7
Provide Assistance

SOCIAL ABILITY

Never run after your own hat—others will be delighted to do it; why spoil their fun?

—Mark Twain

As we’ve just discussed, most of our actions are far more influenced by others than many of us imagine. That’s why influencers take care to ensure that those they want to influence are sufficiently encouraged to adopt vital behaviors. But encouragement isn’t enough. Offering a supportive smile is good, but when people need permission, information, coaching, or hands-on help, a friendly nod won’t cut it. It’s time to make use of source 4, social ability.

So we’ll start this chapter with one of our favorite examples of an influencer who enables millions of people across half a continent to enact new vital behaviors by brilliantly leveraging the help of their friends.

Seated in a tight circle in a neat, tin-roofed building located in a small village in central India, we find five housewives—Tanika, Kamara, Damini, Payal, and Sankul. They’re in the middle of the most important meeting they’ll ever attend. They’re selecting the first of five businesses they’ll start (one each) through small loans from Ujjivan, a local microcredit firm that has set up shop in the region.

Despite the fact that none of these women has ever held a job outside the home or taken a single course in business, and despite the fact that all are caring for families of their own with little or no help from their husbands or ex-husbands, nobody will tell these five women what businesses to start. They will invent businesses on their own as a team.

Today Tanika plans to propose that she be the first of the five women to start her own business. She is desperate to get started because, like many women within a radius of several hundred miles, she lives in gut-wrenching poverty.

“Maybe I can start an egg business like my friend Chatri,” one of the women, Payal, suggests with a shy smile.

“You can’t start there,” Sankul explains. “It takes three or four loans to work your way up to such a large investment. We have to think smaller.”

“My cousin Mitali has enjoyed great success with the minivan she rents,” Kamara enthuses.

Once again Sankul sets her friends straight. “That requires an even larger investment. It has taken your cousin over five years to work her way up to a vehicle. We’re beginners and have to start much smaller.”

“I’ve got it!” Damini suggests. “I would like to make puffed rice. It takes very little money, and I’ve heard that many women in nearby villages are now doing well with similar ventures.”

“That’s the problem,” Tanika says. “Too many people are in that business, and profits could drop.”

“Then what do you think will work?” Damini asks Tanika.

Tanika makes her move. “I think I have a plan that will make money, even for a beginning person like me. You all know that I have earned money in the past by collecting hair from the local barber shops and making wigs.”

“Yes, and they’re beautiful,” Sankul responds. “But you haven’t been able to live off of that.”

Tanika remains undeterred. The circumstances she faces are far too desperate for her to back away at the first sign of discouragement. Three months earlier when her husband sold his rice crop for far less than he expected, he came home one evening screaming obscenities, beat her, accused her of dragging him into poverty, called her ugly, and threw her and their three daughters into the street. Under normal circumstances in her village, a divorce such as this would have been a death sentence for Tanika and her children.

But these weren’t normal circumstances. One day as Tanika sat in her tiny hut, worrying about her family’s next meal, her neighbor Sankul approached her with wonderful news. A group of people from the city was starting to loan money to women such as her as a means of helping them start new businesses.

“It’s our turn!” Sankul had said. “It’s our turn to help lift ourselves out of poverty.” Tanika liked the idea but had to admit that the radical words sounded like something Sankul must have heard from one of the strangers from the city. What did they know that she didn’t?

Who would loan money to a nearly starved woman of no means? Tanika wondered. How will I be able to come up with an idea for a successful business?

As a gentle but unrelenting rain starts to beat its tattoo on the tin roof over the five Indian women, Tanika continues to articulate her partially formed idea.

“You’re right; I can’t count on wig making. But I know of a place that will buy hair and use the oil from the hair follicles to make health products. I was thinking that if I could find new ways to gather hair, I could sell it to that company and make enough money to feed and clothe my family.”

“How do you propose to do that?” asked Payal, the shiest of the five would-be entrepreneurs. “I’ll gladly give you the hair from my hair brushes. It does me no good,” said Damini, offering her support. “So will I,” Kamara chimed in. “And I bet we could get all of our neighbors to do the same.”

Tanika had thought about asking her neighbors for the hair from their brushes and was encouraged to hear that her friends would support her.

“I was thinking that maybe I could hire people to gather hair from surrounding neighborhoods,” she explained. “Yes,” Sankul agreed, “but how would you pay them?” “Hire children,” Kamara proposed. “You wouldn’t have to pay them much, and surely children can gather hair.”

“Toys!” Damini shouted. “Buy a batch of small plastic toys and offer them to any child who brings you hair. That way you’ll get hair for almost nothing, and the money from your sales will be nearly all profit.”

