Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The website for Brian’s company, Influence People, is https://influencepeople.biz/. He has a regular blog there at https://influencepeople.biz/blog/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How Influence Leads to Great Leadership with Brian Ahearn
• Super Creativity: The Leadership Skill AI Can’t Replace with James Taylor
• Agape Capitalism: Can Ethics & Profit Coexist? with Jim & Tom Grote

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Brian Ahearn is the Chief Influence Officer at Influence PEOPLE and a faculty member at The Cialdini Institute. An international keynote speaker and TEDx presenter, Brian is an expert in the science of influence, certified in the Cialdini Method for Persuasion and Pre-suasion. Brian is the author of “Influence PEOPLE” and “Persuasive Selling for Relationship Driven Insurance Agents.” His insights have reached over 700,000 people through his LinkedIn courses and more than a million views on his TEDx Talk. Brian’s latest work, “The Influencer: Secrets to Success & Happiness,” weaves these teachings into an engaging business parable.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] My name’s Maureen Metcalf. Today, we’ll be talking to Brian Ahearn, senior sales consultant focused on teaching and applying the psychology of persuasion to improve business success. Authentic persuasion is a critical skill for leaders moving their organizations into the future. 

They need to see a vision and enroll the organization in moving toward that vision. Brian specializes in applying influence and persuasion in everyday situations. So Brian, how did you get involved with persuasion of psychology? 

Brian: The way I got involved with the psychology of persuasion is I’d been doing a lot of sales training for State Auto Insurance for many years. And somebody who had been in our department came down one day. 

She was studying for her master’s at the Ohio State University and had a videotape of Dr. Robert Cialdini at Stanford University talking about the psychology of persuasion, and she said, “I think you guys,” meaning myself and my boss, “would really like this.” So we watched the video, and a light bulb came on. 

It explained all of the sales techniques that we’d been teaching [00:01:00] for years. It was the psychology behind that and why those techniques were so effective. And what I like is that when you understand why something works, you can go beyond learning simply a technique. And so we started utilizing that videotape in some of our training sessions, and then fate led us to end up having a relationship with Dr. Cialdini, and then years later, I got certified, and it’s just kind of taken on a life of its own.  

Maureen: So what exactly is persuasion?  

Brian: Aristotle says that persuasion is the art of getting somebody to do something that they wouldn’t ordinarily do if you didn’t ask. 

So if you think about it, it’s a great definition because if people are doing what you want, you don’t need to ask. You don’t need to interact with them in any way to change their behavior. But quite often, people aren’t doing either what we want them to do, need them to do, or believe is in their best interest to do, and so how we interact with them, how we communicate, may make all the difference between them saying yes or no. 

So it really is about changing behavior, getting someone to do something that they’re [00:02:00] not currently doing.  

Maureen: So this seems like a skill that’s really important for pretty much anyone in a leadership role.  

Brian: Oh, absolutely. Whether it’s leadership, sales, parenting, I often tell people that understanding persuasion , in large part helps your success professionally, but also on a personal level, your happiness. 

Because if you think on the professional level, quite often it starts with just getting hired. You’re having to persuade a number of people that you’re the right person for the job. But when you get into a position, for example, with leadership, you may have a great vision, you may have great strategy, but if you can’t get your team on board, you’re not gonna be able to move that forward. 

And I think it was Jack Welch once said that, “Nearly everything I’ve accomplished in life has been with other people.” So brilliant businessperson, but yet he recognized that without the aid of other people, he wasn’t able to make those things come to fruition. The challenge that we face, though, Dale Carnegie, in his book, ” How to Win Friends and Influence People”, said the biggest challenge you’ll face is dealing with people, [00:03:00] especially if you’re in business. 

So we need people, and yet they can be our biggest challenge. And if we understand how they think and behave, and we’re willing to change our communication, we can enjoy a lot more professional success. On the personal side, having been married for 27 years, having a 19-year-old daughter, I can tell you that at home, life is much more peaceful and happy when my spouse willingly does what I’d like her to do, or when our daughter willingly does what we want her to do.  

