11
You Have the Power
Most people don’t take action.
You have, and always have had, the power. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to take action?
When we were developing this book, we wanted to include a chapter to show people how much power and influence they have on their organization, their life, and the things that matter most to them.
No matter whether you are a new associate, an intern, the CEO, an entrepreneur, a consultant, a contractor, or even someone who is ready to retire, you always have the power to influence others and make a positive impact. You have the power.
One of the limiting beliefs and attitudes we see in organizations and with their people is the attitude of “I/we have tried this before, and it didn’t work.” This type of thinking and attitude is why we wanted to write this chapter. Over the last several chapters, we gave you a glimpse into why and how you can get the desired outcomes you want—the methodology, the process, and the secret sauce. Processes always take time, and the one thing we can’t control is the time it takes to reach an outcome. Changing the belief so you understand that you have the power allows you to see change that can take shape effortlessly across the most important elements of your organization and even your life.
Matt’s Power Shift
This thinking changed for me when I was 18 years old. I had always been labeled a bad student, not very smart, not focused, afflicted with ADHD, and so on. These external labels shaped my beliefs of what the future might hold. Fortunately for me, I didn’t completely lose hope; I always had an inner drive to get what I desired. One of my strongest desires was to play college golf. This was a burning desire that allowed me to overcome the limited skills or abilities that would prevent most people from going to college. As a student with a 2.6 GPA and a subpar 18 ACT score, I had to use my golf ability to get into college. You might be wondering, “How does this work? How do you get into college with these poor grades?” When you don’t have the standard accepted grades and scores, you go through what is called a special exemption. This exemption is something that schools offer for students who possess other traits that could represent the school well, but don’t have the accepted grades for general enrollment. Once accepted by the board, the school establishes requirements. You have to meet with an adviser once a week during your first year. Luckily my adviser was Dr. Damon Arnold. Dr. Arnold was a student-athlete academic adviser who was responsible for making sure student-athletes had all the resources to succeed in school.
This relationship allowed me to realize I had the power. Up until this point, I was convinced I was just bad at reading and writing, couldn’t pay attention in class, and wasn’t very smart. I had a very fixed mindset—why try if I wasn’t going to be able to do it anyway? My attitude was less than positive. After two to three months of looking over my grades, checking on my attendance, and providing resources for me, Dr. Arnold called me into his office one Tuesday morning. I figured this was going to be our typical meeting. To give you a visual of Dr. Arnold—he is a six-plus-foot, 200-pound chiseled steel ex–football player with a ponytail dreadlock hairstyle. Everyone loved him; he was extremely admired and respected and treated student-athletes with the upmost respect and courtesy. He was the smoothest, most collected guy I have ever met—soft-spoken and eloquent, but witty and cool.
This meeting was a little different. I could tell he was getting frustrated with me, not because I wasn’t doing what he asked or missing meetings, but because I wasn’t trying to reach my true potential.
He started with: “Matt, what are you doing here?”
I looked at him and like a typical 18-year-old, I said, “I have to be here.”
He smiled and chuckled.
“You don’t have to do anything. Playing college golf is a choice, going to college is a choice, how you improve yourself is a choice. You have all these choices. You don’t have to be here.”
He went on: “Why are you wasting your time and my time? You have a ton of ability, the power to do anything you want. Why aren’t you using this power? Why aren’t you applying your abilities?”
I had nothing to say. For the first time it finally clicked.
It was that aha moment. I realized I do have control, I do have the power. Why couldn’t I get good grades? Why not have success academically and athletically? I realized maybe I should continue to be curious and strive to be the best person I can be.
This moment shifted my thinking and ultimately changed the way I went about life. I changed from can’t happen to anything can happen. I went on to be an academic all-conference and athletic all-conference athlete. I learned how to be a good student and to change my mindset to I have the power.