And with that final addition to her original idea, Tanika had all the elements of a business plan. Tanika secured a loan of $20 and immediately bought a bag full of inexpensive plastic toys. Then, much like an entrepreneurial Santa Claus, Tanika trudged with her sack of trinkets from village to village.

“I’ll let you pick any toy you’d like from the bag if you’ll bring me all the hair in your mother and sisters’ hairbrushes,” Tanika explained to the first group of waifs she encountered.

When the word got out that hair earned toys, our unlikely entrepreneur was inundated. Eventually Tanika sold the hair, repaid her loan, and had capital left over to expand.

A year has passed, and Tanika now has hundreds of women working for her. They gather hair in the villages using toys and sell the hair to Tanika, who then sells it again for a profit. She no longer worries about her family’s next meal. And not only has she raised her family to a position far above the poverty line but Tanika is no longer the same shy, frightened person she was a year ago.

LESSONS FROM A NOBEL LAUREATE

This example raises an interesting question. Why was Tanika able to succeed despite the fact that hundreds of millions of people just like her have failed to fight their way out of poverty? To answer this question, we need to spend time with a recent Nobel Prize winner who just happens to be the genius behind Tanika’s success. Meet the soft-spoken and brilliant Muhammad Yunus. He’s the man who figured out how to help Tanika and another hundred million people out of poverty.

Here’s the part of his amazing story that provides the central theme to this chapter. After leaving the United States with a doctorate in economics, Dr. Yunus decided to return to his homeland of Bangladesh to become a university professor. As he assumed his comfortable teaching position, he was horrified to discover that just outside the academic compound, hundreds of thousands of people were dying of starvation.

As Dr. Yunus investigated, it didn’t take him long to discover that the root cause of Bangladesh’s acute and chronic poverty was not the indolence of the poor. Everywhere he looked in neighboring villages he saw people who worked hard but who were still unable to earn a decent wage. After interviewing 42 people in one village, he was shocked to discover that the biggest barrier was not energy, but capital. Few in these villages had traditional jobs. Most were self-employed. If they weren’t supported by their own small plot of land, they were the sole proprietor of a small craft or service business.

To finance their businesses, they needed capital. Usually it was just a few pennies. Since none had even this small amount, they were forced to turn to local loan sharks who charged over 1,000 percent interest. The interest rate was set at just the point to guarantee that each entrepreneur would exhaust his or her income repaying the loan and forever be locked in a cycle of indebtedness. Yunus was dumbfounded when he discovered that a woman who made beautiful handcrafted stools was held in poverty because she lacked the 5 cents she would need to buy supplies each day. Five cents!

Yunus ended his research with the conclusion that if he could enable one vital behavior (villagers’ successfully securing and repaying a business loan), he could improve the financial fortunes of the 42 people he interviewed. In total, the 42 people he interviewed needed a paltry $27 to finance their businesses.

Yunus next turned to local banks and suggested that they offer loans to these 42 laborers at market rates. No takers. In fact, bank executives laughed him out of their offices. As far as they were concerned, no collateral, no loans! This harsh policy caused Dr. Yunus grave distress. In his own words:

Usually when my head touches the pillow, I fall asleep within seconds, but that night I lay in bed ashamed that I was part of a society which could not provide $27 to fortytwo able-bodied, hard-working, skilled persons to make a living for themselves.

Thirty years have passed since that tortured day, and Dr. Yunus now runs a multi-billion-dollar banking and business conglomerate known as Grameen Bank, which has started a revolution that has helped more than 100 million people like Tanika out of poverty. The microcredit group that loaned Tanika the starting cash she needed in neighboring India was formed as a direct result of Dr. Yunus’s work.

What makes this story even more remarkable is that Dr. Yunus’s methods not only helped Tanika but also her four friends who opened small businesses and succeeded—as do 39 out of every 40 people that Dr. Yunus helps. That’s correct—98 percent of the people to whom Yunus loans money enact the second vital behavior for moving themselves out of abject poverty: they pay back their loans with full interest.

The majority of these successful business owners move their families out of poverty. They educate their children, and by now many of these children have earned advanced degrees. Once-starving villagers who at one time earned 2 cents for a day’s hard labor now run profitable businesses while their children attend universities.

As inspiring as this story is, the key takeaway lies in learning how Yunus was able to ensure that his poverty-stricken clients were able to enact the vital behaviors that led to success. What influence magic does he work to ensure that noncollateralized loans are paid back over 98 percent of the time? Equally important, which strategies can you and I put into place as still another powerful tool in our influence repertoire?

As is the case with any complex intervention that claims to change people with long histories of painful failures, Dr. Yunus makes use of virtually every method we mention in this book. His task is too large to rely on a single influence tool, so he uses them all. Nevertheless, by watching Tanika and her colleagues in action, we can focus on yet another high-leverage influence tool: the power of social capital.

