SuperInfluence: Make the Ask
In This Episode
SuperInfluencers are able to impact the behaviors of others without relying on authority. Learn one often overlooked SuperInfluencer skill in this episode.
Wanna dig a little deeper? Check out the research referenced in this week's episode.
Roghanized, M. Mahdi, and Vanessa K. Bohns. "Ask in Person: You're Less Persuasive Than You Think Over Email." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 69 (2017): 223-226.
Bohns, Vanessa K. “(Mis)understanding Our Influence Over Others: A Review of the Underestimation-of-Compliance Effect.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 25, no.2 (2016): 119-123.---
Transcript
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello, and welcome to The LeaderLab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host and LifeLabs leadership trainer, Vanessa Tanicien. In each episode, my lab mates and I distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills, the smallest changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time.
Vanessa Tanicien: Hello LeaderLab listeners, and welcome back. This season, we've had the opportunity to unpack SuperLearning, the benefits and behaviors that'll take your learning to the next level. SuperLeaders, what great leaders do differently. Now this time around, we are talking about influence, specifically what SuperInfluencers do differently. To define this, the way that we're thinking about it at LifeLabs, an influencer is somebody who can impact the behavior of others just by behaving differently yourself, without resorting to authority. This is a big deal because at the end of the day, not all us have a leader title, but we're all leaders in our own right. That's where we're talking about influence. To help us unpack this next skillset is Tania Luna. Tania is the co CEO of LifeLabs. She's an emotion researcher, pig parent, and she had a wedding in Vegas with an Elvis impersonator. Welcome back to the lab, Tania.
Tania Luna: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Vanessa Tanicien: Tania, we're talking about influence this time around on The LeaderLab. I'm just curious, when you think big picture about influence and its place in the world of work, why does this even matter?
Tania Luna: Oh my gosh. I mean, you talked about influence being important if you don't have formal authority. I would argue that even if you do have formal authority, and maybe even especially if you have formal authority, you want to lean on influence instead. The result of using influence is that you're not relying on compliance or fear. You are relying on people being inspired by what you're asking them to do and following you because they believe in it because they're engaged by it. Not only will people be more effective in their work, they're also going to be more engaged by it.
Vanessa Tanicien: Oh my gosh. I love that. I'm already getting the warm feelings in my chest here, thinking about this idea.
Tania Luna: Am I influencing you?
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah, I think you are. This idea of commitment versus compliance, it's already something that I'm gravitating towards.
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: I want to break this down to something that we can actually take away with us. What's the skill we're walking through today?
Tania Luna: The microskill or the behavioral unit that I'd love to chat about, is the very simple but difficult act of making the ask. It's kind of like the Nike version of influence, just do it. Just make the ask.
Vanessa Tanicien: Wow. Well, it sounds really simple, but I know that there are lots of barriers to this. What are some difficulties that folks have when making requests of others?
Tania Luna: Well, okay, obviously I'm making it sound simple, but there are a lot of systemic barriers to just making the ask. You might have relationships or lack of relationships at work. It might be your identity. It might be systems set up in place in your organization that would make it scarier or more high risk, or maybe you just don't have access to the individuals that you would make the ask of. I think A, there's the systemic challenges, but B, there's also the individual challenge, which is that most of us grow up believing that you're not supposed to be asking. If you are in a more individualistic culture, it's because we grow up thinking we should be independent. If you grew up in a more collectivist culture, it's maybe because you don't want to burden others. Either way, it feels really kind of heavy to have to take that risk and ask someone to do something.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah, I totally hear that. It sounds like there are so many things that prevent us from making the ask, but the good news is, we have skills that'll make it a lot easier.
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: What does making the ask on an individual basis considering the environments that we're working through, what are the components of that?
Tania Luna: Yeah. I love that question. Let's break it down even further. I mean, number one, it's literally ask for what you need. It sounds so simple, but people hugely underestimate just the power of saying, "Hey, I need your help. Can you please do this thing?" If you wanted to go even further beyond just the habit of asking for what you need, there are three tips that I'll share. Number one, is ask face to face, especially a big ask of folks. Even if you're working remotely, flip your camera on and actually ask people by showing them your face at the same time, it's a lot more effective. Number two, is don't just say, "Hey, can you do this thing for me," you also want to share an impact statement. "I'm asking you to do this because," and then number three is, make the ask as specific as possible.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. Making the ask has a three pronged approach. Making sure we are doing it as interpersonally as we can, right?
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: Making sure people understand the reasoning and getting into that specificity. I'm a total nerd, so I need to know what does the research say?
Tania Luna: Oh my gosh, I love the research on influence. I'll maybe zero in on two studies that are most relevant. Psychologist Vanessa Bohns conducted a study where she had people ask strangers if they could use their cell phones. What would your guess be? What percentage of people would say, "Yes, random person on the street, you can take my precious device that has all of my information, and possibly my credit card?"
Vanessa Tanicien: I think you're priming me for an answer, but it sounds like it would be pretty low, right? Is it in the low thirties?
Tania Luna: That's a good guess. People assumed that it would be pretty low. In fact, it was a 60% compliance rate.
Vanessa Tanicien: Wow.
Tania Luna: More than 50% of people said, "Why yes, go ahead." In another study, they asked college students to actually vandalize what they thought was a library book.
