You're stuck. It's a stalemate.
You need to get this decision over the line, and you don't have any more time to waste. You just need this one particular person to.
Agree and commit, but they won't. What can you do?
How can you influence the situation? If only there was a magic question that would turn this all around?
Well, have I got the guest for you?
The Queen of Influence, Zoe Chance, is an assistant professor of Marketing at Yale and has so many tricks and tips for being influential that she has distilled into a book called Influence Is Your Superpower. Her class, Mastering Influence and Persuasion is the most popular course at the Yale School of Management. So what is this magic question and how can it become your superpower for being a better influencer? How can you make people agree when they really.
Don't want to come to a decision?
And why is it important to be one of the first three people to speak in a meeting. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of Behavioral Science Consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work A show about how to help you do your best work. Now. Zoe's area of expertise is all around influence, but as a professor of marketing at Yale, she also thinks a.
Lot about productivity.
Well, my dad grilled into me that productivity is the most important thing, and his perspective was just that you're working non stop all the time, every day, And so for many decades of my life it was just am I working? Then I coded myself as being productive, but that was completely wrong because there were a lot of days that I worked for many, many hours and had very little to show for it.
Like if I'm on a writing project.
I might write one paragraph and then edit the heck out of it for an entire day or something. So now I try to, when I'm organized, just set a couple of reasonable goals for myself at the beginning of the day, and if I accomplish those goals, then I feel productive.
Yeah.
Right, And how do you see the relationship between like enjoyment or pleasure and productivity.
In a neurotic way?
When I'm productive, then I give myself a gold star and I'm all happy. And when I'm not, I'm very stressed. But the reality, the deeper reality, is that when I'm overly focused on productivity that itself is what contributes to stress.
And my coach.
So I've been working with a coach for at least a decade, and she helped me this year come up with the theme for twenty twenty two of improvise when I asked her to help me again for the millionth time with time management. So I'm excited for that to now take a new lens from the two that I just shared with you and see what productivity looks like in a year of improvisation.
Ooh, improvise.
That's so cool.
I've been trying to think about a theme for my year, but I'm never very successful in doing it, So I'd love to know what you and your coach's approach was to getting to that word improvise.
Well, it's a little bit woo woo, something that we end up doing a lot of, because, like I said, we've been working together so long and she's great and she tries all different things, but very often for us, she'll lead me on a guided visualization meditation where I will end up meeting face to face in my mind with future Zoe, who gives me advice and I get to ask her whatever questions I want, and she gives me strategic advice or life advice or helps me feel better.
And it's kind of funny because obviously it's just me giving myself advice. But the container that my coach creates and the frame of mind that she's able to lead me into gives a lot of clarity.
Ooh, I like that a lot. And so what advice did Feature Zoe give to you to help guide you through twenty twenty two?
Well, the advice is that I'm always setting these goals for myself and then beating myself up if I don't accomplish them. But stepping back and looking at the reality of how things are going in my life and how they've been going for a long time, is that overall, I'm very successful and I accomplish these big things that I'm excited about in the long run, and it's just the day to day that does always go as planned.
So the advice was just embrace that, and especially with us being in the third year now of the pandemic, just accept the reality that things are not going to go how I or anyone else is going to plan this year.
And so how is the word improvise or the theme of improvise impacting your day to day is so far, like, can you give me an example.
Well, this is a very literal one. But I've signed up for improvisation classes, which I'm really really excited about.
And it was something I've done only once over a decade ago, for a couple of months, and I was so humorous and happy and just feeling full of life, just alive. I loved that time of my life. And then I ended up moving to a different part of
the country, and you know, life happened. And I've realized that if I can get back to that improvisational state of yes and accepting the world reality, my own productivity being one tiny piece of it, but the universe and my life and my work and everything as it actually is, and then adding on to that, I'll be able to be much more joyful. So I've just signed up for improvisation classes and the first ones on Thursday.