Dr. Yunus didn’t merely ask Tanika to submit a business plan that he would review. He demanded that she form a team with four of her neighbors, each of whom would submit plans of her own. Each person from the team would eventually be granted a loan. And with the granting of a loan, each of the other four people would cosign for the debt! That meant that Tanika had to convince her four friends that her business idea would work. More likely, she would have to work with them to create a plan that they would first co-invent and then support.

What do you suppose happens when people who have never worked a job and who are currently inches away from the jaws of the grim reaper are being asked to cosign their new teammate’s note in case the business fails? They don’t put up with any half-baked ideas. They create smart and workable plans by uniting the intellectual capital of all five people in the group.

ENLIST THE POWER OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

In Chapter 6, we learned that other people can motivate us in profound ways. Now we add the second of the two social sources of influence: social ability. As the Beatles suggested, we’re most likely to succeed when we have “a little help from our friends.” These friends provide us with access to their brains, give us the strength of their hands, and even allow us to make use of their many other personal resources. In effect, they provide us with social capital. In fact, with a little help from our friends, we can produce a force greater than the sum of our individual efforts. But we can do this only when we know how to make use of social capital—the profound enabling power of an essential network of relationships. And Dr. Yunus has made use of this power as well as anyone alive.

Popular author James Surowiecki has explained why Tanika was able to come up with her successful business plan. Surowiecki was the first to suggest that the idea he proposes in his book The Wisdom of Crowds has been around for a long time. In his very first sentence, Surowiecki points to British scientist Francis Galton, who applied statistical methods to demonstrate that groups—made up of people at all intellectual levels—often perform better than any one individual.

When 787 local residents who visited a regional livestock fair guessed the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox, Galton calculated the average score of the locals who predicted the weight to be 1,197 pounds. The ox eventually weighed in at 1,198 pounds. The group average wasn’t merely close to the correct weight. It was almost exactly correct. The point Surowiecki makes about crowds is this: “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Long before Surowiecki popularized the idea that groups can do better than the smartest individuals, Dr. Yunus put this notion to work in his microcredit enterprises. Consider the five women who had never held jobs as they were brainstorming ways to leverage Tanika’s scheme. No one person came up with the final plan, but, by playing off each other’s suggestions, they jointly came up with a method that succeeded. They were able to do so because they weren’t merely pooling ignorance; they were inventing products and services that would sell in their own village, and they all knew their village.

BUILD SOCIAL CAPITAL BY PROVIDING ASSISTANCE

Sometimes it’s obvious that a profound change in behavior will require assistance from others. For example, if Dr. Don Berwick and his team want to save 100,000 patients from accidental death in U.S. hospitals, it’s clear that they’ll need to involve doctors, nurses, administrators, housekeepers, and others. The same is true with Dr. Silbert’s work with ex-cons. She doesn’t merely rely on a village to help her. She actually creates a village.

Sometimes it’s not so obvious that your change strategy requires anyone other than yourself. For example, you might think that sticking with a diet is a matter of individual will. In the solitary moments when you’re deciding between a deep-fried apple turnover and an apple, it’s all up to you. But you’d be wrong to make the assumption that you’re alone. While all vital behaviors are enacted by individuals and often done in private, an enabling group of individuals can make an enormous difference in influencing change.

For example, Dr. Wiwat succeeded at influencing vulnerable sex workers who can feel quite intimidated when facing a liquored-up client who demands sex with no condom. As we’ll see shortly, although the sex worker is flying solo in these moments, scores of other people will find a way to help her succeed. Clever influencers always consider ways to ensure that individuals have sufficient social support to step up and succeed in crucial moments.

So, when exactly should you provide assistance to bring about challenging changes?

When Others Are Part of the Problem

Consider the following common business problem. It highlights exactly when people need to rely on the help of others in order to succeed at work.

Meet Jess. At this very moment he’s sweating like an Olympic boxer. That’s because he’s about to tell a lie, and he’s afraid he’ll get caught. Jess fears that he’ll get caught because, unlike a good poker player who can bluff without giving off a clue, Jess has “tells” that he’s powerless to mask. Right now in addition to sweating profusely, his left eye is twitching so violently that he’s sure it must be visible from across the room. As Jess starts to speak, his throat constricts to the size of a straw—still another tell. After faking a coughing seizure, Jess eventually squeaks out the big, fat lie that’s sure to get him in trouble.

“No problem,” Jess mutters. “We’re right on target.”

Jess isn’t the only fibber at the table. Everyone in this product development meeting is stretching the truth. In fact, at the 1,500-person software development group where Jess works, telling your coworkers and bosses that your work is on schedule when it actually isn’t is deeply rooted in the culture. Lying about readiness is so common that Jess and his colleagues have given it a special name. It’s called “project chicken.”

