In his book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices Lawrence and his colleague Nitin Nohria outlined four drives behind all we do as human beings: to acquire, to bond, to learn, and to defend. On the drive to learn, they noted, “Humans have an innate drive to satisfy their curiosity, to know, to comprehend, to believe, to appreciate, to develop understandings or representations of their environment and of themselves through a reflective process: the drive to learn.”3 We are wired to be curious. I think that sometimes in the busyness of our day, it’s easy to forget that. According to Lawrence and Nohria, we can neglect our drive to learn, as well as our other drives. We’ll look at practical steps to ensure we don’t neglect this drive in chapter 5, but here we’ll consider how to apply this framework to our understanding of others.
Coming back to your pending presentation or meeting, before you start mapping out any of the content, it’s time to get curious about your audience. This goes far beyond just thinking about who they are and what they do—it requires considering what is truly driving them.
In two major studies, Nohria and his colleagues looked at what actions managers can take to satisfy these drives and thereby increase their employees’ overall motivation.4 They found that an organization’s ability to meet the four drives explains, on average, a huge 60 percent of the differences in employees’ motivation scores. Fulfilling the drive to bond, for example, has the greatest effect on employee commitment. Fulfilling the drive to comprehend is most closely linked to employee engagement. For your own audience, consider which of the four drives may not be being met in their current context. Given your upcoming meeting, and the reason behind it, which of the four drives could you potentially meet for your colleagues? Which drive is currently the most important to them? Why will they be in the room listening to you in the first place? And what outcomes do you want to generate?
Going through these questions is what researchers looking at executive influence refer to as “target assessment.”5 This is the assessment we make of the people we’re trying to target our influence toward. It means considering factors such as their role, resources, personality, influence on others, potential to resist our ideas, and prior success in influencing that person or group of people. I always think “target assessment” sounds particularly cold! But it’s actually the opposite—it’s about giving greater consideration to the people you’re going to encounter. We spend so much time thinking about what we’re going to say and what we want to happen, and worrying about what might not go our way, that we can forget to give enough attention to the motivations of the people in the room.
For the meeting or presentation you have in mind, consider the people you will encounter and do this target assessment. It can take just a few minutes to think through how their drives may shape what you say and how you say it. Delivering a slick, funny, inspiring message can be a display of charisma. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, many of us would be very happy to get a tick in the charisma box. But the more we are able to understand the people around us, the more likely we are to have a significant, positive, and lasting impact. And in doing so, we increase our authentic gravitas.
Below is a list of suggested questions for target assessment. Obviously, there will be a range of answers to each question if you have an audience of more than one! The list is not designed to be comprehensive; you may think of other questions to ask about your particular audience. It’s also not designed to be cumbersome—you don’t need to respond to all the questions in full, and it’s likely you won’t know some of the answers. The idea is that by going through the IMPACT process, doing target assessment, and considering your audience’s motivation, you shift your thinking at this stage away from yourself and your message, to give greater consideration to your audience. What you end up saying as a result of this process will naturally be more targeted and effective.
Who will be in the room?
What are their roles?
What are their style preferences for interacting?
How much experience do they have in this field?
What level of knowledge do they have about my topic?
Why are these people in the room—why will they be listening to me?
Who is/are the most influential person/people in the room?
What do they want to achieve from this encounter?
What do they most value when it comes to this area?
What are their greatest challenges right now?
What resources do they have available to them?
Who has successfully influenced them in the past, and why?
What have they resisted in the past, and why?
“Am I Too Nosy?”
The reality is, to have genuine insight into the values and motivations of others, we need discussion. As humans, we have a tendency to believe we can see others’ values and motivations from what we see them do and hear them say. But we can’t simply infer someone’s values from observing their behavior. Consider the environment. Researchers from Michigan State University show, for example, that someone who claims environmental protection is a value they hold may not consistently act in an environmentally friendly way.6 A person’s behaviors are often influenced by factors outside of their control—in the case of environmental protection, for example, not having access to quality public transportation means a person who may otherwise avoid driving to work because of the environmental implications may use their car. Psychologists argue that the link between core values and behavior is sometimes relatively weak.7 So the behaviors we observe in others can be an indication, but not a sufficient guide, to infer their values. This is important, because while values and behavior may not always be a perfect match, values do guide people’s decision-making. But we can only see behavior. We can’t be of value to others if we don’t understand what value looks like for them.