Oh that's so exciting.
I used to I did a few years of improv when I was younger, and it was so much fun.
It's so funny.
I can so relate to what you're saying. A few weeks ago, my best friend said to me aman that you need to incorporate more spontaneity into your life. And I got really defensive when she said it. I'm like, I am spontaneous. I do that already. And then I was sort of reflecting on, Gosh, why did I have such a defensive response, And I'm like, hmm, maybe I'm not actually all that spontaneous. So I'm feeling quite inspired
with your improvisation theme that you've got going. I think I'm going to have to do some further reflection on that myself. Now, you made a really interesting choice of walking away from going down the tenure track at university. Can you can you tell me about like what the tenure track is for those that don't know, and why you walked away from it and why that's such a big deal.
Sure, it's basically the worst thing that you can do if you're an academic, And it depends what country you're
living in what the tenure track is like. But in the United States and at my university I'm at Yale University, the tenure track is it just happens to be ten years long, and you have a couple of promotion stages leading up to at the end of a decade, either you get tenure and that you and it means that you're senior colleagues vote on do we keep her around for the rest of her life or do we fire her?
And sixty percent of the time that you've made it all the way to that stage, which means major hurdles to get there, sixty percent of the time you get fired. So only and it's so hard to get down that path that actually, for I think this is just average across fields in the US, but I have heard from smart people that only six percent of new professors end up making it to the end of that path at the university where they start. So there's a whole lot
of moving around. Sometimes people get recruited elsewhere happily. Sometimes they don't get promotion in one place and they move to another place. And then sometimes like me, they like I got the first stage promotion and then before the second stage, I just said, you know, actually this is not my jam. I'm really not happy and I want
to do something else. Usually if you stepped off the tenure track, not just if you didn't get tenure, but usually if you stepped off the tenure track, you'd be fired. It's just wow, pretty much up or out the whole way. But I got really lucky at my university. There are a lot of resources and that's really important, and I'm a star teacher and that's what I love. My class is the most popular class at the business school. Students
love it. And it probably helps that I do a lot for different parts of the university because I really really love it here, despite the part that I wasn't loving. So I'll help recruit with the admissions department, I help train fundraisers for the fundraising department, lots of other stuff. And the thing that I wasn't loving is what would get me tenure, which is the process of publishing academic research.
So the research investigation part is interesting. It's cool, it's you know, for people like you and me and a lot of your listeners who are nerdy. It's totally interesting to have a hypothesis and then you test it and you create new knowledge. However, the actual real life experience of academic publishing is that projects take years and years and they are read by very few people.
Most of them.
When I say very few people the modal number of citations. That means, you know, the most common number of people who are writing a paper that cites your paper is zero, so mostly not even your mom reads it. Lots of papers are published and probably nobody ever actually reads it. Sometimes a few people read it, sometimes a few hundred
people read it. And then on that path, there's so much meanness and negativity, Amantha, It's just a barrage, and any academic will tell you, but especially in fields that get closer to hard sciences and economics, and I'm in marketing and it straddles economics and psychology. But people, even if they're nice, people in real life are very, very critical and negative. And we give each other anonymous negative feedback and reviews and face to face negative feedback when
we present research. And it was just hurting my heart.
And so you made that decision. What was your process for making that decision to step away from the popular path.
It was a few years of denial and then and
getting depressed. And when I say denial, like I study self deception, and it's not coincidental that I was really deceiving myself that some how I was going to make it through and figure it out and get back on track and be happy and flourishing and productive, and all of this and then when it was twoenty sixteen, I guess when Donald Trump had just been elected, and I was personally devastated, and I was at such a low point, such a terrible state of mind, that it just ripped
off the blinders and I just said, I can't do this anymore. And I was meeting with a mentor of mine, and I just shocked myself by just blurting out, I just don't like research and I love teaching, and I don't know what to do. And afterward, I was going, oh my god, that was so dumb. You shouldn't have told Gaul's Alberman that you do live research. But he was great and he helped me, along with many other colleagues to make a transition that's worked out really well.