Here’s how the game is played. You say you’re ready with your part of a project when you aren’t, in the hope that someone else will admit that he or she will need to extend the deadline. The first person to lose nerve and say “I need more time” is the chicken. And like the vehicular version of the same game, once someone swerves, everyone else is safe. All the others are off the hook because they’ll benefit from the new extended deadline, only they didn’t have to admit that they messed up. In this particular meeting, most of the team leaders at the table, just like Jess, are dangerously behind. Yet none of them will admit it. Nobody swerves, the deadline isn’t extended, and, as a result of their combined lying, a major product release will soon end in disaster.

When we (the authors) first started working with this particular software company, it was on the brink of bankruptcy. It had not met a product release date in years. And when the company finally did release products, those products typically cost twice as much as they should have. Morale was at an all-time low, so in addition to product problems, the company was losing far too many of its most talented players.

Mike, the newly appointed VP of development, was tasked with turning around this situation. He had already identified the vital behavior he had to influence. He knew that if he could find a way to both motivate and enable employees up and down the organization to speak up early and honestly about problems, the company would improve morale, reduce costs, and gain control of the schedule. But that was a big order.

When we first met Mike, he had already tried several strategies. He had implemented communication training. He had identified opinion leaders and asked them to help solve the problem. He had even created an anonymous survey to measure whether or not behavior was changing. Still, the organization was stuck. In fact, Mike told us that all he had to show for his effort was good solid data that the company was failing.

What Mike didn’t realize until late in the game was that Jess and his colleagues were not isolated actors making independent decisions about how to talk about deadlines in meetings. Lying in order to look good had been reinforced by managers, directors, and vice presidents. Even Mike had unwittingly played a role in encouraging people to bring only good news to the table. And since the behavior was created by the group, the group would have to be involved in changing it. So how could he provide assistance?

To answer this, let’s see how someone else dealt with a similar problem. We travel 9,000 miles to South Africa to study Garth Japhet. No one has thought longer, harder, or more carefully about how to build social capital than Garth Japhet. He’s a master at turning a me problem into a we problem.

Dr. Japhet began his career as a medical doctor, but he wound a circuitous path to his current position as CEO of Soul City, a South African media brain trust that has led successful efforts to fight AIDS, infant mortality, and malnutrition. More recently, Japhet has turned his attention to preventing violence against women. Dr. Japhet has directed his attention to this particular problem because, within the borders of South Africa, the scourge of violence against women is nothing short of horrendous. One in nine women will be raped at least once in her lifetime. One in five will be physically or emotionally abused by her partner.

Dr. Japhet realized that he wasn’t about to solve this deeply entrenched problem by teaching women individually to stand up on their own two feet and eventually overthrow the insensitive men who obviously deserved a comeuppance. Instead, Japhet realized that he’d have to find a way to include everyone who was creating the problem in solving the problem.

Japhet also understood that there were many in South African society who disapproved of the abuse—both women and men. And yet these people felt unable to exert sufficient influence to change the behavior they despised. So Japhet gave them a way. In his own words:

On the TV program Soul City, we purposefully created a well-respected teacher, Thabang, who repeatedly abused his likable wife Matlakala. Viewers—both male and female—quickly concluded that Matlakala didn’t deserve the abuse as tradition had often indicated. She was pleasant, easy to get along with, and nothing more than an innocent victim. Equally curious, Thabang was mostly a reasonable and good person—much like themselves.

Then the writers showed how interested friends and neighbors could be part of the solution. Dr. Arvind Singhal, who served as a research adviser to Soul City, reports: “On one episode the neighbors hear Thabang beating poor Matlakala, and they can take it no longer, so they decide to let Thabang know that his actions aren’t going unobserved. But how? How could they let Thabang know without being too intrusive? How could they do it without putting themselves at physical risk? Saying something directly would be unacceptable and dangerous.”

Dr. Singhal continues: “To send their violent neighbor the message that his behavior is neither private nor acceptable, the neighbors gather outside Thabang’s front door and bang pots and pans. They don’t say a word; they just bang pots and pans.” In the program, Thabang becomes embarrassed and begins to change his behavior.

What happened after that was totally unexpected. People in several townships across South Africa, upon hearing the sounds of spousal abuse next door, began to stand in front of their neighbors’ home and bang pots and pans.

The power of vicarious modeling worked its magic. The message was out. Men would no longer be allowed to abuse their wives with impunity. Violent behavior, and the collective silence that supported it, were not part of the new norm.

Here’s the influence takeaway. Japhet realized that if bad behavior is reinforced by a web of players, all the players have to be engaged in influencing change. In this particular case, the neighbors had to help lead the change for good because neighbors who stood by and allowed obvious abuse to continue were a big part of the problem.

