sex workers. This statistic might seem a bit odd until you learn that Thailand has over 150,000 sex workers—about 1 for every 150 adult men. Wiwat’s concern was that, when induced by low prices and abundant supply, the vast majority of Thai men periodically visited brothels. This statistic gave Dr. Wiwat the focus he needed. If contact with sex workers was causing the pandemic, he had no choice but to focus his attention there—despite the fact that the government refused to
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She learned early on that if you’re going to work with subjects whose lives are an undifferentiated bundle of dysfunctional behaviors, you have to limit your scope of influence by identifying only a couple of vital behaviors and then working on them. Otherwise you dilute your efforts and eventually fail. As you chat with Dr. Silbert, she’s quick to point out that if you want to help ex-cons change their lives, you need to focus on behavior, not values, homilies, or emotional appeals.
So Dr. Silbert focuses on changing behaviors, not on preaching homilies. And, once again, a few behaviors, not dozens. In Silbert’s words: “You can’t succeed by trying to change 20 things at the same time!” So Silbert made a study of the behaviors that needed changing, hoping to find a couple that would provide focus and leverage in transforming criminals into citizens. After working with over 16,000 felons, Silbert is now convinced that just two behaviors open the floodgates of change. If you focus on these two, a whole host of other behaviors, values, attitudes, and outcomes follow. Silbert
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Wiwat’s and Silbert’s work provides us with a classic example of the Pareto Principle, the old 80-20 Rule. This rule suggests that for whatever your change topic may be, 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. This means that even for the most complicated problems, ones that are influenced by, say, 10 different behaviors, influencers should focus their efforts on the top 2—and only the top 2. If they spend time on the top 4 or 5 behaviors, or, worse still, on all 10 behaviors, they’ll spread themselves too thin.
Now, let’s see how this might apply to something even more local—say, your marriage or significant relationship. Let’s say you’re in a relationship that is good but not great. How do you improve it? Once again, there are dozens of behaviors and attributes you could say are keys to great relationships—spending time together, sharing interests, listening, sexual compatibility—to name a few. So here’s the big question. Could it be that only a couple of controllable actions make most of the difference in a relationship? To answer this question, we visited marriage scholar Howard Markman’s
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Judy B., a nurse manager, tripled her department’s patient experience scores by focusing on just two behaviors: (1) Nurses lead meaningful discussions with each patient every morning, and then they write the patient’s Goal for the Day and Plan for the Day on a whiteboard; (2) All of the caregivers, including the physicians, read the whiteboard, respond to what’s written there, and then update the whiteboard before leaving.
avoid spending time and effort on the wrong behaviors by drawing from the following four vital behavior search strategies: • Notice the obvious. Recognize behaviors that are obvious (or at least obvious to experts) but underused. • Look for crucial moments. Find times when behavior puts success at risk. • Learn from positive deviants. Distinguish behaviors that set apart positive deviants— those who live in the same world but somehow produce much better results. • Spot culture busters. Find behaviors that reverse stubborn cultural norms and taboos.
So here’s the first strategy for finding those oh-so-valuable vital behaviors. Look for behaviors that are both obvious and underused. These are actions that lead directly to the desired results and often come with a big “Duhhh!” But they are also typically underused—not because we’re morons, but because the behaviors can be exceptionally difficult or unpleasant. You find these high-leverage actions either by simply applying what you already know or by doing a quick search of what experts say about the topic. If it’s easy for you to see the big-hitting actions or if you can find quick
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Can you guess the three vital behaviors that drive success during students’ first year in college? The dropout rates for first-year students at some colleges are as high as 50 percent, so academic leaders worry endlessly about influencing these students to succeed during their first crucial year. Dropping out is disastrous for both the students and the schools. This time, since it may not be obvious to your average citizen, we’ll rely on our second quick-search tool—experts. In this case, a quick Internet search put us in touch with researchers from a large Midwestern university who culled
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while we were working with Noble Drilling, a world leader in offshore oil drilling and a leader in workplace safety, internal experts described their safety challenge in the following way: “In our company 98 percent of our people do 98 percent of the right stuff 98 percent of the time. And that’s not good enough!” Notice how this statement focuses the search for vital behaviors. If Noble Drilling could find the 2 percent of the times when 2 percent of their people did 2 percent of the wrong stuff, it would have tremendous leverage for improvement. And that’s what the company leaders did. They
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We worked with an organization in which managers never brought their projects in on budget. We asked them to create a flowchart of their project planning and execution process, and then we asked them to pinpoint crucial moments when problems occurred. They discovered they were caught in a vicious cycle. Executives thought their managers were wasteful, so they routinely sliced 20 percent off of their budgets and demanded that they deliver with the reduced resources. So managers routinely padded their budgets by 20 percent because they knew the executives’ tricks. The padding justified the
