‘Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.‘
Aristotle

I was sitting in a café with my client Susan, a senior manager for a large organisation, while we did some planning together for an upcoming conference. Susan's phone rang. ‘Sorry,’ she said, glancing at the screen. She identified the caller, rolled her eyes and turned the phone facedown on the table. ‘No thank you,’ she said with a sigh, as if she was speaking to the rejected caller.

‘Bad news?’ I asked.

‘He's hard work — and he only started with our business a few months ago.’

How do you think this person (whoever the caller was) was going to achieve anything in the company if he couldn't get others to take his calls? The barriers were up before the work had even begun. It was going to be a long, hard struggle to get Susan to agree or cooperate with anything. Bad news if Susan is your boss!

People buy people first

Before anyone buys into your ideas, proposals or strategies, they decide whether to buy into you. This includes deciding whether they will even listen to you.

Here are some of the questions your target audience might ask themselves about you (at a conscious or unconscious level):

• Do you know what you're talking about?
• Can I trust you?
• Are you just in this for yourself, or do you have my best interests at heart?
• Do you have your act together?
• Do I enjoy your company, or do you drain me?
• Do you get how the world works?

These are the types of judgements we make about others all of the time, typically based on scant evidence. As humans, we unconsciously judge a book by its cover. Psychologists call this thin slicing.

Every time we make a judgement like this, it shapes the way we perceive a person, and those perceptions affect the way we feel about them. It's in this way that, as the Japanese proverb says, ‘a reputation of a thousand years may depend upon the conduct of a single hour’.

So what reputation do you create for yourself in any given moment? When your key stakeholders — the people whose cooperation you depend on to get things done — see your name pop up on their phones, or in their inbox, do they feel inclined to help or to run in the opposite direction? Do they look forward to a meeting with you? Do they view you as someone who has credibility?

Champions of buy-in do everything they can to create a positive emotional response in those they communicate with, from the very beginning. This favourable feeling is what I call a bias to yes.

Bring out your best

The list of questions in the previous section may seem overwhelming. How are you supposed to know what people are actually thinking about you? Guessing perception is a little like playing catch with a plate of jelly — it's hard to get a grip on anything. Worse still, if you start worrying too much about what others are thinking, your own confidence may start to wobble.

So, rather than worrying about what your target audience is thinking, focus instead on how you want them to feel about you. In other words, be intentional.

Being intentional means deliberately choosing what we want others to see in us, or in other words, projecting our best authentic self. Follow the words of Shakespeare: ‘Be great in act, as you have been in thought.’ Your actions must align with your intent. That said, this isn't an Academy Award nomination. If you fake it, people will see through you and you'll lose all trust and credibility with them.

Positive perceptions

What version of yourself should you choose to project? What are the qualities and attributes that are most likely to encourage your target audience towards a bias to yes.

Take a moment to think about two or three people you know who exude a great positive influence — the type that sets them in good stead when it comes to building buy-in from you and any others when they pitch a new idea. Your champions of buy-in. How do you perceive them? What qualities and attributes do they have? What makes them effective influencers?

Figure 6.1 is an example of the type of things you might come up with in doing this exercise.

Turn the spotlight on you

What if I were to ask your target audience to describe you? What words would you like them to come up with?

Your answer to this question represents what it means to be intentional. It provides the guiding star that will allow you to make very clear choices about what you choose to project. Without this kind of clarity, people's perceptions of you are likely to bob up and down on a sea of changing disposition.

We all experience mood swings; we all have our good days and our bad; we all say and do things we regret the next day. Being intentional enables us to chart a steady course in the face of these challenges.

Of course, your choice of intention will depend on who your audience is, and your objective. While one colleague might respond well to humility and empathy, another might be more positively drawn to qualities such as confidence, enthusiasm and a willingness to challenge.

Knowing your audience will help you choose your focus, but you may not always know them that well, in which case it can be helpful to seek the input of someone who does know them. Better yet, stay focused on the qualities you know serve you best in situations where you are typically at your most influential and persuasive. Simply put, bring out your best.

