Closing Thoughts on Persuasion

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Influence

85 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Influence

85 ratings

Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success

What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.

From the lesson

Module 3

This module was designed to help you develop your persuasive tactics and rhetoric to increase your influence. By discussing historical examples of classical principles of persuasion—from Aristotle to the six SUCCES factors—you’ll learn what makes ideas memorable and be able to craft effective messages of your own. You’ll assess your own strengths and weaknesses in influence tactics by taking the Leverage Inventory survey. You’ll also explore statistical analysis examining the relative effectiveness of soft, hard, and smart power strategies. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to employ a toolbox of approaches to gain power and influence, and be prepared to bring the right leveraging skills to any situation.

Module Introduction- Tactics0:53

Introduction to Persuasion22:46

Heath & Heath10:36

Closing Thoughts on Persuasion3:08

Assessing Influence Tactics3:23

Assessment Content13:13

Basic Results10:27

Performance Results7:12

Cluster Analysis5:41

Path Forward and Prescriptions4:23

Meet the Instructors

Cade Massey
Practice Professor
The Wharton School

So, a few closing thoughts on persuasion.

First, one of the quotes that Heath & Heath gives us, is that,

once of the worst things about knowing a lot, or

having access to a lot of information, is that we are tempted to share it all.

I think of this as the fundamental presenter's error.

And the prescription that comes out of it is to find the core.

Cut, cut, cut.

Find the core and build around the core.

A second is that emotion is key.

It isn't the case that more is always better.

You have to match the audience.

That requires some sensitivity and preparation.

But it is the case that we often under estimate the importance of emotion.

Especially those of us in the business world, in the business education world,

trained analytically, we can neglect what turns out to be one the most

powerful levers available to us and that is emotion.

Finally, there is a message here that unseen power Is particularly influential.

And unseen persuasive efforts are particularly influential.

So if we can slip below the defenses, essentially,

folks get defensive if they know you're trying to sell them something.

If you can slip below the defenses, you can be a little bit more persuasive.

So social influence is a great way of doing that daily exposure whether as to

other environmental settings a person's in, the language they're exposed to,

the colleagues they spent time with.

These are all ways that that people are widely influence overtime,

one of the reason is a repeated exposure,

another reason is because it's below their defences.

Another closing thoughts is that rhetoric shouldn't be the primary focus,

we didn't lead the whole course with this, we're not putting undo emphasis on it.

We think it's probably more like a tertiary consideration, but

there are times and places where it matters a lot.

The Greeks had a term for this, kairos.

It's kind of the unappreciated fourth element of rhetoric.

They're talking about timing.

Essentially that an important consideration and

a persuasive effort is the time, right?

We connect that to the notion of situation awareness.

We talked earlier in the course about situation awareness.

You gotta know when is the time to sit down and put a lot of thought into that

persuasive message because there will be those moments.

And then finally, let's acknowledge that this is a gradual process.

You're not going to turn overnight from someone who thinks about these things

to someone who uses them all effectively.

A big theme here, is that none of these things are that complicated.

The biggest challenge is keeping them salient.

So you do that by practicing, you do that by having a success early and then

building on it, while we're aiming for here is to make it a chronic orientation.

To make it, when you're presenting or when you're talking or

when you're writing a note ,you realize you need to drop a little pathos in here.

You need to find a way to build your ethos in here and

to do it in a manner that doesn't rub people the wrong way.

Bottom message,

going back to the relief above the Yale Law School entrance, is to much logos.

One of the biggest themes across all of this work is

there are just more ways to persuade than just logic.

Most of us are trained in that way, many of us find it intuitive and

therefore, we use it too much.

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