HOW TO T A L K SO PEOPLE L I S T E N

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HOW TO TALK SO PEOPLE LISTEN
• They like to cooperate and help others, wanting to be liked in
return.
• Willy Loman, the salesman in Arthur Miller's play Death of a
Salesman, was, among other things, an Affiliator.
Studies have shown that people with strong affiliative needs are often
well suited for jobs that involve people: outreach, coordinating projects,
integrating diverse points of view, mediating conflicts, motivating teams.
They are good at sales jobs that require cultivating and maintaining
long-term relationships.
The high need for affiliation does create problems in decision
making, however, since the need to be liked makes them shy away from
unpopular choices. They can therefore run a less efficient department
than those with more moderate people-needs.
Influencers
Fitting theme song (adapted): "They Did It My Way."
This category has a semantics problem. We get very judgmental
around the words "power" and "influence." They sound underhanded
and manipulative—less than pure—and we generally feel uneasy or
negative about them. In order to understand this motivational category,
we need to look at the influence concept from two points of view:
personal power or influence and socialized or institutional power or
influence.
• Personalized power is linked to controlling or influencing others for
the sake of one's own impact on them as individuals.
• Socialized power deals with leadership of groups such as institutions,
business organizations, or even social movements. It deals with
inspiring co-workers symbolically and collaboratively to reach for higher
goals in support of an organization. It means using power as a leader to
strengthen subordinates' beliefs in themselves and in their competence
to contribute to an organization's success.
Given these two different manifestations of the influence or power
motive, we can now examine a basic set of behavior traits'to describe the
Influencer.
• Influencers want to obtain and exercise power and authority.
What's the Problem? 17
• They look for positions where they are the ultimate authority or
can make a highly visible impact.
• They are not as interested as Achievers are in figuring out how
to make something work. They care more for making an impact
and influencing others to make something work.
• Unlike Affiliators, who are dependent on other people for
approval, Influencers don't worry quite so much about their
critics. They know better who they are and what they want. They
are solid in their moves, with few apologies.
• Influencers are self-confident. They have very clear goals, and
have worked out their rationale, which includes the organizational
or institutional accomplishments they often could foster
with their power.
• Loyalty evoked by personalized Influencers is generally of the
kind we associate with a charismatic leader.
• Loyalty evoked by socialized Influencers tends to be more
attached to the team, the task, or institution.
Studies comparing personalized-power managers with socializedpower
managers found the latter to be more effective.
It might help to compare behavior patterns between all three work
types. For example, the kinds of self-help books they would read:
• Achievers would read books with sixteen choices about how to do
something and what makes any of them work, so they could gather the
information and make their own individualistic decision about which way
is best to accomplish their task.
• Affiliators wouldn't like that many choices. They want more
consensus in their thinking. Therefore they would like the most popular
how-to books to make them more successful from a currently accepted
point of view.
• Influencers would have less interest in either of these types of
books, since neither speaks to their desire for impact on a situation and
its constituents. They would read historical biographies of strong,
successful charismatic leaders and what made them effective.