After not seeing Dr. Arnold since graduation, I decided to call him in January 2016 to thank him and explain how much he meant to me and the impact he made in my life. After our conversation, I decided it would be neat to interview him for my podcast, The Matt Johnson Performance Podcast. One part of this interview that stuck with me was about imagination. I asked him what he thought about information and knowledge. I wanted his thoughts on the information overload we have in our society and the importance of learning and knowledge. He said “Matt,” everybody talks about knowledge being king, and as a person with two master’s degrees and a PhD, trust me I believe knowledge is vital, and I believe we must do more teaching and learning, but to me the game changer is imagination.” He went on to share this story:
When I was a kid in inner-city Cleveland, I remember spending a bunch of time going to Sears. I loved to go to Sears to sit on the riding lawn mowers dreaming and imaging how big yards and houses must be if you need this riding lawn mower to mow the grass. See, Matt, at this point in my life I was only familiar with yards that were 10-by-10 feet and people could cut using a push mower with no motor. This imagination was the first time I remember realizing the world was bigger than I thought and people have things I knew nothing about. This imagination drove me to want to see what else life had to offer, the true potential. This imagination allowed me to believe anything is possible. I now have a yard that requires a riding lawn mower.
I had never heard him tell this story and, looking back, I realized what he was truly asking me when I came into his office as an 18-year-old college kid was this, “What do you want your life to look like?”
If you can imagine it, it can happen. The critical piece was, I had to believe I had the power.
Just Because It Hasn’t Happened Doesn’t Mean It Won’t Happen
We are here to not only tell you but ultimately show you how to use the power to improve the capacity of everything and everyone in your life.
It’s almost too easy to dismiss any attempt to create positive change in the workplace. All organizations have cultures built around foundational attitudes and beliefs that are rarely challenged or questioned. We know everyone wants to do and be their best, but knowing and doing are completely different things. The perceived risks of rocking the boat likely outweigh any potential long-term benefits of changing the status quo. It’s a safer move to toe the line and preserve your position within the organization, right? Why should you stick your neck out on the line, when no one listens to your ideas in the first place?
Most of us barely have time to slow down and assess a better way forward. Like all collective bodies, an organization or large group adopts a herd mentality to react to imminent and immediate threats to the bottom line. This vicious cycle leads to a culture that isn’t armed for the future. We have illustrated the big five problems, the vision for the future, and the action you can take to get ahead of the competition, but are you going to act?
Before we start unpacking the different mindsets you need to execute this positive change in the workplace, we want to take a moment to think about all the monumental innovations that drove the last century of enormous economic, political, and social change in civil society—positive change on a colossal scale. The great titans of industry—Thomas Edison, Roy Firestone, and Henry Ford—come to mind, as do the tech scions of Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. They all have legacies built on creating millions of jobs, connecting billions of people, and launching infinite dreams. We imagine their ideas falling from a magical tree in a eureka—a single moment that suddenly launches them into a manic fury of experimenting and tinkering until they emerge from their labs rejoicing in the rapture of finally creating from scratch something brilliant and earth-shattering.
As much as we want to glorify the myth of the lone mad scientist, the idea of toiling away in a secret lab without any help or input from the outside world is fundamentally flawed. After trying hundreds of other filaments, Edison discovered that a special species of bamboo had a much higher resistance to electricity than other carbon paper–based materials deployed by dozens of early iterations of the light bulb. Xerox and its famed PARC research program had developed an early prototype of the computer mouse, but never could quite figure out how to apply the technology for consumers. Steve Jobs immediately recognized its potential to humanize the Macintosh—a distinction between invention and commercialization.
These prolific change agents did not spark paradigm shifts in a vacuum. Their success depended heavily on recognizing the right moments to stand on the shoulders of giants before them and bravely launch forward into a future only they could envision. They had to fight tirelessly to win hearts and minds. They had to articulate their brave new world in different ways for different audiences. They had to evangelize their arguments for a better way forward and influence countless cynics and skeptics to suspend their disbelief and invest in a more prosperous future for all. Most importantly, they never doubted their ability to be a catalyst for change. Be the matchstick for disruption.
