How much influence can someone liking you have?

In this episode, we explore different strategies for encouraging people to like you. This is critical for a manager and something that is absolutely in your control.

By incorporating these strategies, you’ll become a more likeable person where it matters, and leverage greater influence over your team.

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

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

Transcript

As you all know, if you're running a business, you know, sometimes you got to prioritize. But I missed this for sure. And happy to be back. As we continue going through Robert Cialdini he's influence the science of persuasion and how we can use these levers of influence in running our business and working with our team and working with partners. It's a big part of it. And there's so much that we can do very subtle things to leverage influence without being creepy without being weird. All this stuff is natural human science. And it's just how we're naturally it's how we're wired. So why would we hide from it? Why would we run from what is naturally occurring anyway, in our brains. Okay, so to this point, we've gone through a couple of those levers and brings us to today's lever, which is the principle of liking. So Chow Dini says that few people would be surprised to learn that as a rule, we most prefer to say yes, to the request of someone we know. And like, what might be starting to note, however, is that this simple rule is used in hundreds of ways by total strangers, to get us to comply with their request. Huge factor, there's a lot to draw from here, and just want to kind of lean into a couple of things that really stand out in terms of how we can leverage this in our relationships in what we're doing with our team. And really, the first clear most way is compliments.

When we compliment someone that it's proven to have that reciprocal effect, you gain a lot of leverage with someone and and a lot of good feelings with someone when you're highly complimentary of them. And so how can you do this as a leader as an operator. And one thing I always strive to do whenever I'm meeting with my team, especially in the whole team format, when we're here together on a mass zoom call, I do something called calling, I call it calling out someone for being awesome. And that's exactly how I phrase it was like, hey, I need to call this person out for being awesome. And I'll say something that they did. And so they get that recognition, not only from me, so they get that good vibe from from me doing it, doing it in that but it's also that I'm doing it in that environment. So they're getting complimented in front of their peers. And it's, it's very cool way of doing it, we go round robin with it. So everyone has the opportunity to to call out someone for being awesome. I also do it in the weekly reports that we submit as a team, there's a section where I you know, you're supposed to do shout outs to other team members. And I'd be sure to find something each and every week that team members had done, just so I can take the opportunity to compliment them. This is very subtle, and it's not, there's no direct correlation. But we do know from science that you'll those regular compliments are going to build up over time.

And it's going to really impact your influence over them. And their impression of you if you're a complimentary of them. You know, people have a natural way of liking you more, which is a good thing. The second area I'd really like to get into is cooperation. So what Chow Dini has found in his research, is that when organizations or groups of people are presented with common crisis, and they need to have unified actions, and work together, people have a way of organizing themselves harmoniously to find and fix the problem. There's a great deal of things that happen when we're cooperating when we're working together when we're using teamwork and collaboration. It does have fringe benefits there. After you collaborate with someone. You know, you're building that relationship, your work, you're, you're establishing those foundations of a relationship that can be used over and over again, and it's really part of that long term strategy to building a really solid relationship with your team. So using cooperation whenever possible, sometimes even if I already have the answer, and I know what we need to do on a project, I'll sometimes bring in someone that I need to have a better relationship, I need to work together with them more. So I can further cement that foundation. So think about that carefully, as you're bringing someone, even someone brand new to the team, what levers of cooperation, can we gather, even in their initial days that become at the company, you know, just because they're brand new, doesn't mean, they can't be presented a problem to help team fix with you to help team tackle. If you can establish some of those things in those initial days with the team, man, I mean, you're just settling, you know, creating the types of relationships that you're going to need down the run, and really cementing your relationship with that team member.

Not only that, but what are you doing for their psyche, for their long term outlook into the job, you're giving them a whole lot of confidence. And when they have that good feeling of confidence and ability to accomplish something, who's now associated with it? You are, that's crazy. That is absolutely nuts. I love that concept. And I love applying it. So even from day one or early on in a customer or employees time with the company, find ways where you can have that collaboration with them. And from cooperation, you're going to see a whole lot of fringe benefits in terms of their liking of you. One thing, another thing that Cialdini noticed is that if we use the collective term, we what does that do, it gives people an identity with it, it gives people an association, that they are a part of something, there's a whole lot to be said about what that does, in terms of their ability to see themselves as part of an organization or a project with you. So just using the term we use, that also has a big impact on customers. When we're talking about things like mission about long term strategic vision of a company, using the phrase, we getting things to the collective, it kind of feeds off exactly what we're talking about with cooperation, in that people see themselves as part of the problem part of the solution, when they see that, you know, they they then acquaint themselves with the outcome. So getting into collectives, and using the phrase we, when describing the organization, or perhaps the process that you're using, or the mission that you're on, the term we has a great benefit not only internally on the team, but externally for partners, customers.

And any one potentially, that comes into your framework. I mean, it's really, it's really amazing how that can work. There was a vignette that was shared about a salesman that was the this was one of the best salesmen car salesman in the United States for a number of years running. And there's this great story about how he had this humongous database. And he'd send them letters, handwritten letters at certain times of the year. And it could be for Fourth of July, or Easter or Christmas. And the message inside was simple. It just simply said, I like you come back to see me. I don't know if that could work today. But what an amazing big net of something as simple as a letter to people, I think that has a lot of impacts. Especially in these days, when we're like digital everything. handwritten letter can really take you a long way to someone liking you more to someone having a much deeper connection and relationship with you. And the you know, there's a halo effect that occurs with any of these things. When there's positive characteristics of a person, it tends to convey other positive characteristics about about people. So there is that halo effect that occurs when we're pushing these levers, it makes every other lever that we're pushing that much more dynamic. So the more levers we can push, the more dynamic that dynamicism that we're going to introduce into our influence and the different levers of persuasion that we're pulling.

The final one, which, you know, there's not a whole lot any of us can really do about it. But we know from science, that physical attractiveness is a characteristic that does help people like you more. So not a whole lot any of us can really do about some of our natural physical appearances. But ask yourself, what could you do to make yourself more physically appealing inside of the way that we're meeting with our team, whether it be zoom or in person, like what can you do to make yourself more physically attractive? To have that effect?

I put this Last, because I think it's, you know, it's the one we have the least control over. But that being said, there are certain things we can do, in terms of making sure that, you know, we are in clothes that fit well, you know, properly grooming, you know, if you, you know, if you shave, and you have a smooth face, always having a smooth face versus kind of the Raggedy beard that some of us do, if we, if we shave once or twice a week, you know, keeping up those appearances, doing the little things, and, you know, definitely make your best effort at it. They're definitely, you know, in the chapter, they talk about, you know, the very physically attractive, which there's not a whole lot we can do about, but there are subtle ways that we can make ourselves more attractive to someone and this is not a sexist sex thing whatsoever, you know, male to female physical attraction that or, or anything like that. But even as a dude, you know, a pretty heterosexual dude, you know, you know, it's a scientific fact, we know this, that we're more likely to have, that liking effect was someone that is more physically attractive.

Okay, so this was the principle of liking. It's definitely one of the, you know, there's some subtleties in all of these, I really like overall, I like the benefits that you can get from compliments from cooperation. There's a whole lot you can gain from that, overall, with your teams, if you open up to them, and they see you're a person too, and you're sharing things that they have in common with you. And you're dishing out those compliments, I mean, these are all the little things that help inspire someone to like you. So anyway, that we can make someone like us a little bit more, it's only going to pay dividends down the road. And, you know, we all kind of know that as leaders of people, but now, exposing it as a principle of persuasion, puts a whole different spin on it, and we can see how this can increase the influence that we have amongst our team members.