2.4 Drive action
As it drew towards 4pm on a mid-December afternoon in Munich I looked around the room of assorted marketers and observed an audience trying hard to stay engaged, but feeling the drain of a long day. We had started at 8am and only broken for 45 minutes at lunch. The light had begun to fade outside and only occasional lights had been thrown on in the room. The atmosphere was one of just trying to make it through, and a retina-burningly-bright white PowerPoint slide of text in an otherwise soporifically warm and low-lit room can only do so much to enliven an audience. You could almost feel how low the energy was.
And then it was my turn to present to them.
As I stood up to present my content I approached the front of the room and decided on my course of action. Leaving the PowerPoint on its title slide I asked the whole room to stand. When they had roused themselves, already slightly more energetic just for the chance to move, I asked them to stand on one leg. Suitably balanced, I think asked them to place one finger on their nose. Calmly, as they tottered, I took a photo of them. Turning my phone to show them those standing closest to me the image of themselves, I asked them one simple question: why had they done what I’d asked? Balance and hand-eye coordination are not pre-requisites of a successful career in marketing so there was plainly no direct professional need. Why did they stand on one leg, one hand placed upon their noses and allow me to take a photo?
The answer is obviously because I told them to, but why did they listen? But why would a room of tired people stand for a photo? Many of them were my peers. Some of them were my professional superiors. There was no chain of command. I didn’t give them a reason. I just told them what to do and they complied. Getting people to think, feel or act is the basis of all sales and marketing – this was my excuse at the time. It’s also the basis of change management, enablement, communications and many other disciplines. And beyond a business environment it’s also how politics, the media and elections work. For all of these situations here are only two ways to get someone to do what you want: make them or make them want to.
Tell a child they must brush their teeth before bed and they may comply, but unless you inspire them to want to continue brushing the moment you stop compelling them is the moment they will stop. Tell a child that if they brush before bed their teeth won’t fall out, and you may inspire them to want to maintain their own teeth. Children may not understand the importance of dental hygiene or the expense of dental remediation, but the know they won’t want to look bad in front of friends they like.
Influencing decisions is not the same as instructing them. If you’ve ever worked with a great leader you’ll know that they motivate the people around them to aspire to similar levels of greatness. They may provide clear directions, but they also make people want to follow those directions. They create clarity and a vision that resonates, and then they inspire a team to follow them to the ends of the earth to achieve the mission. People want to follow great leaders. They have to follow average leaders.
Forcing people to do something they don’t want to is not a long-term solution. By other names this is called peer pressure, bullying or blackmail. Even the most basic of actions forced against someone’s will erodes a relationship. You may get a person to act initially, but resentment and resistance build quickly and in short order force loses its effectiveness. The only effective way of getting someone to act is to make them want to. You have to start by knowing what you want them to do, then you have to create why they should want to do it. What you want them to do needs to resonate. It needs to lodge in their mind and be memorable. Resonant ideas are the ones that will stick with your. The idea communicates what you want them to think, feel or do. Why they will act upon that idea and the six levers you can deploy to achieve this are the subject of this chapter.
Because they are getting something that other’s won’t – its restricted, limited or exclusive
Because they feel they are reciprocating or repaying an obligation or debt
Because they have made public commitments they want to be consistent with
Because they believe they are following someone with authority
Because they see a social norm or standard that they are following
These six factors provide all you need to drive action, progress and change. If you aren’t leveraging these factors you are likely resorting to hope as your strategy for motivating action. These levers can the applied discretely or stacked to create combinations. You may know some of them by different names, or may know discrete components but together they form the basis of all inception.