Power Play

Game Changing Influence Strategies For Leaders

Yamini Naidu

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780730329466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Discover the secrets of influence, impact and transformational leadership

Power Play is the powerful and practical 21 st century guide to mega-impact and influence, providing business leaders with explosive influence strategies to move people into action and results. Influence, like gravity, pulls success into your orbit and gives you the power to make real changes in your relationships, your organisation and the world. This book explores the different types of power and you will learn when to coerce, when to collaborate and when to connect. You'll delve into areas of influence that you may not have considered, including the power of message, context, empathy, humour, positioning, love and more. This book identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each of these influence tools and offers practical tips so you can create a seismic shift in your influence while maintaining authenticity and integrity.

Influence is the key factor that allows you to build powerful relationships that facilitate more effective leadership. It can mean the difference between achieving results and falling short, keeping clients or losing them, winning that pitch or blowing it. This book shows you how to amplify your influence and turbo charge your impact in every area.

• Understand the different types of power
• Discover new tools of influence and the art of power play
• Explore influence strategies with impact and integrity
• Become a power player and deliver results

Influence is a science, and it's the key to your personal and professional success. Power Play helps you build a bottomless supply, and wield it with authenticity, compassion and integrity.

Part I
The case for new influence

When was the last time you tuned into the safety briefing on board a plane? It's amazing to consider that even when our lives could depend on the information, we are reluctant to pay attention.

Air New Zealand has managed to reinvent the tired format of airline safety videos, using humour to find new ways to influence their audience. Every year they release a new air safety video that is pretty much guaranteed to go viral. For example, film director Peter Jackson plays a cameo role in a Hobbit-themed version called ‘An Unexpected Briefing'; another, ‘Safety Old School Style', stars Golden Girl Betty White; and (my personal favourite) US fitness personality Richard Simmons and leotard-clad cabin crew deliver preflight safety messages to a disco beat!

Air New Zealand has found a fresh and compelling way to influence. The case for new influence doesn't rest on media stars and videos with high production values, though, but on simple yet effective strategies that can be used successfully every day.

Even a humble sign can be made over using one of the tools we will examine — message power. Walking through a park in London recently, I spotted a lawn sign that, rather than the conventional ‘Keep off the grass', read simply, ‘The grass is resting'. Just a little paint, and imagination. That's influence.

Part I sets out the case for new influence. In chapter 1, we explore the difference between influence and manipulation. Chapter 2 introduces the art of power play, challenging our traditional reliance on a limited range of hard power and soft power tools, and presents a review of the various ‘modes of influence' that will be developed in the rest of the book.

Chapter 1
Influence versus manipulation

What if lives were saved or lost based on your ability (or lack of it) to influence people and events? How do you exert influence when the stakes are so high?

Pet Rescue Australia faces this challenge every day.

Tragically, 100 000 rescued dogs are put down every year in Australia. In an effort to make a difference, Pet Rescue set out to persuade more Australians to adopt rescued dogs. First they had to break down their biggest barrier: getting people to visit a shelter.

Their strategy was simple: ‘If we can't bring people to the rescued dogs, we'll bring the rescued dogs to the people.' How, though? Pet Rescue is a not-for-profit organisation with limited marketing budget and resources.

A perfect match

But they had a secret weapon. Japanese researcher and psychologist Sadahiko Nakajima has made a study of dog–owner resemblance. Nakajima's research shows that pet–human resemblance is empirically valid, a key reason being that some pet owners consciously or unconsciously choose dogs that look like them! Pet Rescue Australia used this insight to deploy their strategy.

They commissioned an app called Dog-A-Like. You download the app and upload a photo of yourself, and the app scans through all the photos of dogs in rescue shelters to find your perfect dog match.

Bingo! Dog-A-Like was an instant hit, becoming the number one app in the Australian iTunes store for a couple of weeks. Whether or not they were thinking of getting a dog, thousands of people started using it and uploading their ‘perfect match' images to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The result? A 36 per cent increase in dogs rehomed — that's more than 2200 dogs every month. It has been Australia's single most successful dog rehoming campaign to date, and that's nothing short of inspiring.

But influence is not all dancing unicorns, rainbows and adorable rehomed dogs.