And that’s also how Mike, the VP of development, finally eliminated “project chicken.” He had first tried to solve the problem by confronting employees like Jess without addressing the role his managers, directors, and a host of others played in the problem. When he realized what was missing, he took a completely different tack. He asked the training department to teach people how to hold high-stakes conversations about project problems. Then he charged every one of his organization’s leaders to be the teachers. It was a stroke of brilliance that changed everything.

Every two weeks the very manager who had previously sent subtle signals about suppressing candor taught a two-hour session on how to speak up about risky problems. In the first two sessions Jess listened passively and cynically. By the third session he raised a concern with his manager. In the context of the class, the manager felt a special responsibility to respond appropriately. By the sixth session many of Jess’s peers had begun to open up. Within a matter of months powerful new norms emerged, and Mike’s vital behavior of candor under pressure flourished. Within a year the organization had launched two product releases on time and on budget, and morale was at an all-time high.^*

To see how providing assistance can apply at home, let’s return to our friend Henry as he continues his lifelong quest to eat healthily and keep his weight down. He’s learned that when it comes to coworkers, friends, and family members, most are full-out enablers, not helpers. Instead of acting like friends, they act like accomplices in the crimes against his body. They take Henry out to fancy restaurants, eat fatty and delicious food in front of him at work, give him gifts of the very food he loves but shouldn’t eat, stock the pantry chock-full of all the wrong ingredients, and so on.

In fact, when it comes to losing weight, Henry can’t think of anyone who is helping him in any way. One day when he asks his wife to stop buying bags of chocolate candy, she actually laughs out loud. She loves candy, buys candy, eats candy, and never gains a pound, so why shouldn’t she buy candy?

But Henry knows it’s hard to go it alone. “Hey, look at me. I live here in the apartment with you. I smell all that delicious chocolate, and it drives me crazy!”

And it wasn’t just his olfactory powers that clued Henry in about the importance of enlisting others’ help. He had recently read a study (conducted by our friend Albert Bandura) about research subjects who were trying to lower their cholesterol. As both Henry and Bandura suspected, participants routinely achieved greater reductions in their cholesterol when their spouses took part in the program.

So Henry has to find a way to step up to his enablers and ask them to become helpers. This means that Henry will have to talk to others in a way that creates genuine dialogue rather than resistance and recrimination.

When You Can’t Succeed on Your Own

The poet John Donne was right: no man is an island. When the people surrounding you are causing or contributing to the problems, playing the role of enabler rather than helper, you need to fight the urge to attack your detractors for their contribution to your pain. Instead, co-opt them. Turn a me problem into a we problem. Provide assistance in order to help people turn vital behaviors into productive habits.

Interdependence. When a vital behavior requires several people to work in concert—where no one person can succeed on his or her own—you have to develop people’s ability to work as a team. There was a time when highly skilled craftspeople worked alone producing pots, candles, jewelry, and the like. But today corporate success often depends on experts who are at least as specialized as their predecessors and who rely on one another to complete their tasks.

For instance, a typical software development team consists not only of code writers but also of designers, marketers, writers, and salespeople. At various stages in the development, all have to connect, bring their piece of the project online, and, at the interpersonal level, find a way to collaborate. Leaders who fail to appreciate this concept are regularly disappointed when their influence efforts bear no fruit.

We (the authors) once worked with a production team that had decided to lower costs by shifting to just-in-time inventory. This meant that no longer would the company maintain a stock of parts and works-in-progress as the product made its way through the production line. One expert would hand his or her finished work to the next expert instead of placing it in a stack that the next person would get to at his or her leisure. This new design, of course, called for impeccable timing (each person’s job needed to take the same amount of time as the person’s before and after him or her). It also called for genuine collaboration. If any one person slowed down, sped up, took an unscheduled break, or failed to meet a quality standard, it caused the previous and next person fits.

When we arrived to help with the project, the company had learned that the old style of stacking expensive inventory between employees had masked the workforce’s inability to cooperate. Now that employees were immediately dependent on the person before and after them, they were constantly bickering, complaining, and asking to change positions in the line. Supervisors would routinely intervene to help their direct reports work through problems, but they ended up spending most of their time refereeing heated arguments.

It turned out that the company wasn’t prepared to shift to a just-in-time system because it didn’t possess the skills to collaborate. When executives purposely built interdependence into the work design, the new design quickly revealed that employees lacked interpersonal problem-solving skills along with the ability to hold one another accountable. Working in isolation had atrophied their ability to interact effectively. No longer did employees “work and play well” with their friends.

The company was unable to implement the new inventory system until each employee had been trained in interpersonal problem solving. Interdependence calls for individuals to share ideas, provide materials, lend a hand, subordinate one’s personal needs to the needs of the group, and otherwise willingly and ably collaborate. Leaders who don’t continually help interdependent employees learn new and better ways to work in tandem tend to routinely suffer from rivalry, and they are never able to make full use of their valuable social capital.