Maureen: And how often is that?  

Brian: It’s a lot more than you might think. If you understand how people think and behave, and you are willing to change how you communicate, it’s amazing the difference in the result that you can get. 

I think I’ve got a wonderful marriage. Our daughter, we get along wonderfully, and have avoided a lot of the pitfalls, I think, because we chose to interact differently with one another.  

Maureen: This presumes then that as I’m persuading people, I need to not only understand what I need, but also who the other person is and what they expect and want and need. 

Brian: Absolutely. Because persuasion isn’t about just getting what you want. Real [00:04:00] persuasion ultimately ends in a win for both people.  

If you believe that your vision and strategy are the right strategy, you have to also get other people to realize that, too. Persuasion quite often helps you make your good case better. 

So i- you may have a wonderful strategy, vision (mm-hmmm) … but if you can’t convey that to people in a way that gets them on board, it’s all for naught. I may know that certain things at home are the right thing to do, whether it’s eating healthy or exercising or studying, any number of things that as you’re raising your kids, you want them to do, but getting them to see that, too, is important so that they own it for themselves. 

And again, how you talk about those things can make all the difference between somebody feeling it’s their decision versus you telling them what to do.  

Maureen: How does persuasion differ from manipulation? Is it just trying to get people to do what I want, so I tell them what I think they need to hear? 

Brian: Manipulation, if it weren’t for that one word, I wouldn’t be sitting here today ’cause I wouldn’t have started a blog, and I wouldn’t be involved in the persuasion training. When Dr. [00:05:00] Cialdini did his presentation at Stanford, one thing that resonated with me is he talked about non-manipulative ways to get people to do things. 

He was very, very clear about that. So after I watched that video, I signed up for Stanford’s marketing, and I got a marketing piece from them one day, and it said, “Call it influence, persuasion, or even manipulation.” That was actually the headline for his video. And I recoiled because I thought, “Nobody wants to be manipulated, and nobody wants to learn how to manipulate people.” 

So I actually sent an email to Stanford, and I said that. I said, “I got your marketing flyer here. I see that you’re promoting Dr. Cialdini’s video. He’s very clear about non-manipulative ways to get people to do what we want, and that word “manipulation” cannot be helping your sales. Nobody wants to be manipulated, and I don’t know anyone who wants to be known as a manipulator. 

And so I sent that email to them, and I never heard from Stanford, but sometime later, my phone rang, and it was Dr. Cialdini’s organization, and they called, and they said, “We wanted to thank you personally because you sent an email [00:06:00] to Stanford, and they’re gonna change the marketing of our video.” And it was during the course of that conversation that the ball really got rolling and how I became connected with Dr. Cialdini and his organization. Now, when we talk about manipulation, a lot of times people equate persuasion to manipulation because their thought is just getting someone to do what they want. And that’s not true in the sense that manipulation quite often is one-sided. There’s a wonderful quote from a book called “The Art of Woo”, which means Winning Others Over, and it says, “An earnest and sincere lover buys flowers and candy for the object of his affections. So does the cad who only seeks to take advantage of another’s heart. But when the cad succeeds, we don’t blame the flowers and the candy. We rightly question his character.” 

So flowers and candy are neither good nor bad. They’re simply a tool that some people will use, but the intent, that’s really what matters. 

When we understand what we call the principles of influence- these six psychological principles, they’re neither good nor bad. They simply describe how [00:07:00] people typically think and behave. How we use that information reveals something about our character. When we talk about ethical influence, we’re talking about creating win-win situations: helping people see the benefits that are also for them and not just for us. 

We’re talking about doing things in a truthful way, and we’re talking about using these psychological principles in natural settings where they genuinely occur, not false scarcity, for example. We know that scarcity is something that when people hear there’s gonna be less of something, they tend to want it more. 

And quite often, salespeople will create a false sense of scarcity just to get you to buy or make a decision. We’re saying look for the principles that are naturally available, incorporate them into your language, and you’ll have more success when it comes to persuading people.  

Maureen: It’s really the character of the leader or the individual who’s using persuasion, not the persuasion technique itself. 

Brian: Right. The technique is simply a technique, just like flowers and candy, they’re neither good nor bad. Mm-hmm. They can be used for wonderful [00:08:00] purposes. They can be used for very heinous things. 

But it’s the intent of that person, and what are they trying to get you to do, and why are they trying to get you to do it? I can say that, you know, if I want my daughter to eat healthy, study more, it’s because there are genuine benefits.  

Now, for me as a persuader, it’s to bring those to the surface so she understands they’re as good for her as they are for me. 

As a leader in an organization, it’s the same thing. If I believe there are genuine benefits for everybody to follow a particular strategy, I need to understand how to best convey that and to get them on board with that.  

Maureen: Most of us probably wanna get what we wanna get, but doing it in a way that you pointed out- that’s win-win makes a very different experience for all of us. 

Brian: And if you use certain principles of influence, for example, the principle of liking, we all know when people like us. We can tell by their body language, their tone of voice, how they interact with us. We can usually tell. Most people don’t know how to make that happen, so we talk about how to make that happen. 

Now, the [00:09:00] interesting thing is that an ethical persuader is not out to just get people to like them so that they can get them to do what they want. When I try to incorporate the principle of liking, I recognize that I wanna like the people I work with. I wanna like the vendors that I deal with. 

I wanna like the people that I train, and if I seek to use the principle of liking, they will like me more, but what happens is I actually come to like them more. And when they see that, that’s where everything changes. When they say, “You know what? I believe Brian truly likes me, and Brian really has my best interest at heart,” now they’re very open to what I may ask them to do, and it’s not false, because those principles have made me like them more as well. 

Maureen: So it sounds like then coming from a place of compassion and care, I want the best interest for everyone. Especially in the parenting realm, having a child who’s healthy and exercising and studying is certainly much better for the child as well as the parent.  

Brian: Absolutely. 

And in an organization, [00:10:00] if I think of the people that I train, do I want them to succeed? Absolutely. Do I want them to succeed for the company? Sure. That’s why I’m employed there. That’s what my job is. But even more so on a personal level, I wanna see them succeed because I know that their professional success also impacts their personal happiness, too. 

If they’re doing well on their job, if they’ve learned things that make them enjoy their job, enjoy their customers more, they’re gonna go home and they’re also gonna be happier. So it’s a 24/7 win for them. And so that really is much more the driver for me, is I wanna see people enjoy that professional success and personal happiness. 

Maureen: And that is certainly a win for both you and for the company.  

Brian: Absolutely.  

Maureen: And Brian, what are the principles of persuasion that you teach? 

Brian: There are six what we call “principles of influence,” and these are all psychological concepts that have been around as long as human beings have been. 

They simply describe how people typically think and behave. So I have no doubt that your listeners will recognize these either [00:11:00] as, A, maybe they have seen themselves respond to them, or B, maybe they realize, “Oh, this is why people respond so well to me,” because they recognize they’re using one or more of these principles. 

So the first principle that I like to talk about is the principle of liking. So the principle of liking says that we prefer to say yes to those we know and like. Well, we all know that, right? It’s easy to say yes to our friends. There’s things that our friends will ask us that we’ll willingly say yes all the time, and a complete stranger, if they ask us, we would say no. 

If you think about it, the only difference is who’s asking. It’s not the request itself. So it’s easier for us to say yes to the people that we know and like. If we can get people to like us, they will more willingly do what we want. But as I said before, the techniques that we talk about in terms of trying to get someone to like us actually work on us just as much and cause us to like them. 

