Key 7

Sell Opportunity to Cautious People

 

 

You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a handful of complex ideas and leave a void behind—you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost!

—Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Over the years, the medical field has been cautious—for good reason. However, one of the most important medical breakthroughs in history was made because an eager surgeon was influenced by a great scientist to seize an opportunity. At the time, doctors ridiculed a new idea that tiny germs could kill a large animal or a human. They believed that germs spontaneously appeared and that people either inherited their susceptibility to them or succumbed because they were being punished for evildoing. Then a French scientist, Louis Pasteur, discovered that germs could kill large animals and that germs came from other diseased persons or animals. However, as late as 1872, a professor at the University of Toulouse said that Pasteur’s germ theory was a ridiculous fiction. Pasteur infuriated doctors by saying that 50 percent of all surgery patients died because they were infected during surgery. He proposed that surgeons disinfect themselves, their instruments, and the area of the patient that was open during surgery. Influenced by Pasteur’s writings, a surgeon named Joseph Lister developed antiseptic methods that reduced the death rate from his surgeries from nearly 50 percent to 12 percent. Others followed Lister. In the next 10 years, thousands of surgeons adopted his methods.

Almost all major innovations in history were spread only after some eager investor produced results so impressive that some of the cautious ones became willing to try the idea.

The Concerns of the Cautious

People are cautious for good reason. Their caution often is expressed in the personal and business questions they ask when they are asked to make changes. The personal questions are:

• Why should we change? Why now? Why us? Why me?
• What if I make a mistake? Will I be worse off after the change?
• What will my new job be? What will the new organization look like?
• How and when will the change be made?
• Does the organization care about what happens to me?
• Will I have a say in what happens, or will they ignore what I think?
• Will I have a role or position as good as the one I have today?
• Will my expertise be as needed and as valuable?
• Will I lose power or influence? Whom will I work for? Will I have a job at all?
• If I lose my job, how will I support my family?
• Where will I find another job?

The business questions and considerations are:

• Is the technology proven?
• Is this opportunity real and long term, or is it just another wild idea or passing fad?
• Is there a clear, low-risk return on any investment we might make?
• Who else in my market has done this? Were they successful?
• We already have our plates full; where would we get the resources?
• Why can’t we wait until the opportunity is more widely tried and proven successful?
• Will my boss or the rest of the organization buy into it?
• What is the hidden downside to the perceived opportunity?
• Is there a safe exit strategy if it doesn’t work?

As related in his book The Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1995), the researcher Everett Rogers found five factors that determine how fast innovations are adopted within a culture:

• the relative advantage of the new method or technology
• the compatibility of the new method or technology with adopters’ existing beliefs and customs
• how simple and easy it is to use
• how easily it can be tried or experienced
• how observable the results are.

Note that all five factors are viewed from the eyes of the potential adopter.

Many cautious people want to keep things the way they are—not only because the way things are has high meaning for them but also because they would rather wait until the opportunity has been proved before they invest. This is the large group shown in the middle of figure 7-1. If selling techniques are used effectively, this group moves up to a supporting role, as the figure shows.

To get this large group to invest, you must be able to answer this question: How do we influence those who have high meaning with their present states—who are skeptical, who don’t like change, or who are weary of change?

How Do We Influence Those Who Are Skeptical, Pragmatic, or Resistant to Change?

High achievers have high meaning with the present state and often are the most cautious of all investors.

Influencing High Achievers

Those who have found an area of work in which they have high expertise, high passion, and are well rewarded have often found and seized great opportunities that have made them highly successful. So when they see that a new opportunity is in a field or area of work where they have less expertise, where they have less passion, or where the rewards may be less, they may be cautious about change. The sidebar gives an example of how this caution shook one company and its people to their foundations.

Cautious resistance like Motorola’s, even when an organization or individual is aware of widespread change such as that to digital phone technology, is called the paradox of differentiation.

The Differentiation Paradox

Differentiating yourself and/or your organization for opportunity is essential to finding great opportunities. Yet that same differentiation can keep you from finding opportunities in a market or an industry that has changed greatly. For example:

• A small retailer may be faced with a Wal-Mart down the street that offers the same products at 30 percent less.
• A wholesale distribution business may be faced with a major retailer, such as Wal-Mart, that is buying directly from factories in China.
• A manager in a manufacturing plant must learn lean manufacturing methods or lose business to a manufacturer in South Korea.

When world markets change rapidly, how you have differentiated your organization for opportunity—that is, the work for which you have high expertise and high passion—may no longer be well rewarded.

So this is the paradox: The way you differentiated yourself was the key to your success, but now it keeps you from finding and seizing opportunities in the changing marketplace. Unless you can change how you are differentiated, you will lose the potential rewards in the midst of this change. But, for instance, how could you have convinced engineers who were experts in analog mobile phone technology that they should learn digital technology? People must not only see that they must differentiate themselves in a new way; they must also see a clear path to becoming experts in the new technology.

Influencing Those Who Have Achieved Less in the Past

Those who have achieved less in the past often are cautious because their past experiences with change have not been good or because they are weary of change. They may have found areas of work in which they are moderately successful and, though they may not be totally pleased with their situation, they have settled for their places in life. They often resist change.

It’s as if there’s a law of human inertia that applies to both high and low achievers. Let’s use a physics analogy.

