Leadership: Influence vs. Obedience

As a featured speaker for Vistage and TEC, two organizations that provide education and peer support to CEO’s, I have many opportunities to speak to leaders around the world, and one of the most common complaints I hear from these leaders is that people just don’t get it! Or, that they don’t understand why you just can’t tell someone what you want them to do and have them do it!

While this is understandable, in order to help them be effective as leaders, I know they must, at some point, make a distinction between influence and obedience. Why? Because getting people to obey you is not as effective as influencing them in a way that brings out their best. As this week’s quote suggests, obedience is what you teach your dog. With a young puppy, you teach obedience because you want the pup to grow up to be an obedient adult dog. You are not looking for the dog to make complicated decisions based upon the changing world around us, but instead just follow simple commands such as sit, stay, come, etc.

With people, however, unless you plan to make every decision for them ALL OF THE TIME, what you want is for them to access their best judgment now and in the future. The term “micro-managing” specifically refers to a leader who doesn’t trust those around him or her, and, thus, has to be involved in even the most minute decisions. Unfortunately, not only does this breed resentment in those being micro-managed, it results in exhaustion for the leader, and keeps them from looking at the big picture.

So, how can you engage others in a way that results in their accessing their best, while at the same time influencing them to follow your leadership?

• First, you have to ensure that what you want them to do is good for them as well as good for you. Often, we are so focused on what we want to achieve that we don’t stop to consider how this is going to be beneficial to those in our organization (or family). Knowing what is important to those we lead and how that aligns with what is important to us is crucial to effective leadership.

• Second, those who look to us for leadership must believe that we both understand and care about them. You have heard the phrase, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Letting people know that you understand their perspective (even, or especially, if they are concerned about something) allows them to drop the need to defend that perspective.

Bottom line, you don’t want them to be in the “defensive brain” or the “resistant brain,” and listening to learn what is important to them and letting them know you get it results in their being willing to hear what you say next.

• Third, you must be willing to ask “neocortex questions,” or make “neocortex statements” about what you want them to do if you want to access their “cooperative brain” or “receptive brain.” Neocortex statements or questions are always about the future and the solution, and contain what is import to them as well as what is important to you.

This is what I do… I travel the world teaching those who want to be effective leaders how to become more influential by first accessing the best of who they are, and then bringing out the best in others. In other words, how to get people to follow your lead by first understanding how the brain works and then using that understanding to engage others in a way that taps into their cooperation and intelligence versus their obedience. After all, we are leading people, not raising dogs.