Hmm. And that’s the real difference-maker, again, is if you know that I truly like you, you’re very open to what [00:12:00] I may ask of you and like me in return. So that’s our first principle, principle of liking. The next principle that we talk about is the principle of reciprocity. People feel obligated to give back to those who first give to them. 

Again, we recognize this because we learn it from the time that we’re children. Some of the first words that parents teach children are “thank you.” So think about the conditioning that’s happening as children. Someone does something for us, and we’re taught to respond in some way. It’s a thank you. 

Maybe as we get older, our parents say, “That was nice that your grandmother did that. You should write her a letter,” or, “That’s nice that this person did that. You should give them a call or buy them a gift.” We learn more sophisticated ways to repay the favor, but it’s ingrained in us from childhood that when someone does something, there’s an expectation we should do something for them. 

When we understand that as persuaders, we look for ways that we can genuinely give and help other people, recognizing that those people will be very likely to want to give or help us if we need help in turn. I’m not a proponent of [00:13:00] giving to get. I’m not gonna help you just so I can pull this lever and get Maureen to do whatever I want. 

I’m gonna help you because I think it’s the right thing to do, because I like you, because you’re my friend. There’s all these reasons that I want to do that, but I know that down the road if I need help and you have the right skill set, you’re probably very willing to help me, and I feel very free to go and ask you, and we both have won. 

You’ve benefited from how I’ve given. I’ll benefit from how you’ll do that in return, and we’re both better off because of it.  

Maureen: So it’s almost an abundance mindset as well. Giving to you doesn’t deplete me.  

Brian: I may never have to come and ask you for a favor, but that’s okay. But I know that if I need to, I’ve got that opportunity. Zig Ziglar once said, “You can get everything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want.” And what he recognized is if you help enough other people, you have all these resources that you can turn to, and it’s much easier for you to accomplish your goals because you can turn to all these people who have different skill sets and abilities to help you. 

So [00:14:00] again, everybody ends up winning.  

Maureen: So as a leader of an organization, not that people are beholden to me, but getting to understand what my people care about and making sure that when I can, I give them what they want or need creates an environment of reciprocity. When I need something, I am better positioned to ask. 

Brian: And even the things that we as leaders may have to ask people to do, to help them see how that’s beneficial for them, to help them see that the thing that they’re working on right now, that skill that they’re learning, is gonna help them in whatever their next move is. And a good leader should always be looking to not only develop people so that they’re the best they can be at their current job, but also be looking to the future, understand what their goals are, and helping them to attain that. And so if in the midst of what you’re doing on a daily basis is helping you be very, very effective, but also you see how it clearly helps you get ready for your future aspirations, you’re gonna go at it with a lot more vigor. Then as a leader, I’m [00:15:00] much better off too, because I’m gonna get better work. Everybody’s winning, but I need to help them see that.  

Maureen: And there are also times that I need people to just do something that nobody wants to do. 

If I have put money in the bucket, in essence, the emotional bank account or whatever we call it, then people seem more willing to step up to do even what they’re not excited about. 

Brian: Right. So the individual I report to at State Auto, the vice president of sales: John’s a fantastic manager, and there are times where he may walk by on a Friday afternoon at 2:30 or 3:00 and say, “Oh, how are things going?” And I’ll catch him up, and he’ll go, “Just go home. Start the weekend early.” I appreciate that, you know? And I walk in the door, I can start the weekend a little bit early. 

But what I find, though, is when John sends a request at an off hour, and we’re all checking email at various times of the day, if I get an email on Sunday at 9:00 from John, I’m gonna deal with it. Mm-hmm. Because I appreciate how he’s treated me. So he gets what he needs. I’ve gotten what I wanted. 

Everybody wins. And so [00:16:00] that’s how a good leader positions themselves. They give, and they also know that if they need help, they can fall back on that later, and everybody feels better about the relationship.  

Maureen: You know, it seems so basic when you talk about it, and yet I’m coaching a couple of leaders right now for whom this is not basic. It is an absolute new way of looking at how we interact with one another.  

