Everybody's a Consultant Now!

What do leadership, sales, education, negotiation, and medicine all have in common? They’re all about moving someone toward a different way of acting or thinking.

In fact, as Dan Pink makes clear in his book To Sell Is Human, “moving” others may be the one core foundational skill that underlies all others in our business and personal lives. And in the modern day and age, it’s not “moving” them in the sense of being a dictatorial leader, a pushy salesperson, or a rap-on-the-knuckles teacher. It even goes beyond getting their “buy-in” to your predetermined solution. Yes, you probably have a solution in mind for them (an initiative, a product, a learning point, a health program), but it’s not about “pushing” that solution on them. It’s about truly listening to them, seeing the world through their eyes, being attuned to their ideas, and being open to their influence on you – even if that means adjusting your solution to meet their needs.

If this sounds like approaching leadership, sales, education, etc., as a partnership – being a consultant rather than a solution-pusher – you’re right! And that, I think, is the key insight in Pink’s excellent book. In fact, one of the frequently cited themes of the book – “We’re all in sales now!” – could just as easily be expressed as “We’re all consultants now!”

The type of “consultancy” to which I’m referring here echoes a distinction that Peter Block makes in his book Flawless Consulting about two different types of consultants, an Expert and a Collaborator.

An Expert Consultant determines the problem, decides on actions, and implements decisions to solve the problem. As Block notes, “Two-way communication between the Expert and the client is limited. The consultant initiates and the client responds.”

By contrast, a Collaborative Consultant’s interaction with the client is characterized by Block in the following way:

·         The consultant and the client work to become interdependent. They share responsibility for action planning, implementation, and results.

·         Decision making between consultant and client is bilateral. It is characterized by mutual exchange and respect for the responsibilities and expertise of both parties.

·         Collaboration is considered essential.

·         Communication is two-way.

·         The consultant’s goal is to solve problems so they stay solved. That is, the consultant establishes a helping relationship designed to broaden the competence level of the client to develop and implement action plans. Next time the client will have the skills to solve the problem.

I think that the Collaborative Consultant role described by Block tracks precisely with the roles and skills that Pink describes in his book as essential for “moving others.” In the sales context, for example, the “client” (the prospective buyer) no longer looks at the seller as “the expert,” since (as Pink points out) the internet makes available the type of information about products and services that used to be exclusively held by sellers. (Consider how easy it is to find online the invoice price of new vehicles and the maintenance history of used vehicles.)

And in all of the contexts I mentioned above – leadership, education, medicine – and any other context involving the use of influence, people are much more tuned into (and resistant to) efforts to manipulate or coerce them to “move” in a certain direction. The classic quote “People like to buy but they don’t like to be sold to” comes into play here. Instead of being pushed into a sale, people want to lead themselves to the buying decision out of their own informed choice, with the seller playing the role of the guide. Similarly, class participants want to partner with the facilitator in order to self-discover learning, patients want to partner with the doctor in order to self-create a health program – and employees want to partner with their leaders in order to self-determine their work and career goals. All of these partnerships involve the seller / facilitator / doctor / leader playing the role of a Collaborative Consultant.

To Influence Others - Listen!

In 2001 I helped launch a group called the Applied Improvisation Network, a global network of business consultants and educators who show organizations how skills and concepts derived from improvisational theater can improve their organizational performance. During several annual AIN conferences since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cathy Salit, whose company, Performance of a Lifetime, consults with major corporations to help them reap the benefits that improv can offer – such as better collaboration and communication, improved adaptability to change, and more creative thinking.

I was delighted to see Cathy’s work with Performance of a Lifetime serve as the focus of an entire chapter of Dan Pink’s outstanding new book, To Sell Is Human. As I mentioned in my previous article, Pink’s basic message is: Everybody sells! That is, almost all jobs involve “moving” (i.e., influencing) others to take some sort of action, such as buying a product, supporting an initiative, contributing resources to a project, or learning and applying a new set of behaviors. And as Pink points out in his description of Cathy Salit’s work, one of the primary tools available to help move others is improvisational theater (or improv).

So how can improv help people sell? Is it all about learning to be more extraverted, to entertain people and wow them with a seamless pitch and line of patter that wins them over every time?

Hardly. As Cathy Salit notes, the true power of improv lies in a simple yet vital skill that very few people are ever taught: Listening with intense curiosity.

