What I remember most about my daughter’s early teenage years was the drama over dirty dishes. Crockery crises inevitably resulted in her stomping off to her bedroom and returning with a load of dirty dishes, which she oozed disdain but dumped in a pile in the dishwasher. I was the Vanna White of dishwasher demonstrations in those years.
Just 25 years later, I have complete clarity as to why my explanations of the inner workings of kitchen appliances did nothing to end the dishwasher wars. As the director of the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library, I am happy to report that my aha moment was due to a book. I read “Crucial Influence: Leadership Skills to Create Lasting Behavior Change” (Grenny et al., 3rd ed.) in order to drive change at KHCPL. It theorizes that there are six sources of influence. Imagine a table with one column labeled “motivation” and another column labeled “ability,” crossing three rows labeled “personal,” “social,” and “structural.”
I read the book just as I was designing staff training to help KHCPL focus more on our community and less on our organization. As obvious as it sounds to prioritize community needs, concerns and projects, the literal and figurative infrastructure of an organization requires a tremendous amount of support and decision-making. It is all too easy for these demands to crowd out the more important, but seemingly less urgent, work of building relationships with other entities, listening well to them, and developing collaborative efforts.
Given how difficult it is for a single workshop to result in meaningful behavior change, I implemented a group practice project for employees. Each group was tasked with learning about and listening to another group simulating a trial community.
If possible, they also worked with this group to make progress on any issues identified. When designing the project, thanks to “Crucial Influence” I avoided the pitfall of focusing only on personal abilities, the mistake I made when I thought that one more lesson on loading the dishwasher would result in neat rows of clean and sanitized bowls , plates and glasses.
It makes perfect sense that human actions are influenced by multiple types of motivation, and I did my best to incorporate personal, social, and structural sources.
If you consider how it would feel for your work team to look bad in front of other teams, and how much you might want to avoid it, or even remember your competitive instinct that kicks in when a situation looks like winning, you experience typical motivators .
You might even understand how KHCPL staff ended up showing their project results at an internal poster session, a passive, industry-specific showcase that’s more or less the grown-up version of a school science fair.
While many of our staff found the internship project a real learning experience, and we hope it will bear fruit as we work to become more community-focused, I have a practical application for you.
My guess is that there is at least one setting where you would like to see positive changes in a group’s long-term behavior. If so, I encourage you to read the book yourself or at least look at the diagrams that illustrate its key points.
You may be surprised at your brain’s ability to produce fresh ideas if you give it a new perspective on influence.
By the way, sometimes someone has the chance to see my grown daughter loading a dishwasher.
Both the awe-filled tone and verbal response are predictable: “How do you fit so much in a dishwasher?!”