Harvard Business Review Special Issues Spring 2017

WOULD YOU RATHER work for someone who barks orders at you, or a person who takes time to understand your position? When a colleague asks for your help on a project, are you more likely to say yes if she helped you in the past? The answers to those questions are obvious, but they nevertheless show that in today’s collaborative work environments, you need a range of interpersonal skills to persuade people to help you get things accomplished. The desire and ability to reciprocate, according to Robert B. Cialdini in “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion,” constitute one of the six fundamental principles of persuasion. These principles appeal to deep human drives, such as wanting to be liked. Given that leaders must get things done through other people, including folks they may…

MOST OF US cringe when we think about office politics. It’s a disgusting, immoral mess that we try to avoid. After all, who wants to participate in backstabbing, lying, cheating, blaming, sucking up, and playing people against one another? Or maybe you take a slightly less offensive view of office politics and see it as controlling agendas, building covert alliances, protecting access to key leaders, and holding “meetings before the meeting.” No matter what your take, it’s not surprising that honest people don’t want to get involved. But are politics at work inherently dirty? The truth is that just being a member of an organization is a political act. In fact, to get things done, we must influence people at work all the time. And to influence others, we must have power,…

MANAGERS WHO seek and give advice effectively are also more likely to wield soft power, our research shows. But you risk damaging your reputation if your behavior has even a hint of inauthenticity— if you use counsel to curry favor, for instance, or to advance an agenda. So tread carefully. It takes a long time to build trust and political capital, but you can lose credibility very fast. Consider this example. The head of a business unit—we’ll call him Cal—was weighing three finalists for the open position of marketing VP, who would also report through a dotted line to the corporate CMO. Cal had a clear favorite. To ensure that she got hired and came in with high-level support, he sought “advice” from his head of sales and the CMO. Cal…

FEW PEOPLE like to be pushed or sold hard into doing something. And few like to push or deliver a hard sell. But at the end of the day, or even the end of a conversation, you do have to move things forward. How do effective leaders get things done? As part of the research for our book, John Ullmen, a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and I interviewed more than 100 people who “get things done” but aren’t pushy. When we asked them, “Who persuaded you to do something really important?” more than a few replied defensively, “Nobody persuaded me to do anything important!” When we switched tactics and asked, “Who positively influenced you to become the person you are?” they leaned back, smiled, took a deep…

WHEN I FIRST started working in the then–Big Six consulting firm Coopers & Lybrand, the partner I was assigned to, Chris Abramson, had an enormous scale of responsibility. Yet whenever I talked with him, which was not that often, he gave me his undivided attention. He talked with me about my goals and my development opportunities. He shared stories about life (both his and mine) outside the office. Even in our short conversations, in which he frequently was directing me to do something, he injected some kind of personal remark or comment. Abramson excelled in one of the most important—and most misunderstood— leadership skills: making an emotional connection. Leadership has everything to do with how you relate to others and the quality and texture of those relationships. The higher up you go…

“The biggest challenge that I face at work is not managing my team—it is dealing with my boss and upper management. Any suggestions?” Every decision in your company is made by the person who has the power to make that decision—not necessarily the “right” person, the “smartest” person, or the “best” person. If you can influence the key decision makers in your organization, you can make a positive difference. If you cannot influence them, you will make much less of a difference. Once you make peace with these facts, you will become more effective in influencing up. The following suggestions do not come with a guarantee—when you don’t have the power to control outcomes, you won’t always win. But they can improve your odds on successfully making a positive difference. 1. When presenting…