On the improv stage, where everything – everything – is totally made up in the moment, “listening curiously” means more than just hearing the words: It means being totally immersed in what your onstage partners are saying and doing at all times. Salit says that the performer’s job is to “take in anything and everything someone says as an offer you can do something with” in order to move the scene forward.

Similarly, a person who wants to “move” someone in a certain direction must listen intently to the other person in order to acquire valuable information about the person’s wants, needs, and motivators. But even more, says Pink, listening with curiosity will help you “quickly realize that what seem outwardly like objections are often offers in disguise.” If a person responds to your request for a $200 charitable donation by saying, “No, I can’t give $200 now,” you can hear this less as a rejection, more as a potential offer to: 1) Give $100 now, or 2) Give $200 later, or 3) Donate time rather than money, or 4) Engage in any other creative combination of solutions the two of you can collaboratively devise. Yet you can only discover and develop these options by hearing the “No” statement as an offer, being intensely curious, and jointly exploring the possibilities with the other person.

“Offers come in all shapes and sizes, “ says Salit. And, adds Pink, “the only way to hear [offers] is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.” And “the way you respond” is by asking powerful questions.

As I mentioned in my articles on The Tradeoff Triangle and the SCAMPER technique, asking questions greatly expands the collaborative playing field upon which two people (in this case, a seller and a buyer) can find a mutually beneficial solution.  In addition, a seller who conducts a sale by using a questioning approach – who acts as a consultant rather than a product-pusher – is more likely to create a satisfied buyer who feels that his purchase was freely made, based on a full vetting of his real needs.  (Contrast this with a purchase made from a “pushy” salesperson, which often leaves the customer waking up the next day with a sense of buyer’s remorse and a feeling of having been taken advantage of.)

Any seller who wants to adopt more of a consultative approach will find that the world of improv can help here too. As Salit notes, one of the basic tenets of the improviser’s art is: “Make your partner look good.” An improviser is taught to support her partner at all costs by (again) listening intently, responding positively to her partner’s offers, treating the scene as an equal partnership, and above all refusing to steal the spotlight or push (that word again!) the scene in a direction the partner hasn’t offered. Similarly, a seller can see her interaction with a buyer as a joint search for a solution that will make the buyer/partner look (and feel) good while also benefiting the seller.

“In improv,” says Salit, “you never try to get someone to do something. That’s coercion, not creativity. You make offers, you accept offers – and a conversation, a relationship, a scene, and other possibilities emerge.” In the consultative selling context, those possibilities include loyal customers, positive word-of-mouth, and long-term relationships.

Ultimately, effective improv and effective selling are both about saying “Yes And.” Saying “Yes And” (to use my definition of the term) in the context of selling involves:

·         Accepting the Person (by listening curiously and seeking first to “see the world through his eyes”);

·         Acknowledging the Possibilities (by treating his responses as offers and exploring them through powerful questioning); and

·         Advancing with Positive Purpose (by seeking an outcome that makes the other person look and feel good and that benefits you both).

“’Yes And’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.” And the more you adopt a “Yes And” attitude in all of your interactions, the more authentic – and credible – you’ll be when you find yourself in the “selling” role.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

In To Sell Is Human, Pink describes several improv exercises that Salit conducts with corporate clients to help them embed listening, questioning, and partnering skills in their muscle memory. I’ll describe two of them here. What would happen if you adapted these activities to your own work environment and conducted them with your team?

1) I’m Curious. In the “I’m Curious” activity, workshop participants form pairs. In each pair, one person chooses a side of a controversial issue and tries to persuade his partner to see his point of view. The partner can respond – but only with questions! (True questions - not opinons-disguised-as-questions such as “How can you say that?”) After the first person responds, the only permissible reaction from the partner is either: 1) Another question, or 2) Silent reflection. “The idea here isn’t to win,” says Pink. “It’s to learn. And when both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn … [t]he conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match.”

2) Time Traveler. One person in a pair plays the role of someone from the 18^th Century who just arrived in the present day using a time-traveling machine. Her partner must describe an everyday action – say, putting gas in a car – to the “time traveler.” “This is more difficult than it sounds,” says Pink. “That person from 300 years ago has a perspective wildly different from our own.” Even simple concepts such as “gas,” “car,” and “debit card” must be fully explained in terms the time traveler will understand. “The exercise immediately challenges your assumptions about the understandability of your message,” says Salit. “You are forced to care about the worldview of the other person.” In other words, you must see the world through his eyes – an essential part of consultative selling.