The dark side

Just as the sun casts a shadow, influence has a dark side. It often earns a bad name because people mistakenly interpret it as manipulation, but manipulation is the flip side of influence. Too many books on influence focus on techniques best described as manipulative or exploitative.

Sixteenth-century diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, in his controversial but enduring political treatise The Prince, declared, ‘It is better to be feared than loved'.

Could that be true, then and now?

Machiavelli was a man of his times, and the city-states of 16th century Italy were snake pits of intrigue and deviousness where the powerful ruled through fear and by controlling information. But that was 500 years ago. Today the internet and social media have created unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability, right?

We all love stories of human endeavour, especially when the underdog beats the odds and triumphs over adversity. We admire heroes, invest in their success and learn from their wisdom. In a world overwhelmed by bad news, these inspiring stories offer rare beacons of hope. We are eager to believe.

A breach of trust

In 2013 wellness blogger Belle Gibson shared her personal story. She portrayed herself as a brave young Australian mother who had survived brain cancer and fought back, reinventing her life based on health and wellbeing.

She won a worldwide social media following through her Whole Pantry philosophy, released a bestselling app and scored a book deal with Penguin. Belle's journey and apparent transformation touched people's lives profoundly. She was an inspiration for cancer sufferers and ordinary people all over the world.

In March 2015 investigative journalists broke an even bigger story, alleging that the entire saga — from multiple cancers and heart surgery through heroic recovery — was a fabrication. When proof of the cancer was requested, none emerged. Claimed charitable donations from Gibson's app sales were unsubstantiated. Penguin and Apple pulled their support. Gibson's followers all over the world were left feeling angry and hurt. The fallout was ferocious.

We experience dishonesty and manipulation, whether personal or public, as a deep violation. They breach our trust by exploiting our empathy and compassion. We feel abused in the worst way, emotionally and sometimes monetarily too. The public backlash in the Belle Gibson case was fast and furious.

Sometimes we are fooled and victimised by master manipulators. In other contexts we are simply made to feel powerless.

Powerlessness — an influence vacuum

In both your professional and your personal life you will probably experience moments of powerlessness, when you feel you cannot even speak up, or be heard or listened to, let alone make an impact.

In 2009 we did some work on storytelling with a senior leadership team. It was one of our first experiences of a toxic management group.

The CEO snapped at anyone who spoke, talked over staff and publicly humiliated the team members, all of whom were direct reports. The CEO was obnoxious, aggressive and intimidating. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

No one, apart from one woman leader, could stand up to this.

Since then that organisation has often been in the news for all the wrong reasons, hurtling through leadership crises and financial mismanagement scandals. Given the low levels of trust and high levels of toxicity emanating from the top, few people familiar with the company were surprised.

Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom'. We hope the individuals in that leadership team find the courage and power to leave the organisation.

Powerlessness is dangerous. It makes us shrink and focus only on ourselves. It makes people feel hopeless and, in the long term, can lead them to breakdown.

Manipulators — power for power's sake

Manipulators focus only on themselves and are driven by greed. They act opportunistically and their impact, while often devastating, is transient.

In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton retells the biblical story of the Fall. The snake (Satan) manipulates Eve into eating the apple (forbidden knowledge). The snake uses a toxic blend of blasphemous flattery and falsehood, promising her that eating the fruit will make her as powerful as God.

Those rigid threats of death: ye shall not die: How should you? By the fruit? It gives you life to knowledge; by the threatener? Look on me, Me, who have touched and tasted; yet both live, and life more perfect have attained than Fate meant me, by venturing higher than my lot.

Eve is seduced into eating the apple, and Eve and Adam are banished from the Garden of Eden.

Watch out for the snakes that can infest the gardens of work and life. Some people set out to manipulate and damage others by their behaviour. They may seek only short-term advantage, but they can damage relationships and trust for ever. Such tactics cause stress and anxiety and create long-term negative outcomes.

Masters of influence

Influence power is like fire: you can cook with it, or burn down your neighbourhood. The issue is not fire itself, but how you choose to use it. When you s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Another book on influence?
• Part I: The case for new influence
• Part II: How (so far) and the new how
• Conclusion: What next?
• Index
• Advert
• EULA