But Amantha, my office used to have this beautiful, large office with this view, like giant window view across the whole city. And now I have this office that's basically the size of a king sized bed, and it not only does it not have a window, it has two walls that are glass on a hallway, so people can walk by and see exactly what I'm doing on my computer even right now. And the thing is, it actually
is fun for me. And I've made this little tiny office absolutely beautiful and people walk by and they wave and they say hi, and they stop and talk with me, and it helps me be productive that they can see what I'm doing.
I love that. That's very cool.
Now you have a book out called Influence Is Your Superpower, which is brilliant. And by the way, we'll be out by the time this interview goes to air. I'd love to know if you can tell me about the magic questions and why they are your go to strategy for being influent?
Can I, metha, Can I just share a story that will take a couple of minutes. Of course, yes, the magic question sinks in a little better with a story, and from an influenced perspective, we can remember things better when we have something concrete to visualize. So this will help listeners remember the magic question. And this is a story that an American feminist named Gloria Steinem told when she came to my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut a little while ago. She was and she told it for
a different reason, but it illustrates very well. She was working on the problem of sex trafficking. She was speaking, she was writing she was traveling the world and she had gone to a sex trafficking conference in Zambia. After the conference, she goes to visit some women in a village that's in the middle of nowhere, near a big game preserve. And three of the young women from that village had been lost to sex trafficking the previous year.
And Gloria Steine is sitting down with this group of women on a tarp in the middle of a barren field, and she asks them the magic question. She says, what would it take or what would it have taken for those three young women not to have left the village in that way? 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 and they trample it. And we have nothing to eat, we
have nothing to sell at the market. We don't have any money to send our kids to school. So these young women and their families were desperate. Glorias Dynam says, listen, if I send you the money, will you clear the field and build the fence. These women say yes, So Glorious Dynam goes back home. She raises a few thousand dollars.
She sends the money to these women in the village, and the way she tells it, she comes back a few years later and they have a bumper crop of corn, and since they put up the fence, no young women have been lost to sex trafficking from that village. It also happens that the women in that village had ended up collaborating with the women in the village next door, and they have now created and as far as I know, it's still going on. There's a chicken collective and a
tailoring operation and their group is called Waka Simba. It means strong women.
So the magic.
Question is just what would it take? And it's magic for multiple reasons. First of all, it's respectful and so that means it's comfortable on the other side and comfortable.
For you too.
You are acknowledging that you're not the expert here. They're the expert on their situation and their obstacles. It second is magic because it often gives you a roadmap to success that's actually so much easier than you would have expected, or maybe than you have even been willing to do. And third, it's magic because if that person or those people in this case have told you what it will take,
then they have implicitly committed to supporting that outcome. And the way that I interpret this story, it's not that the electric fence magically prevented sex trafficking, but the women who had said this is what it would take, would make sure that none of their friends, neighbors daughters, neighbor's daughters are going to be sex trafficked. Now they have
the fence. So the magic question you can work with almost any situation and any person, even if you've used it before, even if you've taught them the magic question and they laugh at you and of like, you know, I'll use it with my daughter.
She'll use it with me and I'll be like.
Oh, ripley, the magic question again, and she's like, I know.
But then they give you an answer. That's great.
I love that.
Now I'm thinking about meetings and I'm also thinking about presentations, which are two situations that certainly I'm in a lot, and then I think a lot of listeners would be in a lot. So I'd love to start with presentations, and I'd love to know what are some of the things that you're deliberately doing to be more influential around the ideas that you're communicating when you're presenting to other people.
You know, I'll start with something that is so simple, but hardly anyone else does it, And it's particularly effective and impactful in global business sorts of situations when we're in meetings together, or for people who are doing business or do leading workshops and things like that across borders and or going around the world like I do. And that is just playing music that is from the places that the other people in the room are from. So at Yale, we have people coming from all over the world.