The three perception dials

According to behavioural scientists Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, people socially judge others on two universal characteristics: competence and warmth. Based on their research, and in the context of this chapter, you can assume your target audience is asking themselves the following questions about you (even if only at an unconscious level):

1. Competence. How intelligent, skilled and strong are you?
2. Warmth. How likeable and trustworthy are you?¹

Let's picture these characteristics sitting on a dial — a bit like the dials on an old-school amplifier — where each dial can be adjusted to read between zero (low) and ten (high). Now I add a third dial, which is integral to building connection and rapport:

3. Pace. What's the speed and intensity with which you think and speak?

Figure 6.2 (see overleaf) shows the three perception dials and some examples of the types of behaviours associated with each.

	Examples of ‘high competence’ behaviours and attributes: Focusing on the technical and substantive issues Demonstrating logical reasoning and thinking Using confident gestures and eye contact Having a strong voice Appearing professional (clothes, haircut etc.) Being well prepared and thorough Showing strong experience, knowledge and technical expertise Arriving on time Presenting good written work, including correct spelling
	Examples of ‘high warmth’ behaviours and attributes: Showing empathy and compassion Smiling Acknowledging others Using open body language and posture Validating others' concerns and feelings Willing to build agreement Demonstrating humility Using other people's names
	Examples of ‘pace’ behaviours and attributes: Reflective and cautious (low pace) vs quick to respond (high pace) Using lots of pauses and silence (low pace) Taking time to write notes during the discussion (low pace) Sitting forward and gesticulating a lot (high pace) Demonstrating high levels of enthusiasm and passion in voice and language (high pace)

Where do you sit?

Understanding the three perception dials and the types of behaviours associated with each enables you to assess how you might be presenting to your target audience, and whether you need to adjust your behaviours to better suit that audience. Each of us has all three categories of behaviour in our repertoire, but the perception dials focus our thinking on how those behaviours show up in the context of our relationships with others.

What aspects of your style could you ‘turn up’ and what could you ‘turn down’ to project the best version of yourself in any scenario, given your understanding of what your target audience responds best to?

According to the research by Cuddy, Fiske and Glick, building connection and rapport is best achieved by first projecting warmth. Once a connection has been forged, and trust established, it then becomes important to project competence. But getting the balance right can be tricky, as some contexts and relationships trigger us to fall out of balance. For example, I know that certain people will trigger me to slow right down, go quiet and look at the floor (low warmth), while others may trigger me to smile a lot and accelerate my pace (high warmth, high pace). I need to account for these default reactions by making different adjustments to my behavioural dials in these different situations.

Pace, on the other hand, is something you need to adjust to suit your audience. Some people tend to operate at a faster, more intense pace. Others present at a more cautious, reflective pace. Use the pace dial to consider how you can adjust your own pace to better match your audience's natural style. Do you need to slow down or speed up? Increase the intensity of communication or reduce it? By making these further adjustments you're more likely to increase their level of comfort, allowing for a stronger rapport.

But let's face it, it's not always easy to make these kinds of self-assessments sitting all by yourself in an office with nothing but the sound of a ticking clock to keep you company. Which is why the input of a trusted colleague or coach can be incredibly helpful here — someone whose observations you'd find valuable, or who can help you to elicit a greater level of self-awareness. You might also consider seeking the perspective of someone who knows your target audience better than you do — for example, a colleague who has had a meeting with your target audience before, and perhaps has even pitched a new idea to them.

One other point to emphasise is that this isn't an exercise in achieving the ‘perfect setting’ on any one of the dials. No one can tell you with objective certainty that your behaviour scores, say, a ‘6’ on the competence dial and that you need to turn it up to a ‘7’ to be more effective. It's far more subjective than that. Instead, think of these dials as being similar to the controls for the air conditioning: the actual number on the thermostat is less relevant than your subjective experience of whether the temperature is too cool, too warm or just right. And even when you think you've got it about right, someone else will walk into the room and tell you it's too cold!

Adjust to your audience

Let's look at how you can use the perception dials in practice.