Novelty. Tanika’s group demonstrates another circumstance that calls for the power of social capital. Tanika and the other members of her borrower group were certainly not specialists, and they faced problems that were completely new to them. Fortunately, the toys-for-hair plan the five came up with grew out of the best thinking of the group. No one person had exactly the right idea, but as one partial idea was added upon and then changed again, each person helped create a strategy that, if left to her own devices, none would have invented.

When facing changing, turbulent, or novel times—calling for novel solutions—multiple heads can be better than one. By demanding that no budding entrepreneur work alone, Dr. Yunus ensures that his microcredit clients always work in teams, think in teams, and meet every single week and brainstorm as teams. Grameen Bank counts on synergy through forced interaction.

Risk. As you might expect, among all the influencers we have studied, those who faced the biggest risks also worked the hardest to provide assistance as a means of influencing change during crucial moments. Toward the top of this list, of course, would be Dr. Silbert, whose job it is to transform hardened criminals into productive citizens. Think of what Silbert’s wards do as a matter of their daily work, and you’ll appreciate just how much risk she and her organization face.

Every day about a hundred of Silbert’s San Francisco residents invade people’s residences across the Bay Area and remove their valuables. This is something many of them did before joining Delancey. The difference now is that they are doing so as part of the Delancey Moving Company. That’s right, people who had once made a living moving furniture and other goods illegally are now doing so legally. You’d think that this business strategy was far too risky given the employees’ job histories. Nevertheless, every single valuable Delancey movers remove shows up at the new residence. Delancey is the largest privately owned moving company in the Bay Area for a good reason. The company has never had a loss or theft. Imagine what would happen if even one pearl necklace came up missing. Delancey’s reputation would be lost, and the moving company along with its 100 jobs would simply disappear. In spite of huge risk, Delancey has no problems.

Equally astounding is the fact that in the Delancey restaurant, residents still reeling from alcohol or drug withdrawal serve alcohol to customers as part of their daily job. Hearing about this obvious incongruity for the first time, we asked Silbert how she deals with “relapses.” Without hesitation, she answered, “We don’t have relapse.” When we pressed her, she thought back to the last instance of abuse and acknowledged that a year earlier one person had “gotten dirty.” To fully appreciate what this means, we need to consider that the average rehab program has a very low success rate.

Silbert sends criminals into people’s homes, and she asks alcoholics to serve drinks—with almost no problems. When you ask her why her influence strategy succeeds, she explains that a key lies in the complex, pervasive, and powerful social system of Delancey. The organization does not have a single inhouse professional, but it does have a great deal of social capital. Delancey relies on a web of helping relationships that Silbert has constructed for over 30 years.

Here’s how she provides assistance as a means of supporting vital behaviors. Silbert structures the entire Delancey experience around residents giving each other instruction, mentoring, and guidance. That means that a resident who has been onboard for a single day is likely to be asked to assist someone who has just arrived. And despite the fact that a resident may have shown up at the front door hungover, uneducated, and skilled only in criminal behavior, he or she will eventually earn the equivalent of a PhD in mentoring, coaching, and teaching—or nobody will make it out alive.

In Silbert’s words, “You learn a little and then teach it to someone else—’Each one teach one.’ For example, you’re at Delancey a hot minute and someone newer than you comes in. So someone says to you, ‘Do me a favor, take him under your wing.’ From that point on, people talk with you more about how you’re doing with the guys under you than about yourself.”

To ensure that individuals assist one another, Delancey is structured with one goal in mind. From the moment a resident arrives at Delancey—frightened and suspicious—he or she is immersed in a culture and language system designed to maximize peer support. If you were a resident, here’s how you’d be enriched with assistance.

When you first show up, you’re assigned to a dorm of nine individuals of different races. Next, you’re placed in what is known as a “minyan.” A minyan is made up of 10 people from different dorms. The word minyan originates from Jewish tradition and refers to a congregation consisting of 10 adults. A full minyan is required to be present before public services can be held. So, the Delancey version of a minyan is a self-supporting group that’s able to do what residents would be unable to do on their own. At Delancey, minyans practically print social capital.

Minyan leaders take primary responsibility for residents’ growth, needs, and supervision. Minyans, in turn, are supervised by a “barber.” (A good bawling out or scolding on the street is sometimes referred to as a “haircut.” Hence, the title barber goes to those whose job it is to ensure that everyone in the minyan is challenging everyone else.)

Assistance comes in still more forms. For example, residents work for crews with crew bosses who are also peers. The average person arrives with a seventh-grade education, and each is required to leave Delancey with at least a high school equivalency certificate. And Delancey achieves this amazing result without hiring a single professional teacher. They provide assistance by tutoring each other.