About forty percent of our student body as international, and we'll have groups of people coming in from many different countries. So if it's a global audience, I'll put together a global playlist, and people who are hearing music from their country instead of the one that they're in get so excited and they feel so welcomed, and it helps everybody
just feel relaxed before we even get started. And this is an example of one of the million things I do to create an inclusive environment when I'm teaching or presenting or leading a meeting.
I love that that is so cool.
I could imagine, you know, if I was visiting another country, if someone was playing an Australian band, that would be a really cool experience.
But yes, go on, what is a otther strategies?
Yeah, so another strategy that's super you can tell I like to focus on low hanging fruit and little tiny things that you can do that can end up making a big difference. Another example is something that I learned from a former manager who I didn't get along with well at all, but he gave me a great piece
of advice. And this advice was about timing, and it's that if you can be one of the first three people in a meeting to speak, then the other people in the meeting will notice that you're there and they will treat you differently through the rest of the meeting. And this is especially helpful for junior managers or junior employees. What happens if you haven't spoken up early in a meeting is that when other people are speaking, they're not looking at you, and it gets harder and harder for
you to jump in and speak up. And it's not just harder because they're not paying attention to you, but you don't even feel present yourself. But when you've spoken up, as one of the first few people to speak up in the meeting. Then when other people are speaking, they're actually looking at you, and it's easier for you to speak up again.
Leader.
He will be back with Zoe shortly talking about how to persuade.
People to agree with you.
And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that have helped me improve the way I work. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot co. Now, something that happens in meetings is that we're often trying to get people to reach a decision. So do you have strategies around how we can persuade someone to agree with something when we're trying to get to that decision point.
Yeah, and again a piece of low hanging fruit here. The highest hanging fruit, by the way, is crafting a perfect persuasive argument. And the reason why I say it's the highest hanging is not that it's the most difficult to do, but it's the most difficult to succeed in because persuasive arguments rarely change people's minds. But low hanging fruit here is that actually influencing people to make a decision shouldn't happen very often in a meeting itself, especially
when there's some resistance. So if there's anything big that you're trying to persuade people of in a group, or anything you're trying to persuade people of that you know that you're going to get some backlash or resistance to. It always starts with one on one conversations before the meeting.
It doesn't have to be with everybody. You have conversations with anybody who's going to be a loud detractor to your idea, and anybody who holds a position of power is at someone considered an expert that other people will be looking to for their response.
And this is.
This is going to sound a little bit tricky, and listeners can just.
I'll just let it sit there. They can think what they may.
But one of the reasons that this works, besides the most important one that you let people speak their mind and you got their advice and maybe made their idea better before the meeting. One of the reasons that's not obvious is that when somebody has heard an argument or viewpoint before, they tend to nod their head just to acknowledge yes, I remember hearing that, and then other people in the room see heads nodding, and it feels like even more agreement than.
There is for your great idea.
I can just speak to that.
And what about when, like, do you have instances what you're trying to get a meating with someone you know with the work that you do now and they're like, sorry, I'm too busy, I don't have time. How do you work around that?
First of all, yes, all the time, and we all do.
And I really really encourage listeners to be the person saying sorry, I don't have time, probably even more than they are. And the real problem is too many of us not drying boundaries and just looking on our calendar to see if we happen to have an opening somewhere.
So it starts with just being okay with other people having boundaries with you and saying no to you, and then acknowledging you, I know you're probably really busy, and if there's any chance that we could meet about so you when you're acknowledging that they're a busy person, they may not have time for this thing. You're letting them know that you don't feel entitled, and that's actually helpful for them to want to help you. And so ironically, making it easier to say no makes other people more
inclined to say yes. And then another small thing is I would just in general say that it should be very rare that you should ask for more than fifteen minutes of somebody's time. When the lockdown happened and we're all doing virtual everything, I ended up reaching out to some very famous people to see if they could be virtual guest speakers for the class that I teach, and we ended up having some people that really surprised me
that they would show up for fifteen minutes. But it's such a small amount of time and doing something from their house that somebody else or a group of people is really going to appreciate. Is it's hard to say no to when you have a lot of appreciation ready to happen on the other end, and you've made it easy for the other person if it's virtual, if it's just a short amount of time. That the most famous person who said yes to us was Darren Brown, who's an a list mentalist and.
