3 Takeaways - Yale Professor Zoe Chance Reveals Smart, Simple Ways To Influence People To Get What You Want (#156)

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Becoming more influential is within your grasp, and it doesn't mean becoming a selfish ass — says Yale professor Zoe Chance, who teaches the wildly popular course Mastering Influence and Persuasion. Here, she shares brilliant, simple strategies — including the “magic question” to ask — to get what you want in a graceful way.“The bedrock principle of influencing behavior is … to have people react unconsciously in a favorable way.”

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another Three Takeaways episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Zoe Chance. Zoe's a professor at Yale School of Management who teaches the school's most popular course, Mastering Influence and Persuasion. Zoe believes that while the study of influence is a science, the practice of influence is an art. Zoe is also the author of the wonderful book, Influence is Your Superpower. I'm excited

to learn more, and I'm especially excited to learn Zoe's magic question. Welcome, Zoe, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you, Lynn. I'm so happy to get to talk with you today. It is my pleasure. Many people think of influence tactics as manipulative, sneaky, and even corrosive. What do you think? I think that some people who use them do use them that way. But what happens if we have that perspective is that we tend to shy away from learning about and practicing how influence works in a healthy way. And if we're stepping back from that, the result is that we leave the world in the hands of the power hungry people who do learn about influence and who do practice it. The benefits of learning influence

is you having a greater likelihood of getting and doing whatever it is that you want in life, whether it's for yourself or other people or the world, and being able to do that in a graceful way. And let me say, this is learning influence the way that I teach it. There are lots of books on influence that could have you turning into that creepy, obnoxious, persistent person you don't want to be. The way that I teach influence, you will be building and preserving strong and healthy relationships because you're practicing influence strategies and techniques that feel comfortable on both sides. And the whole purpose of interacting with people in this way is that you are respecting their freedom of choice. And you are respecting that they are the decision maker in their own life. You don't get to tell them what to do.

You just get to invite them into these collaborative relationships. Let's start with some common misperceptions. If people understand the facts, they'll make the right decision. Is that actually true? We know that it's not true when we self-reflect about all of the good decisions that we don't follow through with about personal habits. Like I'm not exercising as much as I know that I should. I'm not eating the things that I know that I should and staying away from the much as I know that I should. I'm not eating the things that I know that I should and staying away from the things that I know that I should. I don't have an organized house or office or all of these things that I know that I should do. And looking

at life endangering behaviors, like texting while driving that people do despite knowing they shouldn't or life changing behaviors that people engage in, like unprotected sex when they don't want to become a parent or deal with the other possibilities of that. So, of course, other people can't just assimilate the facts and make the objectively best decision and follow through with it if we ourselves can't despite being persuaded. Does becoming influential involve persuading disbelievers and other people to change their minds, bending people to your will? Yeah, this is what a lot of people think of when they think about influence. And that desire is what drives people to be curious about it and learn about it.

But if what we want really is to influence people's behavior, then the easiest, most effective way to do that is to focus on influencing people who are already willing or potentially willing, but they're not taking action. And you could think of it like in politics, rather than trying to persuade a Democrat to vote for a Republican candidate, what you want to do is get out the vote among the registered voters in your party. That's a much better use of your time than focusing even on the undecided voters and a far better use of your time than trying to persuade people who are registered for the other party. But we just don't that often think about this when it comes to our own projects and great ideas. Interesting. Do you see negotiation as a battle?

Sometimes it can feel that way, but far less often than we imagine. And I teach negotiations as a small piece in a large repertoire of influence skills. When we talk about the word negotiation, it scares or turns off a lot of people and their gender differences also where women tend to hate negotiation more often and more pervasively than men do. When we think about this word, a lot of us feel like it's this battle of wills between bullies and suckers. We don't want to be a bully and we don't want to be a sucker, so we don't want to be negotiating. But the reality is that we're doing go fine. And they happen in healthy relationships.

And even when we're talking about arm's length transactions, where we're negotiating with strangers over some fixed pie of money, even those tend to go relatively well. And when can people use influence or persuasion or negotiation? Literally all the time. In every conversation, every time we're interacting with other people, every single thing that we want to accomplish that requires other people's participation, requires us to be influencing and persuading them. And we're doing that even if we're not conscious of it.

And in most of the negotiations that we're involved in, we actually want the other party to be happy with the process and the outcome. Because if they're not happy with it, not only does it hurt the relationship, but even if this is a stranger, they're going to try to get out of it, or at least they're going to not want to deal with us in the future. So the idea that we should be negotiating to just get as much as we can from other people is very short-sighted and wrongheaded. And also, it's not true of other people when they're negotiating with us. Who does influence flow to? Influence flows to the people who study and practice influence. It doesn't flow to the people who deserve it. And this is a very important distinction. So interesting. And of course, what you specialize in, Zoe, is helping people understand influence and becoming more influential.

