Leading, influencing, and selling involves getting others to give up something they value–usually money, attention, political currency, time, or effort.
If we are not careful and caring in our approach, we end up trying to get them to agree or even to obey. Unfortunately, this approach creates a massive hairball of resistance, defensiveness, politics, struggle, waste, loss, and exhaustion. And our work becomes more and more difficult.
Yuck-o-rama.
When we are careful and caring, we follow these four steps (more here):
- We build a foundation of trust, then
- We explore what’s true now, what we all want to be true, and why, then
- We explore how we will get there, who will do it, and by when, then
- We agree and get going.
This way matches how people want to be led, influenced, and sold to. Taking the time to go this way makes our work easy and everyone wins. The hairball happens when we try to skip right to the “agree and get going” step.
In your corner,
Mike