Google rarely misses when it launches a new product line. Its legendary moonshots, fueled by the brightest minds at its X division, have fundamentally shaped the Information Age. The Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” ensures that every aspect of the final product has been refined by an ever-evolving feedback loop of iterative improvements. Google Glass was battle-tested in the lab and then put through its initial beta trial by thousands of new “Glass Explorers,” who started sporting these head-mounted smartphone displays and ushered in a new age of ubiquitous computing.
It only took a few weeks of awkward face-to-face conversations and legitimate fears of strangers recording unsuspecting bystanders for these early adopters to be universally derided as “Glassholes.” It only took a couple of months before developers created Google Glass apps that could steal smartphone passwords, take pictures with just the wink of an eye, or even record conversations without anyone noticing. In less than two years after the botched beta trials, Glass was pulled from the shelves and universally ridiculed as one of the worst product rollouts of the past 20 years.
Even the most successful companies are susceptible to ignoring the most important aspect of inspiring change: you have to alter attitudes first. On many different levels, from the interpersonal creepiness to highway safety, people’s attitudes and beliefs about the dangers of in-your-face computing were already made up. Google believed that the functionality and novelty of the new device would overpower the public’s preconceived notions about how it made them feel.
Change Is Hard
You have influence right now.
You have the power right now.
How are you using it?
In today’s fast-paced economy, the desire to scale is at an all-time high. How can organizations or entrepreneurs be successful without scalable solutions? There are seven billion people in the world all with the opportunity to serve. Leadership inside these organizations looks to automate tasks in effort to reduce inefficiencies and scale growth further. One automation process that more and more organizations rely on is a CRM (customer relationship management) software. This tool is a marketing automation software that allows you to store data and communicate with prospective and current clients on a large scale. It also can automate commissions and track productivity.
Here’s how integration often goes: With the new CRM software purchased and licensed, it’s time to integrate it into the workforce. You assign your national sales manager to reveal the new process and system at the annual meeting in front of the top 500 sales leaders. The sales manager explains that all the manual tasks that have consumed so much of time up until this point are a thing of the past: “Today we start forging a better way forward to amplify our expansion into new markets and generate even more revenue from existing customers!”
The applause and confetti that leadership expected for this new direction is roundly doused with a sobering shower of confusion and doubt by every sales leader in the room. “Who’s going to import all of my contacts into this new-fangled tool?” “How will commissions be split between two of my reps bidding on the same contract?” “How long will it take to transition to this new system?” “Why is this being jammed down our throats in the middle of our busiest quarter?!”
Resistance to new ideas is an innate human reaction to any perceived change in the ecosystem around them. Foreign concepts trigger an emotional response before any rational thought is rendered toward the idea itself. Sure, this new process or concept may very well increase productivity by eliminating redundancies, but logic has no bearing on attitudes and beliefs. People subconsciously make up their minds about new ideas before they’re even presented.
Psychologists Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland proved this potent dynamic when they introduced social judgment theory in the late 1960s. According to this theory, our attitudes are graded on a continuum of pro to con based on our existing beliefs—which ultimately define our attitudes.
So how do you persuade your team to make the small changes necessary to realize the goals and outcomes envisioned? Is it even worth trying to convince those around you to move toward the same outcome if they all have vastly different attitudes and agendas? How do you build a coalition for change to begin with? It’s easy to become overwhelmed by self-defeating thoughts when you step out from the crowd and try to pave an entirely new and different way forward. The following are a few questions you should ask yourself before planting the seeds of change.