To see how all this coaching, teaching, modeling, and tutoring plays itself out, consider the field of romance.

“We’re not healthy,” our Delancey resident James admits. “We shouldn’t be in relationships until we can see the thing is more than sex. We tend to just say, ‘The hell with it!’ when the relationship gets tough.”

So to prepare to go on dates (something they’re not allowed to do for at least six months), residents attend couples’ groups that, as you’ve probably guessed, are taught by resident couples who have been dating slightly longer than the new students. The more seasoned couples teach others how to behave on dates as well as how to talk about what’s working and what isn’t. And guess who will be going along with each new couple on their first few dates. A chaperone who is assigned by the barber to keep the two on the straight and narrow.

This is just a small sampling of how an organization that has virtually no professional resources provides interpersonal assistance as a powerful influence for changing people’s behavior—and lives. Now, if a philanthropist left a billion dollars to Delancey so that the institution could afford to hire professional teachers, counselors, and coaches, do you think Dr. Silbert would allow it? Of course not. By helping others, residents help themselves even more. Teachers learn more than students, mentors more than mentees, and trainers more trainees, so why restrict all this important learning to outside professionals who have already been to school?

At the business level, more than one organization is beginning to understand how to reduce risk by making better use of social capital. For example, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley create “business incubators” as a way of helping new businesses survive the risky start-up phase. The incubators are systems through which specialists of all types freely offer expertise to companies when that advice is most needed.

From a personal career standpoint, the need to provide assistance by connecting with others has never been greater. Tom Boyle of British Telecom coined the expression network quotient (NQ) to highlight the importance of a person’s ability to form connections with others. He argues that from a career standpoint a person’s NQ is now more important than his or her intelligence quotient (IQ). Since you can’t know everything, it’s essential that you find people who can make up for your blind spots. A whole host of recent studies has revealed that today’s most successful employees have networks of people they can go to for expertise, as well as networks of people they can trust with sensitive requests. Successful people not only refuse to see themselves as islands but they also carefully reduce their personal vulnerability by ensuring that they’re valued members of hyperconnected networks.

All these examples deal with the same problem. Changing, complex, turbulent, and risky times require multiple heads to come up with creative solutions that no one person could ever invent. So take your lead from Dr. Yunus. When problems call for creativity and multiple views, place people in teams. To make the best use of your existing human resources and dramatically lower your risks, take your lead from Delancey by turning your more experienced employees into coaches, trainers, instructors, and mentors.

Blind Spots. Perhaps the most obvious condition that demands social support as a means of influencing vital behaviors comes with the need for feedback that can be offered only by a pair of outside eyes. Anyone who has ever tried to learn tennis on his or her own and then gone head-on with someone who has spent a similar amount of time practicing with the aid of a coach quickly learns that real-time feedback from an expert beats solo practice any day. This being the case, you’d think that most people would turn to coaches to help in key areas of their lives, but they don’t. Only a few ask for feedback outside of sports arenas.

But there are exceptions. For example, in healthcare, where doctors are required to insert tubes in people’s hearts and perform other such high-stakes practices, professionals long ago learned the power of real-time coaching. In many instances, physicians aren’t allowed to merely watch others perform a detailed and dangerous procedure before they try it on their own. Instead, they must attempt the delicate procedure while a coach provides immediate feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.

When it comes to business and other lower-risk settings, leaders rarely think of using real-time coaches. Some of today’s companies provide their leaders with call-in advisers who discuss what happened yesterday when the leader faced a challenge and didn’t do all that well. But few provide real-time coaching. This should change.

For example, when we (the authors) worked with Lauren, a rather vibrant executive who was a terrible speaker, we provided her with a speech coach. It was amazing to watch someone once described as having “the uncanny ability to whip a crowd into a nap” be transformed into a solid speaker in a matter of a few hours. Lauren didn’t take a course or read a book. She merely practiced giving a speech while receiving immediate feedback: “Pick up the speed by 10 percent.” “Pause after the word ‘successful.’” After four hours of guided instruction, Lauren learned what might have taken months without feedback.

Since you’re on the wrong side of your eyeballs, you can’t always see exactly what it is that you’re doing that works or doesn’t work. So invest in still another form of assistance: seek real-time feedback from an expert.

Group Solidarity. In a parable by William Forster Lloyd published in 1833, we first hear of a problem that is now known as the “tragedy of the commons.” The parable describes how a town allowed farmers to graze livestock at will on common soil—soil often owned by nobility. This well-intentioned practice eventually led to a public disaster. The more successful a farmer became, the more sheep he grazed, until eventually there were so many sheep grazing on the land that “the common” was destroyed. What was good for the individual farmer was bad for the collective whole.

