Page 279 - The Power to Change Anything

268 INFLUENCER

they wanted. What would it take to get everyone to enact these
behaviors and eventually turn the culture around?

Change How You Change Minds

We knew one thing for certain: Verbal persuasion wasn’t going
to offer much help. Telling people that they needed to speak
up when they disagreed with a person in authority or had bad
news sounded more like, “You need to naively expose your
problems, put your career at risk, and be seen as a whiney non-
team player. So go ahead—who wants to be first?”
What we needed to do was find a way to help people
change two specific views. First, they had to believe they could
indeed speak frankly without looking like rebels or wimps.
Second, they had to believe that if they did effectively share
their contrary or controversial ideas, they and their colleagues
would make the right choices about deadlines and resources,
and eventually they’d be able to actually hit their goals.

MAKE CHANGE INEVITABLE

To replace their existing fears with a growing sense of confi-
dence, employees didn’t need a lecture; they needed to
improve their actual skills (Personal Ability). To do so we took
the rather complex behaviors demonstrated by those who knew
how to make it safe to talk about just about anything, and fol-
lowed the tenets of deliberate practice. We broke the skills into
learnable parts and provided positive examples. As individuals
practiced the new skills within a protected training environ-
ment, they were given immediate feedback from a coach.
Finally, as they grew their competence they began to believe
that they could indeed speak their minds without taking a huge
risk.
But we didn’t stop there. We took care to connect the newly
acquired skill set to the trainees’ sense of who they wanted to