It is conventional wisdom that leadership is persuasion done only by encouragement and never by coercion. The successful leaders who preach this sermon really mean it, but unconsciously they do not practice it.
Discipline by reward and punishment is an essential part of leadership. If and when you are a supervisor, you can reward your subordinates for obedience and good performance by:
- Raises
- Promotions
- Praise
- Favorable assignments
- Job security
To some the tone and manner of authority come naturally; to others they can be learned if the lessons are taught. There are inspiring leaders who successfully persuade by example, and you need to follow one. You should try, but they are hard acts to follow. You need to have the talent. Napoleon did pretty well without the height qualification, but he made up for it in other ways.
Just as inventiveness requires a combination of talent and effort, so does persuasiveness. Suppose you know a teenager, quite bright, who refuses to do homework but gets by in school by sheer charm. He has a lovable, persuasive personality which gets him what he wants without work. He would consider this article completely obvious. If he can overcome the ethical examples set by his parents, he will be a great con man.
You use speech and writing to persuade. You speak to individuals, small groups, and large groups. Speech is a learnable art, and you should learn it. Speak loud enough to be heard, pronounce clearly, omit all but essentials the first time around, use specific words rather than general words, use complete sentences including verbs, and try to sound like Winston Churchill. Join Toastmasters. Toastmasters is an organization which holds meetings at which the members give talks to each other and teach each other how to do it better.
Learn to use slides and viewgraphs. If you work in a big company, it has an art department which will make you slides and viewgraphs and help you to design them. Use humor. (Be careful to avoid old jokes!) Use quotations.
After you have written something, let it cool off for a day and then read it. You will be surprised by how the meaning can change overnight. After you have corrected the piece, show it to a friend. It is most discouraging to find that what is crystal-clear to yourself can be so badly misunderstood by someone you used to think was bright. The bad news is that you must not argue or explain. If the friend misunderstands, so will your intended readers, who will not have the benefit of your arguments and explanations. You must change what you have written. Good writing is like good design development: you must repeatedly refine your work.
Writing is the bane of engineers; we are almost proud to do it badly. Yet we must do some of our persuading in letters, reports, and proposals.
Compete for repeated attention. You will rarely change someone's mind permanently in one interview. Even if you do, the person is likely to backslide after you have parted. Find excuses to repeat your case. The successful salesperson makes repeated visits to the customer, each time devising some excuse to prevent the appearance of harassment. This is called "following up."
If you want an organization (your own company, your customer's company, a government body) to do something, do not find the "key" person and persuade only that person. Sell to everyone who can influence the decision, and sell to all of them at the same time.
Listen as well as talk. Not only will the persuadee like you for providing a respectful audience but he or she may tell you what is really wanted so that you can adapt your case to those wants. In salesperson's slang, you will learn the persuadee's "hot buttons."
Avoid "permutation" meetings. Permutation meetings are meetings of five people held four at a time, so no final decisions can be made. (Yes, mathematically these are "combination" meetings rather than permutation meetings but permutation sounds more high-tech.)
Bootleg your proposal partway, and exhibit successful progress. The Sidewinder missile was bootlegged in defiance of Navy policy, but its technical success sold the design. But remember that you are playing with fire. If your early results are not successful and if you have an unsympathetic management, this is a dandy way to get fired.
Use acronyms, trade names and trademarks, and slogans (e.g., radar, zero defects, know-how) and descriptive phrases with favorable connotations (robots usually do have both "passive homing guidance" and "active homing guidance"). The wordmanship adds absolutely nothing to the technical merits of your design, but it puts favorable feelings in the minds of the persuadees and thus encourages them to accept your design.
The need for persuasion occurs when there is conflict. Whose will shall prevail? One approach is to negotiate a compromise. Most people will be persuaded by a proposed reasonable compromise to abandon a stonewall position rather than wage a prolonged battle. There are books and courses on negotiation, and you may do well to read or take one. A second approach to conflict is to invent a two-way winner in which both parties leave happy. The last suggestion of this article is to read Dale Carnegie. His books and his courses have been helping people persuade other people for over 40 years.