1. Am I the Best Person to Deliver the Message?
Media approval ratings are at an all-time low, barely above big banks and Congress, according to the most recent public confidence poll from the Associated Press. The echo chambers created by a highly partisan 24-hour news cycle have conditioned the public to believe news organizations almost always have a political bias baked into every story they cover or publish. If you’re a reporter working for a liberal newspaper and file a story on Planned Parenthood funding for a local health clinic, it will likely be perceived to have a favorable opinion of women’s reproductive rights. A gun owner is almost always assumed to be in opposition of any gun control legislation. But what if a climatologist came forward and proposed that global warming is a fallacy perpetuated by corporations to drive sales of greener technology? You might listen more just to understand why their opinion is so drastically divergent from the rest of the scientific community.
The element of surprise, combined with a more appealing messenger, is a tried and true tactic for winning hearts and minds. What if the national sales manager from our earlier example called up the five best sales reps from the company and asked them to beta test the new CRM? Ultimately these marketing automation processes will benefit the reps on the ground the most. If a rep could automatically receive all new leads who attended a recent webinar, and know what type of content those leads viewed on the corporate site after listening, wouldn’t they know exactly what types of solutions those leads were seeking? Instead of the new manager starting to sell the idea from the top down, let those who benefit the most show its results from the bottom up. Ultimately, a peer is going to listen and respond more positively to a 25 percent increase in revenue from his peer rep, than from the national sales manager who won’t use this software nearly as much.
2. How Do I Convince Someone to Change Their Behavior?
We tend to gravitate toward people we already relate with. Opposites attract, but most healthy friendships and marriages persist and grow stronger because of parallel attitudes and beliefs. Social judgment theory calls this area the latitude of acceptance, but it is now commonly referred to as the okay zone. It’s very important to respect your audience’s zones of tolerance since any idea that falls outside these zones is highly likely to be rejected. If you walked up to someone in the store who was buying a bag of prepackaged cupcakes for their kids and shouted at them, “What are you doing? Are you stupid? How could you feed your children that processed garbage?” what would you expect them to do? Would they smile and say, “You know what, you’re right. I can’t believe I buy this stuff every week. Thanks for your concern!”? Or would they scowl and scream back, “How dare you tell me how to feed my children! Get away from me or I’m calling the cops!”? This is a bit of an extreme example, but it perfectly illustrates the wrong way to try and change an attitude that dictates daily habits and behaviors. The concern and passion for eating healthier food is on full display, but the vehement tone of judgment and condescension is immediately perceived as a threat to their children and a potential assault.
A better approach is to take the time to identify where someone’s OK zone is before trying to persuade them in any given direction. According to Sherif and Hovland’s research, people only change their minds within three degrees of where they sit on the latitude of acceptance. In other words, if you ask someone who has a neutral opinion on a topic, it’s almost impossible for them to strongly agree with you right off the bat. They must slightly agree with your idea before they can even start to agree with it.
My dad has always been an avid golfer (he actually taught me how to play), but his swing mechanics still can use some fine-tuning from time to time. Heck, all our swings can use fine-tuning from time to time. He usually plays one to two times a week and hits on the range when he can. He has worked with a golf instructor regularly for the past three years, but still struggles to get off the tee with any consistency. Every year we play as partners in our club’s invitational. It is a tradition for us, and we have played together for the last 10 years in a row. In the early years after he hit a bad shot, I would say things like “When did you start taking the club so inside on the backswing? That is why you hit it bad.” This type of coaching does not work for him and tends to make him angry and question why would I say something like that—I’m not in the okay zone. I don’t know what he has been working on, and I am sure he didn’t intentionally try to swing incorrectly. This was not the way to help him make a change.
My new approach is using the okay zone. If I see some mechanics that need to change or something I believe could help him, I start of by asking, “What are you working on with your instructor?” This allows me to learn what he is working on and how he is thinking. Usually this conversation uncovers the challenges he is having and the feels he still doesn’t have down. Once I uncover what he is working on and what he still is trying to figure out, I try to address these thoughts first. If he is struggling with his backswing, I don’t tell him that his downswing is broken. I give him some specific cues that can allow him to make a better backswing. We all want to help, but helping someone change their behavior starts with them being in the okay zone.
