Adversaries into Allies
The bestselling co-author of The Go-Giver offers new insights into what it means to be truly influential.
Faced with the task of persuading someone to do what we want, most of us expect resistance. We see the other person as an adversary and often resort to coercion or manipulation to get our way. But while this approach might bring us short-term results, it leaves people with a bad feeling about themselves and about us. At that point, our relationship is weakened and our influence dramatically decreased. There has to be a better way.
Drawing on his own experiences and the stories of other influential people, communication expert Bob Burg offers five simple principles of what he calls Genuine Influence™—the ability to win people to your side in a way that leaves everyone feeling great about the outcome. In the tradition of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Burg offers a tried-and-true framework for building alliances at work, at home, and anywhere else you seek to win people over.
Adversaries into Allies Reviews
Excerpt from Adversaries into Allies
“The single greatest ‘people skill’ is a highly-developed and authentic interest in the ‘other’ person.”
Communicate with Tact and Empathy
My Dad, Mike Burg, says, “Tact is the language of strength.” Communicating tactfully displays a genuine regard for the other person, which will open the door to making him your ally. It’s also somewhat of a linchpin in that—without it—your other skills will be rendered much less effective. The ability to use tact in every situation is key to becoming an Ultimate Influencer.™
Tact is the ability to say something in a way that makes the other person feel less threatened or defensive and more open to you and your ideas. This is powerful. Rather than bruising their ego and eliciting the usual resentful feelings and resistance most people can display in this situation, tact opens them up to very positively accepting your suggestion, and acting upon it!
Complaining loudly that your steak is underdone and curtly demanding it to be redone will be far less effective at getting the waitstaff on your side than gently calling over the waiter and with a genuine smile and appreciative tone saying: “The meal is delicious and I love the presentation of it. The meat is just a bit undercooked. Could you let the chef know how much I’m enjoying it, and if she could cook it just a tiny bit more that would terrific?”
Saying the right thing and saying it correctly brings forth results that seem like magic. The good news is that communicating with tact is a skill you will easily learn through this book. At first you may have to work at consciously utilizing it, but stick with it and it will soon become a natural part of your being. You’ll be amazed at how far a little bit of tact goes in influencing others.
Empathy is related to tact but can be defined as the ability to identify with another’s feelings.
Is empathy simply putting yourself in the other person’s shoes? Not exactly. Even if we have shared another person’s experience, our aforementioned individual belief systems, personalities, convictions, and the variety of our backgrounds makes each person’s reaction, even to common experiences, different.
Fortunately, in order to communicate empathy, you don’t necessarily have to understand exactly how they feel. All you need is to communicate that you understand they’re feeling something; something that is uncomfortable for them, and that you are there to help them work through it.
Like tact, feeling and communicating empathy for another person is a skill that you can develop. It is vitally important to becoming an Ultimate Influencer, and we’ll talk about the two traits together because they tend to work hand in hand. You will naturally display tact when you are truly empathetic to another’s situation. And speaking tactfully will communicate your empathy to that person.