In one of my last posts, I described motivational Interviewing, an interview process designed to help people discover their values, passions, and other sources of motivation. The idea is that you can motivate far more effectively if you use your ears instead of your mouth.

In this post, I’ll outline why and how to use this approach with senior leaders.

Why Motivational Interviewing with senior leaders?

Senior leaders, like teenagers, can be sensitive to any attempt that encroaches on their power. And, like your teenager, your typical senior leader won’t put up with demands or lectures.

In addition, senior leaders have a broader, more enterprise-wide perspective than many of the people who make requests of them. The people making requests represent more narrow functions, professions, regions, or groups—and so their issues often come across to senior leaders as narrow, parochial, or even self serving. Motivational interviewing avoids all of these traps by beginning with the leader’s perspective.

Example. I was working with a friend who had recently taken a job as vice president of human resources at a firm that licenses digital images. We’d worked together at her previous job and achieved a big success in improved employee engagement and retention. She was hoping to duplicate this success in her new job, but couldn’t seem to get the senior leader’s attention.

We crafted some nifty presentations showing that their turnover was high and costly. While the CEO listened intently, he ultimately turned down her request to take action.

After the presentation, I called my friend to discuss more powerful ways to convince the CEO to address the turnover problem—when it hit us. We should stop telling the CEO what he should care about and start asking him what he does care about.

My friend scheduled a meeting just to listen. She told the CEO she wanted to hear about all the threats and opportunities he saw on the horizon, and to learn how he prioritized them. The CEO was quick to put her on his calendar, and here’s what she learned:

The firm’s owner was convinced that rapid growth was essential to their success. And this growth could only be achieved through acquiring firms that already had libraries of images that could be digitized. He had asked the CEO to acquire firms at the rate of one new firm every two months.

My friend called me after her meeting. “Turnover isn’t important here,” she said. “My job is going to be all about integrating new acquisitions.” That single discussion changed her entire set of priorities. Within a month she’d created a triage team that would go into a newly acquired firm, assess its human resource needs, identify key players, and put policies and procedures into place. She and her team became an integral part of her firm’s acquisition strategy, and she became one of its most important executives.

Who influenced whom in this example? My friend’s strategy of listening didn’t change her CEO’s motivation; it changed her own. Or did it? It certainly changed her tactics. Instead of working to reduce turnover, she worked to improve their acquisition process.

In our book, Crucial Conversations, we encourage people to ask themselves, “What do I really want—long term—for myself, for the other person, and for the relationship?” What my friend really wanted wasn’t to reduce turnover but to further the organization’s success, build her own credibility, and nurture a relationship with the CEO. What she discovered through motivational interviewing was that her original tactic wasn’t going to achieve her long-term goals. So she changed tactics. If you aren’t open to influence, you won’t be influential.