PART 1: You're Already Persuading People. You're Just Not Very Good at It Yet.
Every single day, you are trying to get people to do things you want them to do. You persuade your spouse to pick a restaurant. You convince a coworker to help you finish a project. You try to get your teenager to clean their room. (Good luck with that last one. I've been working on it for years.)
The problem is that most of us have never actually been taught HOW to persuade someone.
Instead, we learned by watching the people who raised us. If your mother yelled to get her way, you probably learned that yelling was an effective strategy. If your father shut down during arguments, you may have learned that silence was the best way to handle conflict. Some of us learned to cry, some learned to argue, and some learned to avoid conflict altogether.
But here's the good news. Persuasion is a learned skill, which means you can get better at it whenever you darn well feel like it.
First, we need to get something straight. Persuasion and manipulation are NOT the same thing. Persuasion becomes manipulation when you cross an ethical line by misleading people, exploiting their emotions, or taking away their ability to make an informed decision.
Good persuasion is about helping people see why an idea, decision, or action makes sense. My favorite way to describe it is figuring out how to get people to do more of what you want them to do without making them hate your guts in the process.
So how do we do that?
Let's go back about 2,300 years to a guy named Aristotle. He identified three elements of persuasive communication: ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos is credibility. Why should I trust you?
Pathos is emotion. Why should I care?
Logos is logic. Does what you're saying actually make sense?
The problem is that most of us rely heavily on whichever one works best on US.
If you're a data person, you probably think that if you show someone enough charts, graphs, and statistics, they'll eventually agree with you. So you put together a 47-slide PowerPoint and verbally vomit information all over the room.
And then you're shocked when nobody changes their mind.
Here's why. Not everybody is persuaded by data first. Some people need to trust you before they'll consider your facts. Others need to understand why the issue matters to them personally.
The best persuasive communicators learn to use all three.
The next time you need someone to support an idea, approve a project, or change a behavior, ask yourself three questions. Have I established why they should trust me? Have I explained why this matters? Have I provided enough evidence to support what I'm asking?
If you're missing one of those, you're probably making your job harder than it needs to be.
What This Means for HR
HR professionals spend an enormous amount of time trying to persuade people who don't necessarily want to be persuaded. You're asking leaders to change behaviors, employees to follow policies, executives to invest in programs, and managers to have conversations they'd rather avoid. Your job is basically professional persuasion with occasional paperwork.
The next time you're introducing a new policy or asking leadership to support an initiative, stop leading with the policy itself. Establish why HR is recommending the change, explain how it will benefit the people involved, and THEN present the data or requirements. You're much more likely to get cooperation when people understand the reasoning behind the request instead of feeling like HR just invented another rule to make their lives miserable.
Persuasion isn't about manipulating people. It's about building trust, making meaningful connections, and giving people a reason to listen.
But what happens when people don't TRUST the person delivering the message?
Next week, we're talking about CREDIBILITY and why even the best advice falls flat when people don't trust who's giving it.
Talk soon,
Kristin