Brian: It makes sense, because we’re describing human behavior and I can see how you nod and you get it, and probably all of your listeners do, but the application is always much harder than people think. 

To remember to be somebody who gives rather than somebody who just expects. Well, it’s your job. Mm-hmm. You’re expected to do that. We default back to these behaviors that we’ve been in for such a long time, that even though we get it, we don’t actually always put it into practice, and that’s what I work with people to do, is to help them not only learn the concepts, but then how do we translate that into activities that will, on the business level, (Mm-hmm) give more success, on a personal level will give you that [00:17:00] happiness.  

Maureen: And part of it seems, one, many people haven’t learned this, and then the other is I’m busy. I’m working crazy-long hours. To take the time to go walk around and ask someone how they’re doing means it’s adding hours to my day. 

How do I get my head around the fact that the organization and I will be better off in the long term even though I have to stay an extra half-hour today? 

Brian: I look at everything that we do as an investment. To say that, “Well, now I have to stay an extra hour,” is kind of an expense mindset, which means it goes away forever. When we think about expenses, companies are always trying to cut expenses. But good investments, they’ll continue to make good investments all the time. By investing in people, by managing, by wandering the floor, by going in and checking in with people, by actively looking for ways to help them or to do things that will make them happier, productive employees costs time upfront, but it will save time on the long run. Because ultimately you’ll [00:18:00] probably get the things that you need better quality, probably get them faster because people will be working for you in a different way than they’re working right now. 

So it’s not as if you’re putting in this time that’s just more time in the day. You’ll ultimately, I think, see a much better return on it.  

Maureen: It certainly makes sense, so back to your point, I need to build a practice of doing that.  

Brian: Absolutely.  

Maureen: And almost put it on my Outlook reminders for the next month. 

Brian: My wife used to sell jewelry at open air markets, and she was great because she would say, “I wanna take one of these principles today. Just let’s take one, and see how it works.” And I’d say, “Okay, well, let’s engage reciprocity.” And as I would see opportunities, I would nudge her and say, “Okay, here’s a real opportunity to engage reciprocity.” 

And then she would do that, and she would see tangible results. When people are willing to open their wallet and hand you cash, you know you’re doing something right. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And so she would take it and consciously work it until it became something that was more natural for her, and then the next time she’d work something else. 

But sometimes we have to do that because persuasion’s a skill, and like any [00:19:00] skill, the more you do it, the better you get. And the more you do it, the more it becomes almost like muscle memory and you don’t have to think about it. It’s just how you kind of do things.  

Maureen: So as we think about developing any of the leadership skills, it’s really  

Brian: practice. 

Absolutely. Fair enough. But you have an opportunity to practice 24/7 because you are trying to persuade people all day long.  

Daniel Pink in his book “To Sell Is Human” had done a survey of more than 7,000 businesspeople, non-salespeople, and asked the question, how much of your day is spent in, he called it non-sales selling, persuading? 

And the average came back 40%. Hmm. People in business say that they’re spending about 40% of their day, so that’s more than three hours a day, trying to get people to do things. So if you’re gonna spend nearly half of your time doing something, it probably would serve you well to understand how to do that most effectively, and that’s what I do when I teach people about persuasion. 

Maureen: And if I think about how much I do it by email, it’s probably 80% of my day.  

Brian: Yeah. Email is another… It’s just a different [00:20:00] form of communication.  

Maureen: Cool.  

Brian: We’ve talked about the first two principles. There are six of them, so we’ll move on to the next one: principle of authority. Principle of authority tells us that people defer to those that they see as having superior knowledge or wisdom. 

We all know that. That’s why some of us hire accountants, because we know that they’re better with accounting than we are. We go to lawyers if we need legal advice. We go to doctors if we have medical questions. Many of these things we could do on our own.  

I could go to webmd.com. I could go to find a lawyer site and try to figure out the law myself. But I know that it saves a lot of time, a lot of effort, and they’ll probably do it much better. The thing is, a lot of times people don’t really understand that somebody may be an authority in something.  