What happens if we go through our questions and realize we can’t answer many of them, which suggests that we don’t really know what is motivating the people we’re meeting? That’s okay. At least we’re mindful of what we don’t know! And now we can ask. If you can’t answer a fair number of these questions, including the trickier ones in the second half of the list, it’s probably time (before you start writing your content) to seek out someone who can. This could be a colleague who has worked with these people more closely, the conference or meeting organizer, or an influential member of the audience. It might feel like a hassle, but the few minutes spent on this conversation could again make a huge difference to the level of authentic gravitas you have with this group. These questions also tend to be well-received. Wanting to better understand your audience is rarely considered nosy or annoying, but rather thoughtful and considerate. You might be able to take an informed guess, but if you don’t know with some certainty what’s motivating your audience, ask.
While we may discover a need to have conversations before our meeting, so far we’ve only spent five or six minutes thinking through the answers to these questions. It might feel like a lot of work when you’re reading through it here, but if we were face-to-face, doing this together, we could make good progress after spending only a few minutes on insight and a few minutes on motivation. Next we need to consider perception before we start writing any content for our presentation.
PERCEPTION
The way you see the world is different from the way I see it. It’s different from the way anyone else sees it. Research shows how both personality and context can shape our perceptions.8 The personality of the person we’re with can impact their perception of our words and actions. (We’ll take a closer look at differences in our preferences and social styles in chapter 7.) And different experiences shape our perceptions. Our position and role, relative to theirs, can also impact how another person perceives what we say and do.
The way the people we’re speaking to se
e work, projects, new opportunities, and strategies is often different from our way of seeing those things. But we can be so focused on wanting to make a good impression, to make our encounter a success, that we think solely about our content and fail to give sufficient consideration to the differences in the way our audience may see things. If we don’t challenge ourselves, our subconscious assumption is that others see things the way we do.
For the meeting or presentation you have in mind, consider two simple things:
What is your audience’s perception of the topic you are discussing?
What is their perception of you?
The first is easier to address. And as with motivation, if we don’t know the answer, we can ask. Being proactive and finding out or confirming in advance their perception of the issue at hand is likely to influence where you focus your content and the extent of your impact. But it can make us uncomfortable to consider what people think of us.
People close to us typically have a good understanding of what we’re like. Our close friends, family, and coworkers often know our personality and how we are likely to behave. The American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a study showing that close contacts are just as likely to accurately predict our daily behavior as we ourselves are.9 We feel relatively comfortable considering what our close family and friends think of us—where we have a high degree of trust and psychological safety. What they think is likely to be similar to how we think of ourselves. But outside our inner circle, other people’s perceptions of us become more unknown.
The sense of uncertainty we feel around what others may think of us, unless that person is a close family member, friend, or trusted longtime colleague, can be unpleasant. We implicitly understand that their perceptions are likely to be different from our sense of self and/or how we would like to be perceived. As a result, we tend to do one of two things: we can simply try not to think about it (because—let’s be honest—unless we’re confronted with some feedback, nobody forces us to think about what others think). On the flip side, we can spend a lot of time worrying about what others think of us. This self-imposed obsession can consume much of our thinking. The reality is, neither ignoring nor obsessing is particularly useful. We need a healthy middle ground of caring about the impact we’re having on others and being proactive about getting constructive feedback.
For the context you have in mind, ask yourself the question, What is their perception of me? Write down a few words that you think that person might use to describe you. Now think about how you would like to be perceived by them. To build authentic gravitas, we not only have to be intentional with what we say, but also clear about how we would like others to experience us. Someone’s perception of you is not something that just happens to you—you are able to shape that perception more than you likely think you are.
If you think they perceive you to be serious but not fun, then you get to choose to adopt a lighter approach in the meeting . . . if you want to be regarded as fun. If you think they perceive you to be nice but not an expert, then you get to choose to structure your talk in a way that highlights more of your expertise and experience . . . if you want to be considered an expert. If there’s a gap between how you would like to be regarded and how you regard yourself in terms of your level of expertise, then it might be time to focus on self-development (more on this in chapter 5). But if you feel there’s a gap because you don’t have the confidence you’d like to have, remember that confidence is not the immediate goal here. You most likely lack confidence because you are stepping out into new territory—a new position, new opportunities, new challenges, new contexts, etc. You’re moving forward, and that never feels comfortable. If you were completely comfortable and confident, that might suggest you weren’t taking big enough steps into your professional potential. Stop beating yourself up for not feeling confident, and instead choose to be courageous and do it anyway.
