What is the “Impact Gene”? (Influence and Change 1 of 10)

We’ve all experienced people who get a message across in an impactful and memorable way, who can create changes by inspiring others to act. We’ve heard stories about people who make huge changes in their own lives, their organizations, and even the world. What is it about these people that enables them to do this? Do they have some sort of “impact gene” that the rest of us don’t?  Several researchers have been fascinated by this question, so they studied these impactful people and identified some common practices that anyone can learn and become skilled at – essentially they decrypted the “impact gene” and wrote about it in books like Switch and Influencer. The following provides a brief summary of the “impact gene” decrypted. For a fuller description and additional examples, I’d recommend anyone to give these books a read.

Influence begins with the question, “how do I get someone else to do something, especially when it seems like he or she doesn’t want to, and I don’t have any authority?”

The researchers began with this question, and then studied people who – despite having no formal authority – were able to create dramatic changes that involved getting people to do things differently. As it turned out, the most impactful and sustained changes had very little to do with formal authority. In fact, leaders who had formal authority were better able to get things done and create sustained changes when they used they influence tactics, and relied minimally on their positions of power to get things done.

The researchers also found the influence tactics used by these master influencers were not the result of personality or some other inborn trait, but were learnable knowledge and behaviors that anyone can practice and master. This set of knowledge and behaviors can be grouped into three main areas, creating a basic to-do list for any aspiring influencer.

Clarifying Key Behaviors

Tapping into Intrinsic Motivation

Shaping the Environment

By using the tactics that served the studied master influencers so well, we too can learn how to influence sustainable positive changes.

The posts following this one will break down each of these elements, and provide examples to illustrate their use.

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