So something as simple as, for example, when you read my bio, people might have initially thought, “Well, who’s this guy Brian Ahern? Why do I wanna listen to him on this subject?” Well, once they understand that there’s only 20 people in the world who do what I do, or that people in 200 countries are reading my blog, it adds [00:21:00] credibility. So by them simply knowing that upfront, that makes a difference as to how much they’re gonna pay attention. 

And so we talk about, how do we get our authority in front of people, or how do we borrow authority from others so that we are more credible? So another example, you know, I’ve quoted Zig Ziglar, quoted Daniel Pink, quoted Aristotle. For many people, many of your listeners, those are familiar names. 

That adds to my credibility too. Mm-hmm. So there’s lots of little things that we can do that all of a sudden make people pay more attention, and if they pay more attention, they’re more likely to do what we want.  

Maureen: Okay. So  

Brian: that’s the, the principle of authority. Principle of consensus, most people know this one because their mom and dad talked about it when they were young. 

It was called peer pressure.  

They didn’t wanna see their kids get involved with sex, drugs, drinking, any number of things that as a parent they thought this could lead to a bad consequence, and they were afraid of the pressure, the social pressure they were gonna feel from their peers. 

Well, as we get older, we may not be tempted in some of those same things that teenagers face, but we are [00:22:00] affected by what other people do, and we call it consensus. Sometimes it’s known as social proof, but we are heavily impacted by the behaviors that we observe other people doing.  

There’s that thought that, well, if everybody’s doing it, it probably is the right thing to do. 

And that’s why you see things like bestseller, or you see (Mm-hmm) people consulting Amazon ratings because we feel more comfortable moving in a direction when we see that other people have moved in that direction and have had positive things to say about it. An effective persuader looks for ways to convey that information. 

Maureen: So as a leader, as we’re trying to move in a different direction, I might talk about a competitor using this strategy and how effective they’ve been.  

Brian: Absolutely. When you can talk about multiple competitors, the more that people are doing something, the more it gives a sense to somebody else that this might be the right thing to do; maybe I should be moving in that direction as well.  

Maureen: So it could even overcome my inner bias that this seems silly. But if I see that all of our competitors are [00:23:00] doing it, it may seem like the right thing to do.  

Brian: Absolutely. Okay. There’s the old adage, keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a reason for that, because people feel that social pressure of moving along. They don’t wanna be left behind. There’s that doubt that if everybody’s doing it and we don’t, maybe we fall behind. So we look for ways to honestly incorporate that information into our conversation, and it makes it easier for people to say, “That’s probably the right thing to do.” 

Maureen: So how do I deal with, organizations that can leverage transitions or gaps will be the ones that move ahead, and yet it seems like there’s a balance of leveraging consensus and also differentiation. How does that work for you? 

Brian: Well, an organization can leverage consensus by talking about their customer base.  

Maureen: Okay.  

Brian: But they may be drawing in that customer base also because of, in sales, it’s called a unique selling proposition. 

Maureen: Okay.  

Brian: By talking about who you are and what you do in a way that sets you apart and makes you unique is sometimes a compelling reason for people to pay attention. Going [00:24:00] back to the authority that I mentioned before if you know that there are only 20 people in the world who do something, people are more compelled to pay attention to that. That’s a form of scarcity, right? Mm-hmm. If everybody was doing what I do, then it wouldn’t be special to have me here on the show. So the principle that ties into is called the principle of scarcity, and this principle says that when something’s rare or diminishing, people tend to want it more. 

This is exactly why people see ads that say, you know, “Sale ends Sunday,” and all of a sudden their behavior changes. They get off the couch, and they go to the store. Now, they might say, “Well, I’m just going to look around. It sounds like it’s a good sale,” and they end up buying something, and they probably never would’ve gone to the store if they hadn’t seen, “Sale ends Sunday.” 

