How to make friends & influence people
Humans are creatures of habit and we default to our routines. It is incredibly tough to change the way we do things, especially the things we do subconsciously.
Let’s just take a few simple work examples. When you take notes in a meeting or on a call, what is the first thing you do? You might take out a notepad or if you’re like me, you open a new page in Notion. Maybe you send yourself an email with action items (me), send yourself a voice note or use the reminders app on Apple. We all have specific ways of working that … work for us.
While there are obvious productivity benefits to this, the downside is that information - especially the bits that directly impact company-wide initiatives and goals - is stored across a combination of peoples’ brains, notebooks, computers, desktop folders, static files and emails. It makes cross-collaboration, visibility and project management very tough as companies scale. More importantly, it makes it very challenging to drive accountability and clarity.
When I joined my current company, one of the first tools I introduced was Asana (there was nothing in place for cross-functional collaboration or project management).
I love Asana ….less because of the rainbow unicorns that fly across your screen when you complete a task but more for the automation and ability to micro-engineer and optimize your entire workload. It’s been an absolute game changer for my direct team but we have struggled to strike mass adoption across the business.
As I thought about how to improve adoption, I found this to be a great example of human psychology and behavior. Here are some of my learnings:
Explain the why: you have to bring people on the journey with you even if you’ve already arrived at the destination. Help people understand why a change is needed and what the benefit will be to them.
Be clear on the how and what: If you don’t provide direction, people will either do nothing or interpret the given information incorrectly. In the absence of answers, we make up our own narratives (more on this in a later post).
Be prescriptive: If you are driving a new behavior, you have to lay out the ideal state and gold standard. Not everyone will agree but there will be a natural self-selection process that occurs. This is usually a good thing.
Find champions: Identify people in your organisation with pain points you can solve with your tool/idea/initiative and go pitch them. Ideally, these are people with tentacles of influence across the business (by the way, this doesn’t mean they need to be super senior). Get their buy-in and then let them run with your message. You have now multiplied your voice. Leverage is a beautiful thing.
Repeat and reinforce your message: Research has shown that people need to hear a message between 7 and 20 times before it truly registers and prompts action. 7 to 20 times! You may think you’ve communicated the why, how and what enough but chances are you are still far from your message becoming a permanent fixture in someone’s mind.
Mass adoption of a new workflow tool is a tiny example of how to influence people, which is arguably one of the most important skills in business … and in life.
It’s an art, not a science and there is no perfect way to do this. But, having gone through this exercise many times, at companies of varying degrees of scale, I am confident in one thing: humans operate well with structure & guidance and generally follow people who they believe have their best interests at heart or paint a vision that they can project themselves in. This is especially true when embarking on or embracing something that is entirely greenfield.
Provide context, create frameworks, point to best-in-class, lead by example, find early adopters and be patient (I am still working on this one).
