Spit in Your Soup
(Last week’s Women’s Foodservice Forum Executive Summit featured execellent educational content from industry leaders and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management faculty. Here’s the next in this week-long series on key learnings from the conference.)
brand-as-business bit:
Kellogg Associate Professor Tanya Menon taught us how to get people motivated about the things we want to do. Explaining the psychological tools and principles behind negotiation and persuasion, Tanya shared some sound advice:
“When you use force, you lose the power of influence.” She described the “spit in your soup” problem: we can be a pain-in-the-neck customer to get our waiter to comply with our demands, but do we really want to suffer the consequences? Instead, persuasion is about finding what the other person’s goals are and how we can help them achieve them.
“A meeting is where decisions are performed, not made.” She described what we’ve all encountered – if we gain key people’s support before the meeting and ask them to advocate for your recommendation, we’ll have much greater success. We need to make it easy for people to come our way.
“Persuasion doesn’t start with big ideas, but with effectiveness.” The former makes it easy for others to disagree with us. Instead, start with a point both sides agree to and set up a “cascade of ‘yes-es’” that ends up with outcome you’re looking for.
Check back tomorrow for insights on hybridity from Jump Associates CEO Dev Patnaik at the Women’s Foodservice Forum Executive Summit.
previous posts in the series: