In Shanghai

I’ve been in Shanghai, working in a hotel which was, apparently, the home of Shanghai’s Gangster No 2 early last century. Given the photos of him around the walls, holding court with the statesmen, politicians, actors and business people of his day, he was clearly a very popular guy. Or maybe he was very persuasive.

Monday morning: a workshop that starts by asking this marketing leadership team: what’s the thing you most need to develop that will create a step-change in the work of this team? Their answer: influencing. Creating more effective relationships with their internal and external business partners so that they get the buy-in, engagement, permission, resources - and all those other variants of Yes - which allow their ideas to come into reality.

I’m taken aback by how strongly the team feels about those it has to influence, and mostly those feelings are not positive ones. The default stance seems to be that others are wrong or bad to behave as they do, and that is what makes them difficult to influence. Which sort of explains, I guess, why people think they are going to have to have difficult, fierce and risky conversations to move things forward…

So the first intervention is to change how they look at these ‘problem people’ (Wayne Dyer: change how you look at something, and what you look at changes). To stop making them wrong, to stop making them intractable. To see that the behaviour of these people is perfectly right, natural and justified - from their perspective.