Learning from the Persuasive Genius of Great Leaders
“Mike,
I know you are a star player,” said the senior executive to his newest vice
president. “But there’s something I want you to think about.” He placed a
single sheet of paper on the table between them: a cartoon of two people in a
boat. One is bailing furiously as water pours in through a hole in the bottom,
while the other sits high up on the other end, saying, “Well, at least the hole
isn’t in my end.” After a brief pause, the CEO continued, “This is what is
actually happening when your group makes decisions without considering the
impact on the company as a whole. I know you trimmed customer support expenses
significantly last year. But now I hear we are losing customers because their
experience is not up to par. Does that make good business sense to you?”
The
particulars of this conversation are a composite of many examples I have seen
of great leaders creating “lightbulb” moments. The executive in this story did
not rely on facts alone to make his point. Instead, he offered a new frame for
what those facts meant. In my 20 years as an executive coach and advisor, I’ve
found that such “framing” is one of the common threads behind great leaders’
persuasive genius—both in formal presentations and one-on-one conversations.
Simply put, a frame is a lens for
interpreting events, a way of making sense of complex, messy experiences, so we
can communicate and take action.
As
Gail Fairhurst wrote in The
Power of Framing (Jossey-Bass, 2010), framing is
“defining the situation here and now in ways that connect with others.” The
good news is that it is a technique that anyone can learn.
First
described by linguists such as George
Lakoff, framing is referenced in a wide variety of
contexts, such as problem solving, negotiations, mass communications, and
political theory. Clay
Christensen, Matt Marx, and Howard Stevenson wrote in Harvard Business Review that when
groups share common frames or mental models, they are able to communicate and
take action more quickly than those who have to review every detail of a
situation or strategy. For example, if a team member says, “Let’s not get too
academic about this,” the group is likely to cut the conversation short and
move to a decision. Even a short phrase or a colorful image, such as, “Is the
competition eating our lunch?” can activate an entire world in the listener’s
mind. As Eric Ries has
said, when the CEO of a lean startup tells her
team it is time to “pivot,” the team recognizes a whole host of implied
actions. Frame a negotiation as “win-win” rather than “win-lose” and you are
likely to improve outcomes for all parties. Even more astonishing, the right
frames can actually prime us to be more intelligent. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Blink (Little, Brown, 2005) about Dutch researchers who
found that thinking about yourself as a college professor for five minutes can
improve your score in a game of Trivial Pursuit by 30 percent compared with
your score if you picture yourself as a soccer hooligan for the same amount of
time.
Yet as powerful as frames are, they can also
create a box around our thinking—narrowing our options, limiting our
perspective, and ignoring critical aspects of the situation. Because they
simplify reality, frames inevitably highlight some factors and hide others. As
conditions shift, those hidden factors may contain important clues about risks
or new opportunities. For example, in my opening story, Mike was focused on
cutting expenses, and within the frame of being a “star player,” his actions
made perfect sense. But his boss recognized that Mike’s actions affected the
customer experience, the key driver of the company’s success, and within this
larger frame it became clear that Mike had to change course.
This is why great leaders look for empowering
frames and communicate them explicitly, to ensure others understand their
intent and interpret their actions through the new lens, rather than old
frames. For example, I met one leader whose collaborative efforts had been a
source of friction with his colleagues. According to their frames of “who owned
what,” he had been “encroaching” on their territory. But when he proactively
framed his actions as “sharing intelligence” about external competitive threats,
his outreach was viewed as a valuable aid.
Leaders also need to be inclusive in their
framing, describing a situation as neutrally as possible. If we ignore others’
frames or try to replace them, we are likely to spark conflict. Instead, a
frame that describes our shared experience as a “third story” can be
liberating. For example, a leader whose team had been in a conflict related to
a change initiative opened a meeting by saying, “The way I see it, we are
working on our airplane while we fly it. Does anyone else feel that way?” The
entire team laughed in recognition, tensions were diffused, and real work could
begin.
Finally, an empowering frame calls to mind
the magnitude of a goal and gives it meaning. “I believe it will take us 300
years to get to full sustainability as a society,” said one CEO. “Our goal is
to build a foundation for future generations.” This perspective gave his team
the staying power to persist on a very difficult goal.
Every conversation, every communication, and
every decision begins with a frame. When we provide a context that expands our
thinking, includes others, and gives meaning to our efforts, we help spark
creativity and insight in ourselves, our peers, and our leaders. Perhaps that
explains the old Disney company joke encouraging its animators and designers to
challenge a limiting frame:
“How many Imagineers does it take to change a
lightbulb?”
“Does it have to be a lightbulb?”
Elizabeth
Doty is a former lab fellow of Harvard University’sEdmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and founder of Leadership
Momentum, a consultancy that focuses on the practical
challenges of keeping organizational commitments.
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