Influence and Persuasion are powerful tools that we can and should use while managing our teams. While these topics may make some uncomfortable, the tools of persuasion are natural within human psychology and are taking place even if we are unaware of them.

As a Psychological Warfare profession, I was well-trained in using these tools and employed them throughout PSYOP campaigns.

Now as a leader of teams, I see them through a different framework and have taken the lessons to be the best leader possible.

In this series, we’ll be exploring the work of Robert Cialdini in his seminal work “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”.

Discover these incredible tools and how you can use them while leading your team.Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

Hello, welcome to today's episode of smooth operator, hope you're having a good start to the week it says I'm coming out on a Monday. And over the next couple of weeks, I'm gonna be doing something a little interesting, a little different, as opposed to talk about kind of topics that have come up in my life as an operator, I'm going to be going into influence. So my experience with influence, and the art of persuasion really dates back to when I was going through psyops school. I'm a former Psychological Operations Specialist in the army. And I did psychological warfare for many, many years in various different types of theater.

Everything from, you know, the classic leaflets, stuff that you hear about and you know, loudspeaker stuff to very, very strategic influence and military deception. So it's something I've had a lot of experience in. And it's kind of when you start talking about influence and persuasion, a lot of people get icky about it. And I want to dispel those notions right out the gate. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being influential. There's nothing wrong with using tactics of persuasion. As long as we're, you know, really the, the key you have to consider is, are you using them for good? Are you using them for good intents, if you're doing that for a reason, and you know, the end result is good, you need to be using persuasion, we are all persuadable human beings, that is just part of the human experience. And so yeah, anyway, I just want to dispel that notion once and for all. There's nothing wrong with persuasion, it shouldn't be an icky thing that people get weirded out by even even the term psychological operations. People get really weird when they hear that. And really, it's nothing more than social marketing. And we're all very exposed to social marketing. From, you know, the old Smokey the Bear Only you can stop forest fires to, you know, various social causes. And they've done a lot of good for the in the world, like teen pregnancies down, that was purposeful, that was an intention, smoking is way down. That was an intention, there were various things that they put into place to discourage people from starting to smoke, and encourage people to stop smoking. So it's being done on both ends, you know, discourage the starting and also encourage stopping smoking, all of that was done with a very good intent. And they tried various things to do that.

And so anyway, if we go back to Gosh, it would have been 2011. You know, I was just getting into the beginning parts of the psychological operations course, which is almost a year long at Fort Bragg North Carolina. And one of the first books they gave us right out the gate was by this guy named Robert Cialdini. So Robert Cialdini wrote this book many, many years ago, it's been through a couple of editions. It's called psycho or influence the art of persuasion. And it's a book I've read now, at least 10 or 15 times I keep referring back to keep rereading it finding little nuggets every single time. Because it really is the big, really the beginner stage. And what I would recommend anyone begins with when they want to get into persuasion. Another book that is really, really good is Dale Carnegie, you know, the win friends and influence people another great book, I would really recommend. So I just want to put this in context for what we're going to be using persuasion for. A lot of times when you hear it in content, texts of online businesses, or among some of my colleagues, we're going to talk about influence from the marketing perspective and trying to get people to purchase your products. So trying to gain a following, you know, everything that you have to do to take some gold to warm to a hot prospect and then ultimately get them to convert into a product or into a purchase. We're going to be doing it from a bit of a different context, because most of us if you're in an operator role, I've said it before, I'll say it again, we're in the people business first.

operators do deal with systems we do deal with tech and all that stuff. But in my role in my experience as an operator, my greatest asset, my greatest contribution was to be the best leader on the team and to really provide that leadership. So the team coalesced around me and was willing to follow me take my directions. Take my orders for lack of a better word, I don't like putting that word in this context, because you're not really going to win anyone, by just ordering them around. That's not the job market of today. It just isn't. And on Friday, I'll be will break from the influence series for an interview I just did yesterday, which was really good. Let me just pull up my notes from that interview. It was with Mark Hertzberg. And he wrote a book called The career toolkit. So that interview is coming out on Friday. And the interesting thing that Mark talked about was that in the job market of today, it's so fluid. And our employees have so many different options, they're not just stuck to us. And we really have to be careful. And be aware of how we're influencing our team, and how we're purposely leading them in the right direction, and to not only get the job done, but to really expand their skills, increase their capacity, move them forwards with the company, so that they not only have job satisfaction, they have motivation.

But also we're looking at the long term prospect of keeping them on the team and moving them up into further levels of the company where they're able to take on additional responsibilities get promoted from within, you see this a lot within companies where a company will grow from 20 to 100 people, and the people that were there at the beginning, are the people that are end up being there, as you grow to scale. That's the ideal. That's really what we want to be growing our team members into, we want to grow them into the leaders of tomorrow, you're not going to win every time. So it's definitely, let's start with that idea right out the gate, you're not going to be able to influence everyone to come up with you. But we can use some of these triggers of influence and persuasion. To better position ourselves to be that magnanimous leader on the team that inspires everyone to follow us. A leader does do that leader inspires people, a leader motivates people, a leader uses various mechanisms, various tools to do that. And that's really that's the framing of how we're going to approach this idea of infill of influence. And I really liked that perspective, because it's so different from what we typically see in the marketing industry, which that has its place. So I've definitely not discounting that at all, if you want to keep leveling up your influence game. Perhaps in the future, I'll redo this series from the marketing perspective of different mechanisms and different levers of influence that you can pull during a marketing campaign to trigger people into the purchase to pull them along and make get them to make a decision, we will be going through all of those, if I do do it from a marketing perspective, but very much from the operations and Team Leader perspective is how we'll be doing this.

So if you don't have either of those two books, I'd recommend going out and getting them right away. It's both are very useful books to have in your library. As you more than know by now, I'm a huge believer in reading our interview from last week with Nikki blue. One thing that Nikki says is Leaders are readers period, I just watched a podcast episode with, with Russell Brunson, where like one of his top tips of how he became a millionaire was he reads, and he reads all the time. Even Mark Hirschfeld from that interview that's coming out Friday, he actually created it's this new thing called the brain bump app, which is really interesting. And I'll probably find a way to feature it here. What the brain bump app does is it allows you to put those little nuggets of information into an app so you can recall them easily. But I would strongly urge you to get those books, start reading them go along with this series and read along with the text.

It's really gonna help put a lot of things into context, see it from the method that Cialdini was applying it, for sure. But then you better see how I put a little spin on it to show how I've used it as an operator as a team leader, not only within the business, but also a lot of stuff I did in the military, because it was a team leader in the military as well and had many people working under me. Like all these tools come into great effect. So pay attention. For these next episodes, we'll probably figure out a way to release it in some other format, just because it's really really valuable information. But look forward to having you there. Please do shout if you have any questions along the way, because it's gonna get into some pretty good topics here. And yeah, I'll see you tomorrow with part one of the influence series, just to go along and Part one is going to be all about reciprocation. So reciprocity, and we'll see how we can incorporate that into our jobs as operators.