Here’s the key—it’s about being intentional with how you want to be regarded by others. In chapter 1, we looked at the importance of deciding what kind of leader/professional you want to be, in order to have authentic gravitas. For the meeting or presentation, ask specifically about this context: How do I want them to perceive me? You get to decide, and it’s likely you can shape it more than you think. You probably won’t be able to create a perfect match, but you can reduce the gap only if you’ve first clarified your intention.
Gravitas on the Spot
I’ve had the opportunity to serve as a faculty member on professional development programs for many years. Having just finished a design meeting, I was walking around the offices of one leadership consultancy and heading to the kitchen to grab some water, when I heard my name. “Rebecca!” Shona called out to me. She came over and explained that two executives from a potential client company had arrived for a meeting. Shona asked if, now that I was here, I could “pop in” to meet the prospective clients as a means of demonstrating to them what the faculty were like. Of course, I agreed to go in. The executives were from a leading company that was doing inspiring work in its field. This was a very important encounter to me, not just because of the potential client relationship but also because of my relationship with Shona and her firm. But I wasn’t expecting the meeting, so I wasn’t prepared. Normally, before a prospective client meeting, I would have done a huge amount of research. But I had no opportunity here. Shona had just jumped out of her meeting when she saw me walking past, so we had to go straight back in, meaning she didn’t even have time to brief me on the basics of the potential program and client goals. As I headed into the meeting room, I had just a few seconds to gather my thoughts.
What happens when you don’t have time to prepare? Annoyingly, many of the career-defining encounters we have are spur of the moment. We can’t plan for them; we didn’t even know they were just around the corner. Sometimes we find ourselves in an encounter and only in the middle of it realize just how important it is. This could be a great opportunity, meeting someone influential in your field whom you weren’t expecting to meet. It could also be a serious conversation about your work performance that you didn’t see coming. How can we have authentic gravitas in this situation?
Given what we know about insight, motivation, and perception, here are two simple steps to be prepared for the unexpected:
1. Stop worrying about what you’re going to say. Instead, focus on the impression you want to leave with them. Ask yourself the key questions: How do I want them to think, feel, and act differently as a result of listening to me? What insight do I want them to have? As I walked into the office and asked myself these questions, two words came to my mind: impactful and tailored. I wanted them to leave with a belief that my colleagues and I delivered programs that were impactful for participants, so I needed to be clear and give some strong comparative examples of where we had made a positive impact on other clients’ programs. The other fact I wanted them to take away is that we tailor our work—it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather, we take great care to ensure the interventions and experiences we design are specific to each client’s needs and goals. So I needed to ask questions to ascertain their needs and goals, preferences, and past experiences, and to share our bespoke approach.
When you find yourself in the middle of an opportunity, it can be useful just to think of one or two words you would like to frame others’ experience of you. Intelligent and experienced? Passionate and determined? Thoughtful and knowledgeable? Calm and influential? Right now, imagine you are heading into an unexpected, important meeting; think of words you would want others to use to describe you. One of my clients, Maya, decided to adopt just one word for all the ad-hoc meetings she regularly has: strategic. A strong, passionate communicator in marketing, she realized the one shift she needed to make when talking with internal senior managers was to highlight how she was thinking strategically and driving things forward
in her work. Now every time she finds herself in an unexpected meeting, she just thinks “strategic” to guide her conversation in a way that better aligns her intention and her actual impact.
2. Choose to be interested rather than worrying about being interesting. Don’t focus too much on how you’re going to wow your audience with your smarts. Instead, put your energy into understanding them. Decide to be interested in them and their situation (e.g., their needs, challenges, changing environment, opportunities, aspirations, and goals—whether personal or organizational). Being interested is a choice. Sure, we are naturally more interested in certain things, and those things vary for each of us. But when it comes to other people and their situations, we can choose to be interested and engage with great questions. Focus on being interested instead of worrying about coming across as interesting. You’ll end up being able to contribute ideas and thoughts that are interesting, because your contribution will be tailored to your new understanding of others’ motivation and perception.
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