As in Jasper's example, using the perception dials is a matter of trial and error and continual refinement. Every relationship has its own dynamic. The three dials help you to stay attuned to the things that are likely to be contributing to that dynamic.

When the sh!t hits the fan

What happens if the relationship doesn't feel like it's in sync? Despite your clear intention for the relationship, and your adjustments in approach using the three perception dials, things just aren't ‘humming’ the way you'd hoped.

You can't control the way someone perceives you. Their perception is theirs to own.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is to initiate an honest conversation with a stakeholder about the working relationship between you.

At first, this can seem like a scary thing to do. But let's not blow this up to be bigger than it really is.

At its simplest, a conversation about your working relationship is a request for feedback — an equally scary word for some! But there's a big difference between someone who makes a vague request for feedback in the vain hope they'll receive a nugget of gold, and someone who asks for feedback on the back of a really crisp intention for that relationship. Take the following two examples:

• ‘I was wondering if you have any feedback for me about our working relationship?’
• ‘So I've been giving some thought to our working relationship [sharing the intent]. It's my aim to be supportive, but I also think it's important for me to be constantly challenging you to think of things in different ways. Are those things important to you? If they are, I'd love to hear how you think it's going …’

The first version is way too open-ended, and can leave the person being asked unsure what to say, or how honest to be, eliciting not much more than a slightly awkward, ‘Umm, no, it's all good.’

The second version, by contrast, makes it much clearer what is being asked of the other person, and also makes it hard to dodge the question as the request is quite specific. It also creates an excellent opportunity to recalibrate a relationship where your intentions are misfiring.

Listen and learn

When I first started my career, I worked as a commercial lawyer. My very first boss, a senior partner in the firm, spent countless hours with me sitting alongside him, working through documents I'd drafted, ripping apart my thinking and the choices I'd made along the way. But the biggest lesson he taught me wasn't anything to do with the quality of my work, but about the dynamic of our relationship and how we communicated.

One day, as we were working through something I'd drafted, he burst out, ‘Why on earth would you bore someone with all this detail?’

I sheepishly began to answer him, trying to articulate some reason to do with the importance of the detail to understanding the flow of the document. No sooner had I started to offer up my answer than he turned to me with a pained look on his face and said, ‘I haven't finished yet.’ I apologetically shut up, and let him continue. A few beats later, and clearly not doing a very good job of reading the play, I jumped in to respond to something he'd said, when he turned to me with the same perplexed frown, and said, ‘Sorry, didn't I just say? I haven't finished yet. When I feel you've heard my point — then I'll be happy to hear your response!’

All this probably sounds a little more austere than it was in reality. I'd grown accustomed to his slightly eccentric style and larger-than-life personality. But I'll tell you what, that moment — and the lesson it contained — has stuck with me for a long time.

For me that lesson is the distinction between letting someone speak and making sure they feel heard. This is something we tend to get wrong all the time. When we think we're unheard, we're likely to feel a need to speak more loudly and more slowly. A bit like a monolingual English-speaking tourist in a foreign country who speaks more loudly so people will understand.

Ernest Hemingway said, ‘When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.’

Listening is an art. There have been numerous books published on it, and the good news is it's an art that can (and should) be learned.

While it's not my intention to delve into too much detail in this book, I do want to draw a distinction between two key forms of listening — clinical listening and engaged listening — and offer you some key tips for becoming a truly engaged listener.

Clinical listening

Clinical listening is a skill you use when you want to get to a solution — often, quickly. It's the sort of listening you might expect from your doctor. Does it hurt here? How long have you been experiencing that? Any other symptoms? What kind of sleep have you been getting?

When we're in clinical listening mode we're trying to control the conversation. We want to get from A to B in the way we see fit, often within a limited timeframe. As a result, we tend to filter out everything that seems extraneous or irrelevant to that pathway, and our listening reflects our desire to keep things on track. Follow-up questions are often used to steer the conversation in the preferred direction. What happened then? Did you speak to Bob? Who told you to do that?