3. How Do I Convince Large Groups of People to Change?
It’s much easier to convince Chris to make small changes in his golf swing than to mobilize the momentum necessary for completely overhauling a company’s processes and workflows. In order to create and sustain changes at a larger scale, we need to focus on the factors behind social influence and the key factors that determine the dynamics of how large groups interact. Social impact theory, developed by psychologist Bibb Latane in 1981, uses a relatively simple equation to predict the level of social impact for any given situation:
impact = strength × immediacy × number of people
Any good leader knows they can’t advocate for change alone, but better leaders know they need to recruit the strongest supporters and create a sense of urgency to fuel the change they seek. Rarely does the entire company gather in a room to confront future challenges and create initiatives needed to deal with them. First, you must recruit a strong coalition of people who genuinely care and are willing to fight for change. When you do so, the chances of success increase exponentially.
So, let’s go back to the national sales manager and his continued campaign to convince the sales team to adopt the new marketing automation processes. He’s already won over the five best sales reps to start using lead generation to close more deals than they were before. Strength in numbers is already being attained, but the main ingredient missing is immediacy. As the national sales manager, Dave is always asked by the executives, “How are our competitors selling online and using automation?” So, this manager decides to block out a couple hours at the end of the week to visit some direct competitor sites and see if they’re using any advanced marketing automation tactics to close more leads. It doesn’t take long before he starts seeing the hallmarks of advanced marketing automation on full display: personalized content tailored to his clients; automated follow-up e-mails thanking him for signing up for their newsletter and a subsequent e-mail a couple of days later sharing blog articles that relate to his job title. He’s heard rumors of how much one particular competitor had been eating into their market share, particularly for health-care clients. Dave visits the health-care segment page a few times during the day to see if he starts receiving e-mails related to those specific products. Sure enough, a couple of days later, he receives a personalized e-mail directly from the health-care rep in his region asking him if he had any questions about a recent whitepaper he downloaded about ADA (Americans with Disability Act) standards. Seeing firsthand how effective these tactics are, Dave forwards the e-mail chain to the five reps and asks them how long it normally takes to get someone this close to a sale. Within a few minutes, they reply back with varying degrees of concern and urgency, and they start to connect their diminishing market share in this space to how their rival is deploying these tactics.
The next morning, Dave receives an emergency meeting invite from all of the sales executives. He can’t help but smile since he can sense the winds of change blowing in his favor, but he certainly doesn’t want to count chickens before they hatch and takes a little time to prep himself on any possible objections they might have. Dave walks into the same conference room where before he was met with nothing but ridicule and suspicion and is greeted not only by the same executives but all five sales reps on the conference line. He sits down in disbelief. Not even he expected this type of coalition to materialize in a relatively short amount of time. He knows how hypercompetitive the reps are with each other, let alone the sales managers. He then hears a somewhat familiar voice dial in to the conference line and ask him a pointed question: “Dave, we haven’t had the pleasure of meeting quite yet, but this is John Howard. Would you mind telling me a little more about this marketing automation tool and how you plan to help us implement it going forward?” Never in a million years did he imagine the president of his company would take the time to ask his opinion about anything. He tries to contain his excitement in his response, “Well, Mr. Howard, I never thought you’d ask.”
You have the power to spark immense change within any organization. Like anything else in life, it’s all about strategy and execution. The best part about being a change agent is actually experiencing just how green the grass is on the other side. Everyone around you is a little more optimistic about the future. They know that together, they can move mountains and accomplish big goals that improve not only their lives but also those around them.
The capacity for change is arguably the most defining and rewarding part of being alive. Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years through a natural selection of better ideas over all else. It may sound cliché, but if you take change to heart and take the time to cultivate change to better those around you, the possibilities are truly limitless.