The UK you know him very well.
Yes, yeah, it was.
It was amazing, so memorable for the students, maybe the most memorable part of our class.
Oh goodness, yes, he'll probably be my favorite magician in the world.
Oh amazing. Yes, I'm too too.
Now, you teach charisma as part of your course, and I'd love to know, like, what do you deliberately do or what have you learned to do to be more charismatic.
The idea of teaching charisma was so crazy and terrifying to me when I first came up, because I just felt like I would be a fraud and an ass even though I had done a ton of acting training and also directing. I had done theater, and I had done some small movies, and I had been a high school theater teacher even and directed stuff like directed a film that won a little film festival. But who am
I to teach charisma? And you could imagine, whoever you are, if you're a relatively humble person, it would just be ridiculous to teach charisma. But I decided to do it because when I would ask people what's the influenced skill you would most like to master, just an open ended question, charisma was by far the most common response. So I started reading all the academic literature on charisma, because that's the kind of nerdy thing do.
And the academic definitions of charisma were things like a seven factor model by the world Expert and charismas John Antonochus.
And so it's really he's great, but as far as being charismatic, it's not possible to try to do seven different things at once. And so I started then just workshopping charisma to figure out, Okay.
What is it?
What is the thing that people do that might be actually replicable for normal people like us?
And I would ask people, actually, do you want to try this?
Let's do it? Yes, okay, great.
So I would ask people in a room to think of a charismatic individual, just the first person who pops into your head, famous or not. And in the workshop, it doesn't matter if you say the name, but I'm just curious who's a charismatic person that comes up for you.
So I've got a friend called Sean who I actually met in improv classes a couple of decades ago, and he's very charismatic.
Oh cool, and he would love to hear that he's the first man who find it. So could you just think about and just quickly that was only a great amount of sight. What are three characteristics about Sean that make him charismatic?
He's incredibly present, He's very funny, and he uh really listens. And it's funny because I was commenting to another friend of mine because my daughter Frankie just adores Sean like more than any of my other friends. But she's probably spent more time with a lot of my other friends. And I was commenting on this to another friend, and this friend of mine said, it's because Sean is just so present with her. All his attention is focused on her when she's around. So, yeah, there's some things.
So awesome and I would love to meet your friend Sean. So what ends up happening? And again this time what ends up happening? About eighty five percent of all of the answers and all the things people write down fall into only two buckets, and those two buckets are connection and confidence. And it turns out that when you mix this cocktail, that's pretty much all you need and the only thing that explains who are the charismatic most charismatic
people among us and who are not. And it sounds like Sean has so being present and listening one hundred percent about connection, right, and then being funny actually takes a mix of both. It requires confidence to let your guard down enough to be funny and to say things that are unexpected and maybe weird. But you're not actually
funny unless you're connecting with people. So for those of us who are not that funny, and that definitely includes me, although I'm working on it by taking these improv classes.
That all you really need to do.
To nail connection and confidence at the same time is to practice focusing on the other person. And this is coming back to just what you said about listening and presence. And it's weird that it think about how weird it is that you said Sean is charismatic because he's a great listener, because we most of us think of charisma as somebody who's a shining star. But actually you don't have to say almost anything to be charismatic, and you
don't have to be loud. You can definitely be a quiet person who's like the Dali Lama would be someone who comes up a lot as charismatic and social quite because he has that kind of presence you're talking about.
