Dan Gregory @DanGregoryCo
I spend most of my time working with really smart people: scientists, engineers, professional service consultants, lawyers, accountants, business owners. leaders and the like. These are people who, through their educations or their professional experience, have been elevated in society to positions of expertise and responsibility. The problem is, smart people are often not so people smart, and that, is dumb!
The reason it’s dumb is that almost everything we wish to achieve in life, in business and within our communities is driven by our capacity to engage others with our ideas and to attract followers and supporters to our cause.
And here’s the thing, being right, isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough.
Additionally, when we face issues like climate change, human trafficking and huge technological and economic shifts. being so right that you become self-righteous becomes a real problem.
Of course, smart people often feel that “selling” their thinking is beneath them and that they, “shouldn't have to sell, we're right, after all!!!,” or “But I’m the expert, people should just agree with me.”
What they're really saying is, “I'd rather be right than be effective. I’d rather be right than win. I’d rather be right than rich.” Fine, if that’s what you really mean, but if you actually do want to lead change in this world, you’re going to need to expand your skills set.
The truth is, we are only as effective our capacity to build engagement and buy in to our cause, to be influential, not just intellectual.
Right is good, but it’s not enough
So, huge caveat here, clearly being right is a good thing. In fact, it’s waaaaay preferable. There’s a deluge of fake news, faux science and intellectual dishonesty circling around our social feeds and news services and some of it is downright dangerous.
However, simply expecting people to be able to discern the truth from the lies is equally dangerous.
Adding to this is the historic failings and diminishing trust we have for our social institutions like government, religion, education and medicine, all of which has us all feeling a little more cynical and a lot more tribal.
My belief is that if it’s important enough to you, and important enough to your community, then you should not be so proud that you refuse to sell your thinking. I’ve deliberately chosen the world “sell" here, partly because it makes people uncomfortable and also because, in essence, that is actually what is required.
However, when I talk about selling, what I'm really describing is an ability to communicate effectively and to establish a sense of value.
Trust beats truth and beliefs beat facts
A huge part of increasing your influence is cultivating your reputation. If I’ve found you to be trustworthy in the past, I’m more likely to do so in the future. The opposite is also true.
And if people I already trust, defer to or also trust you, then you’re on very solid ground indeed.
What this means is, demonstrating your trustworthiness is as important as, if not more than, the content you wish to share.
Decisions are not made at a purely logical level
There's no doubt that logic is useful and serves us in many useful ways, however, where it is less useful is in the field of influence and persuasion.
Yes, a case study or some research can add to your trustworthiness, but unless you also connect to us with some storytelling and communication that aligns with our emotional needs, beliefs and values, logic will be of little use.
We are far more likely to decide emotionally and then to seek logical and factual support for our intuitive hypotheses than vice versa, which means, trying to beat us into factual submission is unlikely to succeed.
When our being right makes others wrong
Perhaps most critically, when we seek to have influence with others, to change opinions or to shift cultural and national conversations, one of the greatest mistakes we make is to make ofthers wrong in the process of making ourselves right.
In other words, when we give people no space to feel a win, or force them to feel like they're losing, they are more likely to fight back out of spite and not even listen to our argument, however correct it may be.
Psychologists refer to this as, “The Backfire Effect.” Essentially, it means that the harder we try to crush someone’s argument with facts, the more likely they are to entrench themselves in their emotional, and perhaps less rational, positions.
However, when we create a space for others to feel a sense of a win, they're more likely, out of a sense of resiprocity, to allow a space for us to win also.
So, the question we should all ponder when we are trying to engage others with our vision, our purpose and our messaging is, “Are we so busy being right that we've made ourselves impossible to agree with?”