Meaning and the physics of change. Galileo discovered a remarkable fact about motion: A body in motion will continue to move at the same speed in the same direction forever if it’s not acted on by an inside or outside force. This is called Galileo’s Law of Inertia, which would later become Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion.

If we could extend Newton’s law to changes in humans and organizations, we might propose a second law of meaning.

The Second Law of Meaning: Many individuals and organizations will continue in the same direction, at the same speed, unless they are acted on by an inside or outside force. It’s as if there’s a law that says that the more meaning humans have invested in the way things are, the more they’ll resist efforts to seize new opportunities that change the way things are.

Inertia and meaning. Some leaders assume that cautious people will be willing if they see the benefits of an opportunity. They’re frustrated when others are skeptical and reluctant to change.

Because “the way things are” has high meaning for cautious people, they often resist change until they’re in trouble. That’s why the biggest need for progress and the largest opportunities are usually in organizations that cautious people are managing.

To get them to change, there must be dissatisfaction with the way things are; an urgent, compelling case for change; or a higher meaning.

You must help the cautious see that if they don’t find and seize opportunities, others will pass them by and they will lose what they have. The best leaders also help them to find higher meaning in the new opportunity.

Help Cautious People Find Higher Meaning in a Mission

Steve Jobs has an extraordinary ability to get others to invest in a dream—to convert them into investors. He converted the Macintosh computer development team by promising that it would “put a dent in the universe.”

So did Thomas Edison. One of his assistants said that Edison told them they were not inventing an electric light, they were dispelling night with its darkness from the arena of civilization.

At Gettysburg, after a battle that caused nearly 50,000 casualties, President Abraham Lincoln appealed to the highest meanings:

 

FROM THESE HONORED DEAD WE TAKE INCREASED DEVOTION TO THAT CAUSE FOR WHICH THEY GAVE THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION—THAT WE HERE HIGHLY RESOLVE THAT THESE DEAD SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN—THAT THIS NATION, UNDER GOD, SHALL HAVE A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM—AND THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE, SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH.

These leaders converted cautious people by helping them to find the highest meanings in their missions and then helping them to find great opportunities to accomplish their missions.

The great, philosophical leader knows that shaping a stone has higher meaning when the stone is part of a cathedral. So he or she helps cautious masons see the cathedral they will be building.

In this vein, Louise Francesconi, the vice president of Raytheon’s Missile Division, believes that the reward people get is seeing the vision and result as their own. She believes that people like to go to work when they feel that what they do is important and when they feel that they are the best in the world at what they do—when they feel they are the best missile makers in the world.

Leaders often fail when they keep people in the dark about the mission or when they expect them to do the job just because they’re paid.

Actively Search for Higher Meaning with Cautious People

To find high meanings in which people will invest, the best leaders simply ask these kinds of questions:

• What do you feel is the most important issue facing you or your organization?
• What are the most important opportunities or threats for you in the future?
• What concerns you most right now?

Thus, the best leaders try to imagine how they would think and feel in other people’s situations—essentially, they show empathy and compassion. They look for changes people will support. They ask, “If you could have any wish you wanted, what would you wish for?” and “What would you change if you could change anything you want?” During questioning, they regularly feed back to the person what they think he or she said, to make sure they have understood their meaning. Finally, they ask questions based on guesses they make about what people will willingly support.

Here are some recommendations for searching for meaning:

• Ask questions aimed at uncovering another’s point of view, goals, thoughts, feelings, fears, joys, hopes, wishes, understandings, values, beliefs, and/or highest meanings.
• Acknowledge what you heard by restating what you believe the person said.
• Clarify and validate the person’s point of view.
• Avoid analysis, judgment, coloration, amplification, diminishing, evaluation, or disagreement with the person’s point of view.
• Carefully probe deeper when you find something that means a lot to the person.
• Acknowledge that you understand and respect what means a lot to him or her.
• Search for a benefit from the opportunity that will have high meaning for the person.
• If possible, redesign the opportunity so that it has high meaning for all who have a stake in it.

Finding out what means a lot to people is easier said than done. None of this is easy. But great leaders know it’s worth it. They help cautious people find meaning in every step of the finding-and-seizing process. And they don’t do certain things:

• They don’t find opportunity for others; they help them to find it.
• They don’t design or plan the opportunity for others; they help them to find opportunity that has high meaning for them.
• They don’t implement for others; they support them and remove barriers as they implement.
• They don’t provide the high meaning for others; they help them to find it.

Beyond Caution: Paths to New Expertise

Once you have helped cautious people see how they must change to seize new opportunities, you need to help them to see a path to developing the new expertise and, sometimes, help them find the passion they need to seize the new opportunities. In doing this, the best leaders set an example. Let’s look at how one great businessman recently did this.

In the early 1980s, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, saw that his firm could no longer make profits in the computer memory business. He decided to move the company into becoming a producer of microprocessors. As soon as he made this decision, he spent a large portion of his time personally learning about microprocessors and how they make software work in computers. He asked both his internal people and outside software people to help him gain this new expertise. He told his executive staff that half of them had better become software experts within five years.

In other words, Grove set the example by changing his expertise and his passion. By 1985, microprocessor sales had grown, and Intel had closed eight memory plants and left the memory business. By 1996, it had more than 80 percent of the world’s microprocessor business, more than $20 billion in sales, and twice its 1985 profit rate. Intel today is synonymous with microprocessors.

Finally, before they begin the seizing process, great leaders find common meaning and negotiate with those who might oppose any seizing of the opportunity.