What's fascinating now, what about the dark side of influence where you know people and brands are trying to get us to do things. And I say, this is someone that did work in advertising as a strategist for several years. Can we how can we like protect ourselves when we are being trying to be influenced?
Like, how do you do this in your own life?
Given you know all the tricks?
So I'm happy to talk with you about it. And I too have worked on the dark side, And I just ask you as as we get into it, did you do things when you worked in advertising strategy that now you shy away from or would be embarrassed about that you're that you would be willing to share absolutely.
You know. I had a really hardline as I, I guess became a bit more senior in what I was doing that I wouldn't work on brands that advertised to kids. And in my first year of working in advertising, I
remember I had to work on a project. So I was working as a consumer psychologist and brand strategist, and I was working on a project for a very well known chocolate brand and I had to go out and do focus groups, run focus groups with it's like eight to ten year olds, and I look back on that now, and I feel quite sick about the fact that I was trying to get insights from kids to try to use those insights to make them eat more chocolate.
Awful.
Yeah, yeah, I had similar misgivings myself because back in my marketing days, I was working before I came to Academia as a brand manager for Barbie and doing focus groups with even three to five year olds, wow, trying to get them to pester their parents for more toys. And we were selling two Barbie dolls a second, and I was just asking myself, what would success look like? Does it look like selling three Barbie dolls a second? And girls were getting five Barbie dolls a year, So
what does that look like like? They get six Barbie dolls a year, and you know, they chop off the hair and then chop off the head stripper naked, you can't get the clothes back on, and then.
She just ends up in a landfill. Yeah.
So, but that's not like it doesn't sound like you were doing dirty tricks or anything necessarily, but just the just not feeling comfortable about the whole idea of persuading kids. And now as a parent, I feel much differently as well, and I don't want people trying to persuade my daughter. So there are lots of red flags that we can
look for. In the book, I have a chapter that's called Defense against the Dark Arts of Persuasion, and we start out with Bernie made Off and we talk about nine red flags that you can find in situations like cons situations like manipulative charlatans who might be cult leaders or even leaders in personal development industry, kind of going
that direction, but also just transactional sales. And the red flags don't necessarily prove like if you find one of these, that doesn't mean that, oh, this person can't be trusted, but it's a clue to look for more of them. And the number one red flag to look for that says, maybe this person trying to persuade you is trying to manipulate you and they don't have your own best interest in mind, is the most common one that's used in transactional sales.
And it's just urgency.
It's just telling you this is you know, here's this great deal, but you can only have it right now.
While supplies last today.
Only kind of thing.
And you know, when you go on hotel booking websites and they'll tell you only three rooms left, or you know, twenty nine people are looking at this pair of shoes right now. Almost every time you see that, it's a clue that somebody is trying to manipulate you to buy something quickly or make a decision quickly without being able to think through it well enough. And the vast majority of the time they will still want to sell you that thing tomorrow after you have a chance to sleep on it.
Now, For people that want to consume more of your work and importantly get hold of your book, what is the best way for people to do that?
So the best way for people to do it is whatever wigh is the easiest for them. It's the book is available wherever books are sold and online at whatever
site you want to go to. A lot of people who like you and me, are very into product activity are using audible or some audiobooks a lot, So you could go on there and use some of the extra credits that you have, or if you're not sure you want to explore other stuff, please come to my website, Zoe Chance dot com and there's a newsletter and all kinds of other things like that.
Amazing Zoe. I've just loved chat. I wish we had another five hours, but we don't. Sorry, thank you so much for your time. It's been absolutely enlightening.
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure of talking with you and Martha.
I just loved hearing all of Zoe's tips for being more influential, and I especially love the magic question what would it take? I tell you what, I'm very keen to try this one out on my daughter Frankie. If you are enjoying How I Work, maybe today's the day that you decide to leave a review for the show. You can do that by clicking on the star rating or leaving a comment wherever you're listening to.
This podcast from.
How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Said Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
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