Clinical listening has an important role to play when our sole purpose is to solve a problem. Say, for example, a team member comes to you and asks you to identify whether they've left anything out in preparing a report to the Board. A few precise questions — such as, Did you reconcile this data with Steve's set? or Are you planning to include this information as an appendix to the full report? — might enable you to get to the nub of any issues and provide a clear answer quickly.

But we very easily default to clinical listening even though the situation may call for a greater level of connection with the other person. This is especially relevant in the context of building buy-in, which requires us to build the kind of relationship in which others feel heard and understood.

Engaged listening

Engaged listening is aimed at building connection and rapport. Sure, information will be exchanged in the process. But more than anything, engaged listening creates a feeling in your target audience that they matter.

For some, the idea of engaged listening will seem painful, especially when your only interest is to get a job done, but engaged listening is often the key to unlocking resistance.

After all, buy-in is not about having the right answer; it's about helping people go with you on a journey. Poor listening can be the very thing that causes resistance.

As renowned author Stephen R. Covey says, ‘The real beginning of influence comes as others sense you are being influenced by them — when they feel understood by you — that you have listened deeply and sincerely, and that you are open.'²

Top four tips for engaged listening

So what does it take to be an engaged listener? To listen to others in a way that helps them to hear you? Here are my top four tips to help keep you in engaged listening mode.

Tip 1. Be curious, not incredulous

Engaged listeners listen with a curiosity to understand the other person. That means suspending judgement or the desire to convince the other person that they're wrong. This can be hard to do when you have your own, perhaps opposing opinions, or when your ego wants you to show everyone how smart you are as early as possible in the conversation. That's why it helps to have some standard questions or phrases you can use to stay in curious mode, even when instinct is pulling you in a different direction. Here are some of my personal favourites:

• Why is that?
• Help me to understand that …
• Talk me through that …
• I'm curious to understand what you mean when you say …

Here's a little game to play with yourself: Imagine you're about to play the role of your target audience in a movie. Do you understand the way their mind works? Do you really get their thinking? Do you appreciate why they do the things they do? This can help you to shift to a whole different type of listening.

Tip 2: Listen out loud

One fundamental of engaged listening is that it gives the speaker a sense of connection — where your full understanding of what they've told you brings them closer to you, so they feel they can trust you that little bit more than before.

One way to do this is to listen out loud. This can serve as a great prompt for them to keep going, but it also sends a strong message that you are genuinely thinking through everything they say. It also gives them an opportunity to correct you if you're wrong.

Here are a few examples of what ‘listening out loud’ might sound like in practice:

‘Oh, okay, so you're probably thinking that's going to cause you difficulties down the track?’

‘As you speak, I can really sense the frustration.’

‘That's hilarious!’

‘Ah, I see, so you're finding it hard to reconcile this project with the broader strategy?’

‘Oh, wow!’

Another important effect of listening out loud is that it can serve to validate the other person. Psychologists often talk about validation as a powerful aspect of good listening, as it gives the other person the sense that their voice is legitimate and worthy — a key to building connection and empathy.

Tip 3: Listen to the great unsaid

Engaged listening is also about listening for unspoken information — things they're not saying explicitly, but can readily be gleaned from their tone of voice, demeanour, pauses, facial expressions and so on.

So much often remains unsaid in conversa-tion, and the more you can do to demonstrate your sensitivity to the unspoken stuff, the more likely you are to build real connection through your listening.

Take the following conversation between two colleagues. Person A is leading a project and is asking person B to come on board as a contributor:

A: Did you have any questions about the overall aims of the project?

B: Um … no, not really.

A: (Wondering whether B's hesitation is a sign of something) Where do you sit with it?

B: Oh, look, I don't necessarily have a view. (A notices that B isn't making eye contact with her and is shrugging his shoulders in a resigned way.)

A: (Gently) Is it that you don't have a view or you don't feel it's worth sharing it here?

B: Oh, look, clearly this is going to happen whether I like it or not, so you just tell me what you need me to do.

