Management Today Book Series

Understanding Influence for Leaders at all Levels

Chapter 2: Persuasion and influence
Extract

Dr Caroline Hatcher is the MBA director at the QUT Graduate School of Business. This is an edited extract from 'Persuasion and influence', the chapter she contributed to Understanding Influence for Leaders at all Levels, AIM Management Today Series (McGraw-Hill, 2005).

Setting the parameters for empowered action is a mighty task. It is less simple than in the past, when managers could give directions, threaten and cajole, and take authority for granted. The democratic imperative that permeates the personal lives of employees is increasingly apparent in organisational life and, as the drive for flatter organisations continues, the need for soft discipline will increase.

Choosing to follow replaces the right to lead in this equation. So, in the end, good management will become the capacity to engage staff sufficiently so that they choose to follow you. You don't need to look back, because the momentum is so powerful that the whole team is surging forward with you. Consequently, managers need to create a language of leadership that inspires, is emotionally intelligent and accessible to all staff, and at the same time possible to ‘do' every day.

How staff become committed to their organisation and their manager is a complex process that many researchers have tried to understand in a variety of ways. One rather new way to think about this is to consider how an employee achieves organisational identification. Put more simply, these are the mechanisms that lead employees to identify with their manager and their organisation.

Researchers working in the field of corporate identity and reputation have been analysing the relationship between the communication employees receive and their development of supportive behaviours. They have identified four key elements that determine this relationship and lead to positive employee identification:

• information availability
• personalised messaging
• communications quality
• emotional appeal.

Employees' positive responses come partly from having sufficient knowledge of what's going on, but also from the way they are made to feel about their manager and about themselves (including being given the chance to participate in the organisation's decisions, the level of personalised messaging they receive and their level of connection with the organisation).

The ability to influence and persuade others in order to achieve a positive response has, of course, been the subject of attention for centuries, and was first explored by the ancient Greeks. Aristotle recognised that a mix of the various appeals must be used if listeners are to commit to the goals proposed by another. Aristotle taught that, when seeking to persuade, we should:

• seek to engage the rational thinking ( logos ) of our audience
• inspire a sense of belief and trust ( ethos ) in those with whom we communicate
• seek to engage our audience emotionally ( pathos).

This idea was further developed by US rhetorician Kenneth Burke, who explored the idea that identification was the important moment of connection between a speaker and a listener, when the listener identified their ways with those of the speaker.

When employees identify with the organisation or an individual manager, the result is the positive achievement of psychological unity…and psychological unity is a significant and likely effect of high quality persuasive communication.

Kenneth Burke challenged us long ago to remember that, ‘You persuade a man only in so far as you can talk his language, by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.'