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The Six Stages Of Influence

Decent Essays

Intrinsic Motivation is the Goal of the Six Strategies of Influence
Perhaps the most important of all the steps of the six stages of influence is Personal Motivation (Grenny, Patterson, Maxfield, McMillan&Switzler, 2013). “If you don’t deal with personal motivation, your influence plan will fail” (Grenny et al., 2013). If a leader needs employees to perform vital behaviors that are not “intrinsically pleasurable” to them he/she is presented with the challenge of finding ways to motivate them against what is natural to them. The authors employ four tactics to accomplish this daunting task of “helping people to love what they hate”: 1) Allow for choice 2) Create direct experiences 3) Tell meaningful stories 4) Make it a game (Grenny et al., 2013). The key tactic is allow for choice. If the employee makes the decision to change a behavior on their own it is more likely that he/she will begin to make that changed behavior a habit. Nagging, threatening and trying to make your employees feel guilty for not achieving the correct behaviors are futile ways to motivate/influence (Grenny et al., 2013). These techniques can have the opposite effects on employee personal motivation. Nagging, threatening and making employees feel guilty creates resentment towards the leader .Therefore, employees are less likely to perform required behaviors and may undermine the leader’s directives. Grenny et al., 2013, describe a situation with a burger joint employee named Biff, who was not

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