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wanted to improve patient saety and employee satisaction byradically changing employees’ condence and ability to speak up candidly at critical times, she overdetermined success with amulti-pronged infuence eort.Identiying the high-leverage behaviors that needed tochange in her organization was only the irst step or Putman.Training the target behaviors was also insuicient. Gettingher employees to routinely act in new ways called or severaladditional inluence strategies.For instance, to help employees candidly speak up, she linkedthe new behavior to existing values. She instituted training toteach people how to voice concerns with ease. She garneredthe support o key opinion leaders and aligned the perormance-review systems with the target behaviors. She even madeseveral changes to policies, work layout, and organizationalstructure. By targeting individual, social, and structural infuencesources, Putman completely transormed the corporateculture. Forty-one o the orty-two questions improved on theannual employee satisaction survey, and employees are now53 percent more likely to conront dangerous shortcuts andaddress mistakes in providing patient care.
The Study
Our research eort included three studies.
C-level Challenges.
In our rst study we interviewed twenty-ve C-level leaders about their oremost challenges, includingbureaucratic inghting, silo thinking, and lack o accountability.We constructed a survey to measure the scope o these issuesand, more importantly, to see what organizations did to deal withthem. We administered this survey to nine hundred managersand supervisors. Fully 90 percent o those surveyed said theirorganizations struggled with at least one entrenched habit; mostsaid the problem negatively impacted areas including employeesatisaction, productivity, quality, and customer satisaction. A highpercentage o those surveyed had employed only one infuencestrategy—or example, they oered training, redesigned theorganization, or held a high-visibility retreat. A handul—ewerthan 5 percent—had used our or more sources o infuence incombination. The dierences in outcomes between these twogroups were astounding. Those who used our or more sourceso infuence in combination were ten times more likely to succeedthan those who relied on a single source o infuence
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Corporate Change Initiatives.
Our second study involveda larger sample o C-level leaders and explored how theyapproached change initiatives. We ocused on one hundredmission-critical initiatives—eorts such as internal restructurings,quality and productivity improvements, and new product launches.We wanted to see which sources o infuence companies used tosupport their initiatives—and how many sources they employed.Here, too, we ound that a high percentage o executives usedonly one approach, and that those who used our or more had thegreatest likelihood o success.
Personal Challenges.
In our third study, we shited the ocusrom organizational to personal challenges such as overeating,smoking, overspending, or binge drinking. We randomly surveyedmore than one thousand individuals, asking them to describe thestrategies they had tried. Many had attempted to alter their ownbehavior using a single approach (or example, join a gym, ollowprescriptions in a book, or attend AA meetings)—and nearly all othem had ailed. Only 14 percent had approached their problemusing our or more strategies; or them, the success rate was ourtimes higher, moving rom 10 percent to 40 percent
Gain Ten Times More Infuence
We have documented the success o this multi-prongedapproach across organizational levels and across dierentproblem domains. And while the results are impressive,they do not rely on an obscure calculus—i anything,they are built on simple arithmetic. Eective infuencersdrive change by relying on six dierent sources oinfuence strategies at the same time. Those who succeedpredictably and repeatedly don’t dier rom others bydegrees. They dier exponentially.
Ths wh ndstand hw tmbin t six ss infn a p t tn tims msssl at pding sbstantialand sstainabl hang.
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