"Everybody's In Sales Now!" Says Dan Pink

I just started reading Daniel Pink’s new book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Pink’s basic point is that, while research shows that 1 out of 9 Americans today works in sales, so do the other 8! In other words, even people who don’t sell products or services still spend a significant part of their workday engaging in what Pink calls “non-sales selling” – serving clients or customers, or persuading, teaching, instructing, coaching, or otherwise “moving” other people in a certain direction.

As I embark on my journey through the book, I’m eagerly anticipating Chapter 8, titled “Improvise,” which focuses on my fellow Applied Improvisation Network member Cathy Salit and her work involving the ways in which improv theater skills can be applied to the act of moving others. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about that chapter (and the entire book) after I read it. Right off, though, I encountered a point in the second chapter that echoes one of my earliest articles in this blog.

In that article, I described the Scientific Management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose basic premise I summed up as follows:

Thinkers think. Planners plan. Workers work.

In other words, according to Taylor, the role of management is to define the “one best way” to perform any task through rigorous measurement, analysis, and planning. The role of the worker is then to perform the task exactly as designed – no questions asked, no suggestions accepted.

However, as I noted in my article, since Taylor’s heyday in the early 20^th Century:

“ … the spread of complexity, education, and entitlement have resulted in a world where organizations should expect – and, in fact, need – every member to be Thinker, Planner, and Worker (or, let’s say, ‘Doer’) rolled into one.”

Pink also notes that one of the hallmarks of present-day life is the melding of multiple roles within a single individual. Pink cites two primary forces driving this trend. First, he cites statistics that demonstrate the explosive growth of small, entrepreneurial enterprises in the past few years, a trend that is only expected to continue.  This trend has had a huge impact on the very notion of the definition of “work” and “job”:

“What people actually do in tiny operations is often fundamentally different from what they do within massive ones. In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization. A two-person company doesn’t need a human resources department. A two-thousand-person company can’t survive without one. In bigger companies, selling is often a specialized function – a department, a division, a task that some people do so that others can specialize in something else. But proprietors of small operations don’t have that luxury. They must wear several hats – often at the same time – and one of these hats is the selling cap.”

But this role-melding trend isn’t limited to the one- or two-person shop. The second force that Pink cites is the need for ever-shorter lead times in a world of permanent whitewater, which is requiring even large, established companies to demand what Pink calls elasticity – or a breadth of skills – of its employees. Companies can no longer afford the delay in responding to external circumstances - market conditions, competitors’ actions, customer expectations - that can result from highly segmented role definitions. And as Pink notes:

“When organizations were highly segmented, roles tended to be fixed. If you were an accountant, you did accounting. You didn’t have to worry about much outside your domain because other people specialized in those areas. The same was true when business conditions were stable and predictable. You knew at the beginning of a given quarter, or even a given year, about how much and what kind of accounting you’d need to do. However, in the last decade, the circumstances that gave rise to fixed skills have disappeared…. What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.” [emphasis added]

Or, leaping off my earlier characterization:

Thinkers plan. Planners work. Workers think.

And to add Pink’s conclusion from his observation about “non-sales selling”:

Everybody sells!

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Immediately the question comes to mind: Does this trend toward all-roles-in-one-person run against the grain of another trend I’ve frequently discussed in this blog – the notion that people should play to their strengths? Certainly, some people who find themselves expected to play these multiple roles will discover that they’re just not very good at some of them. If they try to follow the strengths-based approach and only do those things they are good at, will the trends that Pink cites make that option tougher to employ?

These are questions I’ll return to at a later time. One thing I do suspect, though, is that there is such a thing as “foundational skills” that every person, no matter his or her role, must be able to play at some level if he or she hopes to achieve anything in the world. And the ability to “move” people – to influence, instruct, engage, etc. - to at least some degree is probably one of those foundational skills. Very few of us could afford to (or I imagine would want to) sit in an ivory tower thinking great thoughts that never filter down to others (even a few) in a way that might change their behavior (even a little). As I continue to read Pink’s book, I’ll be eager to see how he addresses this strain of resistance I’m sure many people have to the idea of being in sales (even the non-selling kind).