Why is just asking so important? It sounds so simple, but it's not. First of all, it feels really hard in a lot of cases to just, we'll put the just in air quotes, to just ask for something that we want. But even before that, what we do most importantly to minimize our own possibilities of influence is to not even think of asking for things that we might ask for. And to illustrate this, there's a game that I play in my class that we call the bigger and better game. I didn't invent it. It's been around since at least the fifties where you start with something small, like a paper clip, which is what we use. And then you trade it up for something bigger and better, bigger and better with anyone who wants

to trade with you. And in class, we come back a week later and you bring your biggest, best thing. So some students come with really giant, useless things like a single oar from a Yale rowing boat or like a really big smelly fur coat. And then some students come with valuable, meaningful kinds of things like a collection of love poems. Or sometimes people come with an experience that's valuable, like Yale students, like Columbia students have some fancy connections. So they might have a condo for a weekend in the Alps to go skiing or like condo in Hawaii. current record for biggest and best of all time in my class, traded up the paperclip 10 times between a Monday and a Thursday with business owners in our hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, where they traded for, there was a gift certificate for cheese. There was an antique brooch.

There was a painting that I thought was ugly, but apparently was valuable. And I guess six other things, but their biggest, best thing, they couldn't even fit into the classroom. And they said, Zoe, could you please bring the class outside to the front of the building? Do you mind? So we go outside and in the turnaround in front of our building is a Volkswagen Jetta. And it says bigger and better scrawled across the windshield. And Manis and Tom traded up from a paperclip to a car in three and a half days by just asking people to play this game with them. And a lot of times we hold ourselves back from asking because we just don't think the other person will say yes. And we don't think that they will want us to ask.

So we say no to ourselves before other people can even say no to us. That's the first piece of just asking is even having it occur to us. Zoe, what is a soft ask? And can you explain why it's important and also give some examples? A soft ask is just a hypothetical ask where you're not putting somebody on the spot to agree or refuse your request. You're just asking hypothetically, say, how they might feel. I asked my husband this morning how he would feel about my sister and her family staying in my house for an additional night than what we had planned.

And I just said, like, what would it be like if they did rather than can they do that? Is that fine? And a soft ask takes the pressure off and it allows you to find out how the other person feels and then to know whether to follow up or not. When you're talking about something like a negotiation with a stranger, another purpose that a soft ask serves when you say, how would you feel about, or what about some general price range or time range or something is that you can sometimes find out that they're already sold. They're already in, they're already ready. And if you didn't know

that you would have been hurting the relationship a little bit to keep selling or to keep trying to persuade them when they're already persuaded. That's such a great idea. The soft ask is part of your broader strategy of baby steps. Can you talk about that, Zoe? Baby steps is the idea that if you ask for something that's so big that the other person might be uncomfortable with it, their natural reaction is resistance. Even if you're actually their literal boss, if you influence through baby steps with less pressure that are more comfortable, then bit by bit, it's much easier and more likely that that person says yes in the end. So instead of say, will you invest in my startup? The steps

might be, here's my idea. Here's our personal connection through some friend or something. And I'm looking for some advice on this thing that I'm working on. Is it possible you might have 15 minutes? And then you have this 15 minute conversation where you're legitimately seeking advice and you're trying to make this helpful for you. They're contributing their time. So this is a real sincere advisory conversation. And then you're asking, would it be okay if I reached out to let you know how this goes? And they say yes. And then you reach out and let them know how it goes. And then maybe it's, I'm putting together a pitch stack. And I wonder if you might be willing to

give us feedback on this. And then when it comes to this person who's showing themselves to be interested in you and your project and being helpful, then asking them eventually in a very gentle way, where maybe there's some more steps to like, is there anyone you know who might be potentially interested in a project like this, in investing in a project like this? When you ask them that, they know that they can step forward and say, well, I might be interested in a project like this. But you might also, after that, just very gently ask, is this the kind of thing or the time in your life or whatever, where you might potentially be interested in that? And you've been so helpful already, no pressure, but you have led the two of you to a

situation where you have your best chance of them investing in your project, where they feel that they have been treated as a human being rather than a wallet. And they know enough about your project by now that they know more or less whether they might want to invest in it. They know how professional you are and they know whether they like you. So this is the idea of baby steps in a nutshell. That is so helpful, Zoe. And the specific examples are wonderful.

What is the bedrock principle of influencing behavior? The bedrock principle of influencing behavior is that rather than appealing to someone's reasoning process through all of the mountain of facts and data that you can amass and present to them, you need to have them be reacting unconsciously in a favorable way. And the unconscious reaction comes back to system one and system two. I know you've talked to Danny Kahneman on this podcast before, but I know you've talked to other behavioral scientists. So a lot of people will be familiar with system one and system two. In a nutshell, system one is the instantaneous gut unconscious reactions

that people have to each other. And this is also the process that drives our unconscious behavior through habit. Everything through practice becomes habitual and very easy. This is the dominant mode that drives our decisions and behavior. But when we're thinking of persuading people, especially when we are smart intellectual people, and when we're persuading other smart intellectual people, we forget that. So the bedrock principle is that we start there with this unconscious process before then going to hear all the facts and the data. The path of least resistance behaviorally is doing what they've done or what's easy. The path of least resistance emotionally is doing what they already want to do. Tell us about persistence. When does that work well,

or how can one make it work in our favor? Persistence plays a bigger role than people think. Just like ease plays a bigger role than people think, even though we know both of these things are important. I've mentioned sales a few times. Marketing and sales background is where I come from. And when I teach influence, a big piece of what I'm doing is bringing what we know from marketing and sales into a leadership context in relationships that should be comfortable on both sides. So persistence is one of those things that in sales can be very transactional and annoying, although it's successful. The most successful salespeople go back six or seven times to a qualified lead before letting that go. When you think about those persistent people who are going back six or seven times,

while it sounds really annoying, I've said that those are the most successful people. And you don't have somebody saying yes the sixth time if you've really annoyed them. You only have somebody saying yes the sixth time if you have been building rapport and checking in and getting permission and understanding that this person would like to say yes, but it's not right for them right now. Or they might like to say yes in the future, which is part of the baby steps approach. Again, what most people don't understand is that no is not no to you forever. It's no to this for now. And the one caveat I would put there, which I mentioned to my students is please have a different standard for persistence in romantic relationships than you do

potential romantic relationships. It's very uncomfortable for people to reject each other romantically, very uncomfortable on both sides. And don't assume that persistence is the way to get past that. I love that no is not no forever. It's just no to this and no at this time, except for relationships. And of course, some people come around and change their mind about relationships, but that's just a domain to be mindful of. Zoe, what is the magic question? The magic question, thank you for asking, Lynn, is simply what would it take? And I'll tell a story, if it's okay, to illustrate the power of it and the psychology of it.

This is a story that Gloria Steinem told when she came to our town of New Haven, Connecticut. She's an American feminist, and she was talking about when she was working on the problem of sex trafficking. And she had become an expert in this problem. She was speaking about it. She was writing about it. She had traveled to Zambia to go to a conference and speak about it. And after that conference, she was visiting a village in a rural area near a game preserve where three young women had been sex trafficked from that village the previous year.

She sits down with a group of women in a circle on a tarp in the middle of a barren field, and she asks them the magic question. She asks them, what would it take to make sure no one's going to be sex trafficked from this village again? And they told her an electric fence, an electric fence. They said, when the corn reaches a certain height, the elephants come and they eat it. They trample it. We have nothing for families to eat. We have nothing, no money to send our kids to school. And these families of these young women were desperate.

And Gloria Steinem says, okay, listen, if I can raise the money for a fence, will you clear the field and will you build it? They say, yes, she does. They do. She comes back a few years later. There is a massive crop of corn. Since they got the fence, nobody has been sex trafficked from that village. Now, it might sound like the fence is what prevented sex trafficking in this village, but it's more complicated than that. And the magic question is more complicated than it seems. First of all, the magic question is helpful and powerful because it's respectful. If I'm asking you, what would it take? We're shifting the dynamic from me pressuring you to a collaborative problem-solving conversation that's easier and more comfortable to have.

And I'm also respecting that you're the expert on your obstacles and your situation and your interests. And you know all kinds of things that I just don't know. If Lynn and Zoe and Gloria Steinem and everyone listening brainstormed for a hundred years about the sex trafficking problem, we're not going to realize that it's a human wildlife conflict problem in that village because there's no way for us to know that. And then this question is asking for a roadmap to success. Sometimes there's nothing to be done and you'll find out it's not what you wanted to know, but it's helpful. But most often there will be a conversation that follows that leads to some kind of roadmap

when those steps have been followed implicitly. Whoever told you what it would take has committed to supporting that outcome. So the way I interpret the story of the electric fence is not that the electric fence or Gloria Steinem magically saved women from sex trafficking. It's the women who asked for the electric fence, who when the electric fence had been built, prevented and protected the women of their village

from going into sex trafficking. That is a wonderful story, Zoe. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? You becoming more influential is within your grasp, and it doesn't mean that you become a selfish ass. So you becoming more influential can be good for everybody. You can start that with just asking or using the magic question and enjoy, if you can, playing around with the domain of no. Thank you so much for inviting me. Zoe, it's been a pleasure. I've really enjoyed your book and learned so much. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn.

For anyone who's interested, we have three great related episodes. The first is how to get people to say yes with the godfather of influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Warren Buffett recommends Dr. Cialdini's book as one of the best business books of all time. Dr. Cialdini is episode 42 of Three Takeaways. The second Three Takeaways episode is Ask for More, Two Questions to Negotiate Almost Anything with the director of Columbia Law School's Mediation Clinic, Alex Carter. That's episode 106. And the third episode is with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral

science. Danny shares on what he calls noise and his latest findings in behavioral science. That's episode 27. See you soon on Three Takeaways. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at threettakeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. See you soon at 3takeaways.com.