When you set out to convince, you make the conversation into a battle to be won and lost. You bring force and, as Newton’s laws of motion tell us, force creates counter-force. You’re creating resistance before you’ve even finished your argument. Winning means that in the end, we will just have one side (our own!). We want that unity of opinion, but we create opposition in the process.

But because the very act of providing an answer closes the loop. You've solved the riddle. The thrill of the chase is over. Now everyone else is just expected to take your precious answer and dutifully apply it – to products, campaigns, media plans – without having experienced the journey that got you there.

In their landmark 1959 report often referenced in leadership theory, social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven pinpointed five bases of power: Legitimate: when people perceive that your rank in a formal hierarchy—e.g., manager, CEO, or president—gives you the right to “prescribe” their behavior Reward: when people perceive your ability to distribute rewards for completed tasks or met goals Coercive: when people perceive your ability to distribute punishments and disincentives (the opposite of reward power) Expert: when people perceive your special knowledge or expertise, which causes them to defer to your expertise Referent: when people feel “oneness” with you or a desire to be like you, leading to their respect and admiration of you Referent power is considered the most potent because it doesn’t require that a leader micromanage, use coercion, or reward to influence others. People follow a leader with referent power based on who the leader is and how they behave. According to French and Raven, referent power has the broadest range of influence of any power, allowing it to be leveraged on a large scale.

If you’re trying to think and act more creatively and more critically, focus on asking better, more interesting questions of the briefs you’re tasked with answering. What we teach children can and should be applied to our own professional lives, too. A focus on problems and solutions first, promotes consistent, ‘safe’ answers, but won’t move the work on. Spending time on asking and answering better questions will help refine the understanding of a problem and will create the conditions for new, interesting and challenging solutions.

The cultivation of experiences of awe. Like gratitude and curiosity, awe can leave us feeling inspired and energized. It’s another tool in your toolkit and it’s now attracting increased attention due to more rigorous research.

tips for effective negotiation

Whoever is in charge of hosting the meeting, or the most senior person in the room, should take responsibility for introducing everyone. Doing so neatly sidesteps both the aforesaid problems. Any awkwardness Claire in procurement feels about mentioning her experience and expertise in a relevant issue the meeting will address is deftly deflected. Second, the procurement department’s hi-flyer is now better placed to listen to the experience and expertise of others in the room, without worrying that her turn to speak is rapidly approaching.

You’re about to spend 11 minutes perfecting an email to a customer. You could do a 90% ideal job in one minute, and the extra 10 minutes spent will increase the ‘quality’ of the email to 92%. The alternative? Now, you could spend that ten minutes reading a chapter of an important new book. You could learn a few new functions in Javascript. You could dive deep into the underlying economics of your new project…

Meeting ==> Review

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