So people hate to lose out on what they see as potential opportunities, and in talking about your organization in a way that sets it apart and makes it unique starts to give people some thought: if I don’t do business with Maureen’s organization, I may lose something. There’s lots of [00:25:00] companies that may do what she’s doing, but she’s doing it in a way that’s a little bit different enough that I lose something if I don’t go along with her.” 

And your challenge as a persuader then is: can I talk about that in a way that gets people to say, ” That’s what I wanna do. I don’t wanna lose out on that opportunity with Maureen and her organization.”  

Maureen: So I’m combining then these principles of authority and consensus- Absolutely. If Maureen offers something special, or Brian offers something special, we can still leverage the fourth principle of consensus that by using this, I as the consumer will be positioned effectively with my peers. 

Or if it’s a business-to-business organization, that I’ll be positioned better against my competition. Absolutely. So Brian, we’ve covered five of the six principles. Can you give us the last one?  

Brian: So the last principle that we talk about is called the principle of consistency, and the principle of consistency says that people feel internal psychological [00:26:00] pressure as well as external social pressure to be consistent in what they say and what they do, and I like to boil this down to “word and deed.” 

People feel better about themselves when their words and deeds match up. If your listeners think of a time where they gave their word to somebody that they’d be somewhere or do something, and then they had to back out, even if their reasons were legitimate and their friend or the other person understood, most people don’t feel good about doing that. 

In fact, when I ask audiences, “How did you feel when you had to tell that person you couldn’t do what you said you’d do?” You hear heavy emotional words like awful, terrible, guilty. Well, nobody wants to feel awful, terrible, or guilty, so people work very hard to be consistent in what they say and what they do, and if we can get someone to commit to something, to say, “Yes, I will,” the odds that they’ll actually do it go up rather dramatically. 

Because on the flip side, most people can think of a time, or many times, where they did something, they may not have wanted to do it, but they did it because they told someone they would. That drove [00:27:00] them to do that, and so that’s the principle of consistency.  

Maureen: Can you give an example either of expanding on consistency or just walk us through an example where you’ve applied this in a business setting, where you may have been using multiple principles to drive value? 

Brian: Five or six years ago, I had been on an extended Christmas break. When I came back from that break, within the first week of being back in the office, I was called into a meeting with five or six other people, and here’s the situation that we faced. 

Our company had accidentally overpaid insurance agents in one of our operating states. Wow. It was a $700,000 error, where in the month of December we had doubled the commission for 150 different agents. Now, we couldn’t press a button and electronically get that money back, and so as we strategized how were we gonna go about getting this money back, it came down to the home office accounting manager was gonna have to send a letter to each of the 150 agents to say, “Please sit down and write us a check for [00:28:00] 4,000, 8,000, $10,000 as soon as possible because we overpaid you.” 

Right around the holidays. And so that’s not gonna be high on the priority list. You know, you get this letter that says you owe $5,000, it’s probably not what you’re gonna sit down and take care of first. And we knew that that was gonna probably be the case. Well, the interesting thing was I had done some training for the accounting department the prior summer, and knowing that they had to do things the old-fashioned way, sometimes they had to physically put mail in envelopes and send it and ask people to do things, I shared with them a study having to do with all things sticky notes. 

Believe it or not, utilizing sticky notes can increase the response rate when you ask somebody to do something dramatically. So there was a study that I had shared with them, and in this study, social psychologists wanted to see if they could impact people’s response rate to a survey. And so what they did was they sent the survey out, a cover letter, to a group of people, and a third of the people got the cover letter, had clear instructions what the survey was and why they should take it, [00:29:00] and 36% of the people who got that letter took the survey. 

Now, wanting to see if personalizing it made a difference, to another group, they sent out the exact same cover letter, but they wrote a quick note by hand on that cover letter. So all of a sudden it’s a little more personalized. And the people who got that, 48% took the survey. So in a business result, to go from 36 to 48%, that’s a 33% increase for doing nothing more than taking a few moments to sign each of those letters and put a little personal note. 

