Influence instead of tell
The top-down leadership structure often results in a dynamic where the leader tells people what to do and the people do what they’re told.
What if we reframe the “telling” with “influencing”? Here's what I mean:
Our job as leaders is to help a group of people accomplish a project. It’s to help the group advance and become better individually.
We can tell them to do something, or we can influence them to do it. It’s a subtle but crucial difference.
Telling suggests that the people may remain passive. And when we tell, we often need to enforce the behavior with negative consequences - which can be implicit or explicit. When it’s implicit, it can be quietly humming in the background as part of the unspoken culture. When it’s explicit, it can feel threatening. Both instill fear.
Fear can easily become an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance. As a tactic, it can give leaders the instant gratification of getting someone to do something we want to see happen. However, not everyone responds in that way to fear. Psychologically and biologically, fear can also make people freeze, which prevents action (the opposite of what we want).
On the other hand, influencing suggests that the people must have agency. To me, agency means that people have the desire and feel motivated to take action. They may even understand why it is important to do so. Influence draws upon intrinsic motivation and assumes the people ultimately have the authority to decide. Influence doesn't require enforcement mechanisms.
We can influence people to take action by spelling out the specific, positive rewards they would gain from doing so. While fear can prevent action, reward leads to action.
Leaders can remember that it matters how we choose to elicit action from our people. The issue with fear as a motivator is that without it, we easily lose leverage. With influence, we leverage people's internal capacities and desires. That's not easily lost. It's a win-win for all.
The next time we find ourselves wanting to tell someone to do something, try thinking "How could I influence instead of tell?"
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