You might have faced a similarly constructed scenario. For instance, after plodding along for an hour in stop-and-go traffic, you come across the cause of the holdup. You discover that a large box lies in one lane, causing the snarl. On the one hand, what’s good for you—zooming off immediately—is bad for everyone who follows. On the other hand, if you sacrifice your own interest and step out of the car and remove the box, everyone else will benefit.

Under these conditions, individuals have to learn how to invest in one of the most powerful forms of social capital: solidarity. We must give ourselves up to the larger cause and act for the good of everyone else, or the plan will fail. For instance, we (the authors) were once charged with creating a leadership class that taught newly appointed frontline supervisors how to hold their direct reports accountable. To create the course, we looked for positive deviance. We watched those who succeeded where others failed in action, learned what they did, and then included their unique skills in an accountability class.

After completing the course, all the graduates were asked to put into practice what they had just learned by talking to people who broke rules, violated procedures, or otherwise behaved badly. But a few didn’t put their new skills into practice. These “late adopters” waited to see if their colleagues were going to step up to the challenge before they gave their new tools a trial run. The majority who did confront their direct reports about deviations were soon ridiculed for being too tough. Hourly folks pointed to the supervisors who weren’t setting the same standards for their employees and concluded that their own bosses were unfair or hard-nosed. Eventually everyone stopped applying what he or she had studied.

We learned from this incident the power of solidarity. From that point on, we secured the promise of every supervisor that he or she would step up to problems before we sent anyone into action. With that particular change project, asking employees to toe the line turned out to be an all-or-nothing deal.

To see the importance of solidarity on a much larger scale, let’s look at how our friend Dr. Wiwat from Thailand engaged others’ assistance to help stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. After failing to make a dent in the problem using traditional influence methods, Wiwat took a much more direct approach. Shutting down the sex industry in Thailand was the ideal, but leaders were unable to do so, and the vicious virus was spreading at unprecedented rates. So leaders turned their attention to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Since almost all the new cases were coming from sex workers who weren’t protecting themselves or their clients, Wiwat started a campaign of solidarity.

In Wiwat’s view, one group of people—sex workers—could bring the spread of HIV/AIDS to a halt, but it would have to be done as a group. When a client offered money for sex and the sex worker demanded protection (a solution to the spread of AIDS), more often than not the client would simply go elsewhere.

But what if every worker demanded protection and always refused the financial incentive? Then there would be no place where clients could find sex workers who offered unprotected sex, and eventually every client would practice safe sex, thereby stopping the spread of AIDS. But once again, this plan called for an all-or-nothing deal. If one sex worker broke ranks or one brothel eased its demands, the game would be off.

To ensure that everyone complied, Wiwat held a meeting to which he invited all sex business owners. Then he held a meeting for all their workers. In both forums he explained the economics of why every single person had to participate in the plan or AIDS would eventually kill them all, along with their businesses. He then informed them of HIV growth rates and detailed what would happen if any individual or establishment refused to sign up for the program.

Eventually, when every worker bought into the plan and the entire population banded together by demanding protection, compliance rates increased from around 14 percent to over 90 percent. As a result of demanding solidarity and providing needed social support, an estimated 5 million people have been spared the horrific consequences of contracting HIV/AIDS in Thailand.

What role might solidarity play closer to home? When studying parenting, it doesn’t take long to uncover the simple yet important notion that, with effective parents, no means no. Effective parents help bring predictability into a child’s turbulent life by letting him or her know that parents’ word is their bond. If a child hits her sister, she’ll pay a consequence. If a teenager comes home after curfew, it’ll come with a cost. With two parents in the home, the expectation that no actually means no can of course be achieved only when both parents stand unified, shoulder to shoulder. Otherwise, the child plays one parent off the other, and anarchy prevails. When it comes to disciplining children—as is the case with many profound and pervasive problems—solidarity rules.

SUMMARY: SOCIAL ABILITY

In an interdependent, turbulent world, our biggest opponents—the mortal enemy of all families, companies, and communities—may well be our inability to work in concert. Since rarely does any one of us have all that’s required to succeed with the complex tasks we face every day, we desperately need to build social capital. We need to provide concrete assistance during crucial moments in order to help people change.

However, that’s certainly not the message we’ve been fed for years. The movie and TV heroes of the last half century have fought the enemy within—the big bosses, the establishment, “the man.” This constant celebration of the rugged individualist has had an enormous dampening effect on people’s willingness to draw on others to enable change.

Influencers know better than to turn their backs on social capital. They’re quick to consider what help, authority, consent, or cooperation individuals may need when facing risky or daunting new behaviors. Then they develop an influence strategy that offers the social capital required to help make change inevitable.

^*For more information on this and other case studies, visit www.vitalsmarts.com/corporatecasestudies.aspx.