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If you can find individuals who face the same challenges as your struggling group, yet have found a way to succeed, then you can learn from their solution. Here’s an example. We once worked with a hospital team that transcribed physicians’ notes. Transcribers sat at computers wearing headphones, and they typed what they heard into files. But recently their jobs had been radically altered by technology when the hospital introduced a new voice-recognition system that did 80 percent of their previous work for them. Here was the dilemma. Despite the technological advances, their productivity had
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Speaking up is generally taboo within healthcare, especially when it involves reminding people higher in the pecking order. For example, a housekeeper is cleaning a patient’s windows when he sees a surgeon rush in. He hasn’t seen her wash her hands, but he isn’t sure that she hasn’t. Will the housekeeper speak up? The weight of the culture says “No.” And if he tries this vital behavior once, what will predict whether he does it again and again—making it a new norm? It depends on what happens after the next crucial moment. The instant the housekeeper issues the reminder, he feels incredibly
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if you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed a pattern in some of the culture-busting vital behavior examples we’ve shared so far. In the hundreds of influence cases we’ve studied, one of the most consistent vital behaviors for driving change involves helping someone step up to some crucial conversation. In fact, our research into crucial conversation skills came from this consistent finding. Whether it’s reducing AIDS in Thailand, criminal recidivism at Delancey Street, Guinea worm disease in Burkina Faso, or error rates in software development, one of the most potent behaviors for
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To see how the search for vital behaviors is key to a rigorous influence project, consider the efforts of learning expert Dr. Ethna Reid. She has spent over 50 years doggedly observing teachers in order to identify the vital behaviors that separate the best from the rest. She has codified, gathered, and studied data on virtually every type of teaching behavior, compared these behaviors to the desired results, and discovered a handful of high-leverage actions that make all the difference. One of the vital behaviors Dr. Reid has unearthed concerns the use of praise versus the use of punishment.
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Most of us have our favorite influence methods—just pass a law, just threaten a consequence, or just offer a training program. The problem with sticking to our favorite methods is not that the methods are flawed per se; it’s that they are far too simplistic. It’s akin to hiking the Himalayas with only a bag lunch. There’s nothing wrong with Gatorade and a granola bar, but you’ll probably need a lot more. Bringing a simple solution to a complex behavioral challenge almost never works.
quick fix rarely works. If the behavior you’re trying to change is supported by only one source of influence, changing that one might be sufficient to improve results. However, when you’re facing longstanding, highly resistant habits, you’re typically up against many—if not all six—sources of influence. So think about it: if six sources are driving a bad habit and you address only one, what do you predict will happen? If you answer, “Nothing,” you’re right. The problem is not a mystery. It’s math. Five sources are usually stronger than one. And as you learn to think in terms of the six sources
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Virtually all forces that have an impact on human behavior work on only two basic drivers of behavior. Not thousands. Just two. At the end of the day a person asks, “Can I do what’s required?” and, “Will it be worth it?” The first question simply asks, “Am I able?” The second, “Am I motivated?” Consequently, no matter the number of forces that affect human action—from managing peer pressure in a junior high school to making citizens aware of the cost of illiteracy in a barrio to offering a class on anger management in Beverly Hills—all these strategies work in one of two ways. They either
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Pictorially, we can display these six sources of influence in the following model:
Humans don’t merely find ways to act unnaturally. They find ways to enjoy activities that aren’t inherently enjoyable. Depending on your point of view, hand washing in a hospital can feel like either a tedious distraction or a sacred duty. Finishing tasks on time can feel like either a bureaucratic bore or a demonstration of integrity. Changing a baby’s diaper can feel like either a gruesome chore or a precious moment. The question is, how can you help vital behaviors feel like the latter rather than the former? Influencers use four tactics to help people love what they hate: 1. Allow for
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A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still. —Benjamin Franklin
Generally when we face a problem like Biff, we make an automatic assumption that he just doesn’t care. In other words, we assume the problem is that he’s simply not motivated because he takes no pleasure from doing the work. Then, without even realizing it, we make a second mental leap. We assume that the reason he’s not motivated is because of some moral defect. That may sound harsh, but think about it for a moment. When a doctor fails to wash his hands, we typically assume, “He’s just concerned about his own convenience.” Similarly, when Biff fails to exert himself for customers, we
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Your “yes” means nothing if you can’t say “no.” There can be no commitment if there is no choice. —Peter Block