A: It sounds as though you've got some concerns about the project, and I'd love to hear about them. What's troubling you?

At every beat of this exchange, A is responding to what B has not said, rather than his words. This is where the real listening happens. So long as it's done gently and without bullying the other person, this kind of listening can be an important way to build connection and empathy.

Tip 4: Be careful what you don't say

Similarly, there's a lot you ‘say’ to the other person through the non-verbal aspects of your listening. How do you listen with your face? With your eyes? With the way you position and move your head, body and arms? Tone of voice? Don't misunderstand me: this is not a call for dramatic mime. In fact, there's probably nothing more distracting than someone sitting across from you having a private facial expression party.

When I'm listening intently, I have a tendency to frown. This has got me into trouble on more than a few occasions, as people mistakenly assume I am sitting there thinking to myself, ‘What rubbish!’ Which is not true (well, most of the time).

Ask a friend or coach to offer you observations about the things you do when you're listening and how those things might have an unintended impact on the person speaking.

Another valuable exercise is to film yourself having a conversation with someone (with their permission, of course), then watch it back. You'll probably cringe on the first viewing. It's a natural reaction, but when you watch it the second or third time, you'll start to notice things about how you conduct yourself in the conversation.

After the first viewing, turn the sound off and watch it in silence. What do you notice about your non-verbal language? What do you do with your eyes and your face? Your head? Your arms and hands? Your posture and body movements? It's amazing how much you can pick up from seeing yourself in video footage, because it's not a perspective we typically have of ourselves.

Make them look good

Theatre improvisers have a mantra: make your partner look good. This philosophy sits at the core of strong ensemble work. Improv shows can very quickly fall apart if one performer is prepared to trample all over the other performers to get their own moment in the spotlight. This can fly in the face of instinct for many performers, who are often in it for the stage time, but the best improvisers serve the overall scene or show, not their own ego. And if that means staying out of a scene — or a whole show — so be it.

This is an incredibly valuable principle to live by when it comes to building buy-in.

No matter how good you might think your idea or initiative is, the only thing that matters when it comes to buy-in is how your audience feels.

They need to feel important, and that their opinion and ideas matter. Nothing will undermine this more than letting your own ego and desire to be ‘in the spotlight’ take over, which is a little like being taken to a karaoke bar by someone who clearly enjoys singing more than you do, only to find yourself dragged up on stage and forced to sing along with them. Urgh.

There's a big difference between those who make others look good, and those who make themselves look good. At the heart of the distinction lies a willingness to be humble. Perhaps you recall the images of Pope Francis, crouched on his knees, washing the feet of twelve prisoners on the first Holy Thursday after his election? For a man who had just ascended to the highest position of authority in the Catholic Church, it was an act that said to the world, What's status got to do with anything? This was a sublime embodiment of what it means to be humble.

A great example of a leader who makes others look good is Howard Schultz, the CEO and chairman of Starbucks. Schultz emulates what is often termed servant leadership — a style of leadership that Schultz himself describes as ‘putting others first and leading from the heart’.³ As a highly successful businessman, presiding over a monolithic brand with an arguably plentiful pool of potential employees, Schultz could well have been the kind of CEO who chose to lead from the ivory tower. But, to the contrary, Schultz is known for listening to his employees and prioritising their needs. He makes others look good, and feel good. Which explains why his own staff give him a 91 per cent approval rating on US jobs website glassdoor.com.

So follow Schultz's lead: choose to make others look good. And here's all you have to do:

• Respect and acknowledge someone else's effort and contributions.
• Give credit where credit's due.
• Acknowledge their experience, expertise or status.
• Address them by their first name, make eye contact and smile.
• Express an interest in their point of view (‘I'd love to know what you think …’).

Or, to put it all far more simply, treat people the way you'd have them treat you.

***

You've spent this chapter under the spotlight. When it comes down to it, people buy people first, so we've looked at some of the things you can do to ensure people feel a bias to yes when they interact with you. Throughout this first part of the book we've been busily getting set for success, and now you're probably well and truly ready to pitch your idea. So, let's do it …