Masters of Influence Do These 3 Things

By Marshall Goldsmith

Founder of Influence360°, five-time Emmy award-winning broadcaster, and author of the bestselling books Talk Less, Say More and Become the Real Deal, Connie Dieken is an expert on leadership influence and one of our 100 Coaches.

In this week’s interview, Connie wraps up our series with a discussion about her research and the validated psychometric tool that she and her team developed to identify how and why people are influential.

Marshall: Connie, along with your writing you’re doing some fascinating research and have developed a validated psychometric tool. Can you tell us a little about it?

Connie: Before this tool, there wasn’t anything out there in the world to identify how and why we’re influential, or why we gain influence or lose influence. We identified three habits that highly influential people are masters of. These are: connect, convey, and convince.

• Connecting: The ability to create openness in others, regardless of position or power. You have the ability to engage anyone. Some of us are naturally open, some of us are more reserved and have to work at it.
• Conveying: This is about creating clarity. Do you have the ability to frame the right content, in the right amount, to the right person? Some people are good at this. They can streamline information. Others naturally confuse people because they tend to put out too much information. They do this hoping if they give you lots of information, you’ll have everything you need to make the right decision, or because they want to make their efforts visible.
• The dirty little secret about convincing is: You don’t convince anyone of anything, people convince themselves. What you have to do is inspire commitment in people so that they choose to take action and bring other people along with them. Essentially, they become your accolades. The problem in the convincing stage for many leaders, as you have pointed out in, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, is that many leaders will steamroll others thinking they have to be right.

What we learned from our survey of more than 100,000 leaders around the globe is that these three habits, connect, convey, convince, are the path to influence.

When I go into organizations, whether it’s to give a keynote speech or consulting, everyone takes this survey and then we heat map them. This way we can show them that, for instance, there organization is mainly connectors and that is why they’re not closing deals. Or, perhaps the group is conveyors of information, yet with so much information they are confusing people, so no one knows what to do.

In this continuum you need to be able to handle all of those, and we return to the challenge of persuasion versus influence. Persuaders stop short. They try to maintain the status quo, whereas influencers shape the future. So, Marshall, because you are undoubtedly the most influential person in the coaching world you have shaped the world of coaching forever.

Marshall: Thank you!

Connie: As an influencer, we can see that what came before you in the field of coaching is different than what has come after you.

Marshall: Very different. There wasn’t anything!.

Connie: Yes, and even more than that, you’ve given us all a framework to look at what the possibilities are. So, in the spirit of 100 Coaches and paying it forward, I would like to offer this assessment tool to your audience. I would like for you to be able to take a look at the people in your world, so we’re going to offer this and so to get to this you simply go to www.Influence360.com. In the upper right-hand corner, there is a little button that says conference code. In honor of you, the conference code that your audience should put in is Marshall. (This is a case sensitive code, so please use Capital M for Marshall.)

Marshall: Thank you so much! This is very consistent with what we are doing in our 100 Coaches. The whole idea of the organization is to give things to people and pay it forward. This is a wonderful opportunity with no downside and lots of upside. Thanks so much – I’ll be one of the first people to sign up!

Connie: Thank you Marshall. I suspect that you’ll score 100 in all three of them. You are an excellent connector, an unbelievable conveyor of information, and people are devoted to you. I would be shocked if you weren’t the highest scorer we’ve ever had. Thank you for being such an incredible influence on my life and the lives of so very many people.