A Year in Perspective
by Lauren Grossman
Austin Convention Center
A year as President is done (officially – June 30th) and I look back on a year mixed with successes and losses. The chapter made huge strides this year and I was honored to be a part of it, but there was also strife and it still weighs heavily on me.
What many of you don’t know is that International started changing the way chapters operate about two years ago. Most of the changes that spread beyond the board of directors to the committees and chapter members occurred during my year as president. Change always brings upheaval and thus the “strife” I mentioned above.
At the banquet last year, I made a joke that my biggest challenge as president would be to keep my eyes open for all of the pictures. But the real challenge I had this year was accepting that I could not make everyone happy – especially when their desires were not the best plan of action for the majority of the members. So we as a chapter moved on but some members did not take the journey with us.
On the plus side, WE had many successes this year as a chapter. I emphasize the “WE” because it really isn’t about me but about where we went as a chapter. This year we created a members only section on the website. We created a lunch program in San Antonio that pointed the way for next year. We had our third successful CAMP MPI. We retooled our investments creating higher yielding investments and more funds for the chapter. We gave away close to $4,000 in scholarships. We won national recognition for our 2004-2005 Communications Committee. We put the newsletter and the directory on the website enabling us to redirect funds to educational programs and scholarships.
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Understanding How Influence Works
by Terrill Fischer
CEO
In The Moment Productions
According to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Second Edition, “persuade” has two meanings in modern American English:
1. to prevail on (a person) to do something, as by advising or urging
2. to induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convince.
In fact, most people use the word to mean both things at once, for if you can get a person to believe a certain way, you can influence that person's behavior. And for our purposes in this article, we define persuasion as the act of using communication to change the attitude, belief, or point of view of another person without deceit.
You can see I am modifying the accepted definition. Most people would say it is possible to persuade someone deceitfully, and I admit that is true. But that's not what I’m talking about in this article. We’re going to examine legitimate persuasion.
Appealing to Reason
The dictionary suggests you can achieve persuasion by “appealing to reason.” Certainly most businesspeople try to persuade that way—by straightforwardly stating an argument, presuming that once an audience sees something from the “proper” perspective, opinions will fall in line.
It would be nice if our professional lives were so ordered and logical. But is the modern workplace a realm of order and logic? Anybody who has worked with other people knows what it means to have a fight or flight reaction in a business meeting. Someone is holding forth on “New Directions in Marketing for Legacy Products,” and you can feel your heart rate increase. Your muscles tense, your palms perspire, you begin to breathe in short gulps, all your senses go on alert. Your body is behaving exactly as it would if you'd come face-to-face with a large predator. But no one here is threatening you. No one is armed. Why is your body acting like it expects to begin fighting for your life? What's happening is someone is proposing to take away your department's role in the marketing of the company's most important products. The truth is, “New Directions in Marketing for Legacy Products,” depending on your responsibilities and your knowledge of others' intentions, can be as threatening to you as a saber-toothed tiger was to your ancestors.
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Have you ever been grief-stricken by the discontinuation of a product? Angry when someone in
the organization did not meet a commitment to you? Joyful about the successful completion of a project? The workplace is a cauldron of emotions, and the successful business professional recognizes those emotions, controls them in herself, and understands them in others.
An Emotional Process
It's important to understand that, regardless of what the dictionary says, persuasion works by acting on the emotions, at least in part. When someone converts your point of view, it is often more than a minor adjustment based on a logical marshalling of arguments. You feel persuaded, and your commitment to the new point of view involves more than just your rational mind.
Most people assume that this emotional aspect makes the act of persuasion artistic, spiritual, or ineffable. For centuries, the techniques used by successful persuaders have been known as the art of persuasion. But persuasion is not necessarily based on charisma, charm, inspiration, or any other magical quality. The techniques that great persuaders use are precise and quantifiable. Persuaders may, in fact, be artistic, but they are first and foremost scientists and technicians of the science of persuasion. It lays out the fundamental principles, and then it examines what effective persuasion looks like in light of these principles. It considers persuasion in its three main venues: large groups, small groups, and virtual (which is the best word we can find to cover persuasion situations in which you're not face-to-face). For some people, the idea of persuasion is related to that of manipulation. We believe nothing could be further from the truth. If you're looking for techniques of manipulation, we must tell you to look elsewhere. On the surface, persuasion and manipulation may resemble each other, but the manipulation of another person's point of view will last no longer than it takes the person to discover the manipulation. Persuasion, on the other hand, can last forever. That’s why it’s important to know that every point of view is reasonable to the person who holds it.
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