Vanessa Tanicien: My pearls.
Tania Luna: They would come up to these students that were sitting there and go, "Hey, this is a library book. I'm trying to prank my friend. Can you write pickle on this library book?" Now it is a horrible thing to vandalize a library book, possibly illegal. I have to check.
Vanessa Tanicien: It's pretty illegal.
Tania Luna: What percentage of people do you think did it because they were asked?
Vanessa Tanicien: 10%, this is me crossing my fingers.
Tania Luna: 60%.
Vanessa Tanicien: Wow.
Tania Luna: 60%. Whether it's, "Hey, can I use your cell phone," or, "Hey, can you do this unethical thing?"
Vanessa Tanicien: The key takeaway from both of these studies here is, simply asking someone to do it is going to be more effective than the average everyday person even thinks.
Tania Luna: Yeah. More than 50% of the time people are going to actually say yes to whatever it is that you're asking for. Go in there knowing that the odds are in your favor.
Vanessa Tanicien: Oh my gosh, Tania, this is so exciting. What does this look like in practice? How would we actually break this down so I know when I'm making the ask next, I'm doing this the quote unquote right way.
Tania Luna: Actually, I was thinking that instead of talking about what you can do right now, we can together break down something you did really recently, Vanessa, which is you made the ask of LifeLabs to do Summer Fridays, or we now call Kind Fridays. What do you think if we take a look at what makes an ask effective and break it down and see, how did you apply that in this successful ask?
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. I love a good case study and I know our listeners do too. Context listeners, we now have Summer Fridays at LifeLabs, we're calling it Kind Fridays in reference to our Be Kind to Your Mind value. We're at three o'clock your local time, it's lids down. Me and my colleague, Grace Pfisterer, worked on it and now it's a reality. Let's get into it.
Tania Luna: Okay. Number one, we know that asks are more effective if they're specific. Let us know, how did you make your ask specific?
Vanessa Tanicien: Well, funny enough, it didn't start off specific. There was a lot of different things that were bogged down in the request. Robyn Long, who's our Director of Operations, said, "We really need this to be drilled down." Grace and I made the decision to focus on the most immediate thing we could do, which would be Summer Fridays.
Tania Luna: Yes.
Vanessa Tanicien: Then we specified specifically, what were the dates? We wanted to make sure that this was an alignment with the calendar year. We decided summer starts from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Tania Luna: Yeah, you de-blurred summer. So, so helpful. Yeah. You narrowed the ask and you made it really concrete. How about impact? How did you clarify what the impact would be? Essentially you're saying like, "Hey company, could we not work and still get paid?" That's technically a hard ask of an organization, but everyone said yes. How did you make the impact convincing?
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. We tethered this to a couple of things, but I think the biggest thing is one of our values, be kind to our mind, and we wanted to be able to live that out in a really concrete way for the team.
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: The other thing is, we have been working bananas, right? We've been working a lot. I'm sure that a lot of listeners relate, but we were hoping that this respite would be on a Friday, when we’re at the end of the week.
Tania Luna: Yeah. It was showing the positive impact, "Hey, this can be great for our mental health. This can be great for our productivity." You also took the extra step to show that it wouldn't have a negative impact.
Vanessa Tanicien: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tania Luna: Could you share a little bit about how you did that? I think that's where you used some face time.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. I think what was cool about this whole conversation that we had around Summer Fridays, is it really was a cross-functional collaboration project. We had to check in with our cloud administrators, with our BD team, with our facilitators to really get buy-in across the company and had several conversations. I know that you're saying face to face really works. We also did email. We also did a survey. Not to completely refute…
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: ... those things.
Tania Luna: You don't have to do everything over a Zoom call.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. While we made the ask, again that idea of commitment versus compliance, people were there to help us see it through to the finish.
Tania Luna: Yeah. Just to recap, it sounds like you used specificity, you shared the positive impact, and you shared how we would mitigate any negative impact. At least to some extent, you put in a little bit of face time here and there so that people could feel connected to you and to Grace, who was the other proposer on this initiative, so that there was a personal excitement about it, not just this idea.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. I guess we did make the ask and I'm so thankful it was successful. At three o'clock every Friday until Labor Day, lids down y'all. Well, Tania, this brings us to our LeaderLab listener experiment. What are we asking people to experiment with in their laboratories of life?
Tania Luna: Woohoo. I love this part. Okay. My mission for listeners is to make the ask. Think of something that you've been wanting to get folks to do, or maybe you've been hesitating to ask, and just take that first small step, make the ask.
Vanessa Tanicien: Thank you so much, Tania, for our first SuperInfluencer skill. I'm ready to make a lot of asks of you later.
Tania Luna: Well, you ask me you to do this episode and I said yes.
Vanessa Tanicien: You're right. It's already working. I'll see you in the lab soon, Tania.
Tania Luna: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: That's a wrap of another episode of The LeaderLab. Make sure to subscribe and share this with at least one other person, so we can all be SuperInfluencers. It's pretty awesome. The LeaderLab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tanicien. NeEddra James is our senior producer and Alana Burman is our director and editor. If you'd like to hang out with us on social, go ahead and find us on LinkedIn at LifeLabs Learning and on Twitter at LifeLabs Learn. To bring training to your team, head on over to lifelabslearning.com. See you in the lab soon.
