My husband and I share our apartment with a cat named ¡Pam!¹ I have had close to 20 cats in my life and ¡Pam! is easily the most destructive, taking out wine glasses, our pottery collection, and an antique wooden dragon from Thailand.²

My husband and ¡Pam! like to play a game, called, “Get Down!” It’s pretty simple: ¡Pam! climbs up on the kitchen counter or the TV table, and my husband bellows, “Get Down!” and ¡Pam! ignores him.

“Why does she keep doing this?” My husband eventually wails in frustration. “She knows it’s wrong.”

“She doesn’t know it’s wrong,” I reply. “She knows you don’t like it. There’s a difference.”

Whatever the Cat Does is Right

Cats have a very strong sense of right and wrong. Feeding the cat late? Wrong. Cutting the cat’s nails? Clearly wrong. Disturbing the cat who is lying on top of you in the middle of the night by getting up to use the bathroom? Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

But climbing up on the counter or on top of the bookcases? Right.

Because housecats, while predators to small rodents, songbirds, and insects, are small enough that they also qualify as prey to larger animals. They feel safer when they are at altitude.

So if you want the cat to stop climbing on the counters, give them a cat tree with a higher perch. And keep things that tempt the cat (plastic bags, food) off the counters.

What Does This Have to Do with Management?

I worked with a senior executive once who decided to launch a new system feature during our peak sales season. Now we had a policy that we didn’t launch new features or programs during that season because, if something went wrong, then the sales team would be focused the problem, not on selling. But this executive decided that the benefit of this feature outweighed the risk. I disagreed.

Aloud.

Because I had not yet realized that executives are like cats – their perception of right or wrong comes from within their frame of reference.

Telling the executive “No” did not go over well. By the time the meeting ended and I had walked to my supervisor’s office, the executive had called him. I explained my perspective to no avail: I was told the feature was releasing and that I was not allowed to tell executives “No” anymore.³

What to Do Instead of Making My Mistake

From this experience, I learned that I had to find other ways of persuading people – and especially executives – to change their minds. It’s not enough to be right or to be the expert; you have to get inside the executive’s frame of reference and help them make the right decision.

That takes strategy: you have to figure out who you may need to influence and how to earn the right to spend time with them, before you need to influence them.

It takes patience: you have to ask questions and do a lot of active listening to understand what is important to them. And then you have to earn their trust by demonstrating that understanding, through your words and through your actions.

It takes skill: you have to figure out how to craft your message to help the executive hear that your perspective supports their goals.

And it takes humility: you have to accept that, if you haven’t done these things yet, perhaps you’re not the right one to influence their behavior. Perhaps you need to take a partner who is.

What I Could Have Done Instead

If I had known then what I know now, I would not have confronted the executive directly. Recognizing that my supervisor didn’t have the ability to influence this executive, I would have approached the CIO, who I had a great relationship with and who everyone listened to.⁴ I would have shared the information with him, and asked if he was concerned about the timing. 

And one of three things might have happened:

• Perhaps he would have thanked me and privately persuaded the executive to postpone the release by a week. Problem solved.
• Or he might have asked the technical project lead for a risk analysis, and found a way to mitigate the risks that caused the feature to fail. Problem solved.
• Or maybe he would have reassured me that he had looked into it and was confident that the feature release was low-risk. I might still have disagreed but I trusted him and you don’t win them all.

The Three P’s

Understanding how to influence others is critical to the Perception aspect of the People-Process-Perception triangle that makes managers effective. 

I’ve worked with many beginning managers who struggle with making their voices heard because they shout No! at the cat on the counter, instead of getting inside the cat’s head and figuring out how to get a colleague or executive to do what they want.

If you want that seat at the table, to be in the room where it happens, you need to build your ability to manage perception, of you and of your ideas.

It takes time, patience, and skill – but it’s not impossible to learn how to grow your influence and make your voice heard. First you have to admit to yourself that shouting No! at the cat won’t work.

Your Turn

I’d like to hear what you think:

• What have you learned about influencing others?
• What steps do you take when you need to get inside a colleague’s frame of reference?
• What do you think is hardest about making this shift?

Share in the comments!

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1. I can tell you her name because I will never use it in a password because she is so contrary that using her name as a password will crash that app and I wouldn’t want to… Oh… Hmm… ↩︎
2. Until I discovered Museum Paste (available from The Container Store). Now our pottery collection and statues and jewelry boxes are fastened down and she has moved on to destroying other things. ↩︎
3. The fact that the feature failed to launch accurately and created a huge distraction at the absolute worst moment only made my sin worse, in the mind of that senior executive. ↩︎
4. Mainly because he rarely spoke up. So, when he did, they knew it was important. ↩︎