Now with the third group, they sent the same survey letter, wrote the same handwritten note, but they did it on a yellow sticky note. Hmm. And 75% of the people took the survey. More than doubled the response rate. Wow. And there was another independent study that verified doubling the response rate with the sticky note. 

So I had taught them that, and I turned to my friend Steve, who’s the home office accounting manager, as we talked about this letter. And I said, “Steve, remember the sticky note study?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “If you don’t have time to sign every one of [00:30:00] those letters with a sticky note, call me. I’ll come do it.” 

And he said, “No, I’ll do it.” So few weeks go by, I call him up, and I said, “Steve, how’s the collection going?” And his exact words were, “I’m floored.” And I go, “Why?” And he said, “We’ve already gotten money back in full from 130 of the 150 agents.”  

Maureen: In how long?  

Brian: In just a few weeks. Wow. And the optimist in me, I said, “We didn’t get it all back?” 

And he did what you just did. He laughed. He goes, “Come on, we’re talking about money here.” He said, “I fully expected many of them to say, ‘It’s your mistake. You fix it. Take it out of next month’s commission. Put me on a payment plan.’ Anything except sit down and write that check in full.” He goes, “I’m floored.” 

A few months after that, we had lunch, and I said, “So how did it end up?” And he said, “We ended up getting money back from 147 of the 150 in full.”  

Maureen: Wow.  

Brian: So he’s now a believer because he sees people, he deals with money all the time, and he sees the difference that it made. The fact that he said, “I’m floored,” was enough for me to know that made a huge [00:31:00] difference, and our company was happy to get that money back and to get it back quickly, to recover from that error was huge.  

Maureen: So I’m thinking because I am involved with the Public Radio organization, how might they use sticky notes to increase their fundraising?  

Brian: Well, if they’re sending things out, if they’re putting things in the mail- Mm-hmm 

by, by simply putting a sticky note there and actually signing it, that’s gonna increase their response rate. Now, I can’t guarantee that it’s gonna double it- but every study I’ve ever seen says it’s gonna increase. Because the psychology behind it is the reciprocity. If I do something for you, you feel obligated to do something. 

When you see somebody goes a little bit above and beyond (Mm-hmm) and putting a handwritten note or taking the time to get that sticky note and put it on and write that hand tends to convey to people that something more has taken place. Now, the interesting thing is no person is gonna say, “Well, I sent some money in,” or, “I took the survey because there was a sticky note.” 

Right. They’ll all deny that it had anything to do with it, but so much of this psychology [00:32:00] takes place at the subconscious level, that you can’t deny that when twice as many people do something in two independent studies, that that factor, that sticky note, had something to do with that change in the response rate. 

Maureen: We’ve got listeners who are leaders and emerging leaders. What would you like them to take away with regard to the science of persuasion? 

Brian: I would end by saying what we started with. Your professional success, much of your professional success is contingent on your ability to get people to do the things that you need them to do as a leader. A tremendous amount of your personal happiness depends on how you interact with people in your home life and getting them (Mm-hmm) to do things to avoid conflict. And the fact too that, as Daniel Pink pointed out, people are spending upwards of 40% of their time trying to get others to do things, trying to persuade them. This is something that, that people should look at and say, “I should probably learn how to do this.” What I always recommend to people is you don’t try to eat an elephant all at one time. You do it one bite at a time. Take one concept that we talked about, take one of those six [00:33:00] principles, and look for ways to ethically engage that principle. Take note of the response that you’re starting to get because when you see the people start responding in a better way, you’re gonna naturally continue to look for more ways to do that. And then when you get comfortable with that, start moving on to something else and just begin practicing with these in a very specific way so that you can see how people respond, and you’ll convince yourself that this actually works and is something that you should spend more time on because it’s ultimately gonna help you with that professional success.  

Maureen: Perfect. Thank you very much for joining today.