Leading through persuasion. (Review).

Influencing and Motivating Others, online, 2002 Harvard Business School Online, $195 per student per year. Other material: online facilitator guide.

The Harvard Business School Online course Influencing and Motivating Others touches on a critical facet of leadership. The ability to influence people can facilitate decisions and affect change. The ability to motivate others can help improve the performance of a team, a department, a division, or an entire organization.

But from classical times, persuasion has been viewed with suspicion because influence can mean manipulation and motivation can mean compromising people with financial rewards. Over the last 20 years, we have seen numerous examples of both.

In the nineteen eighties, the big guns of the junk bond markets -- Michael Milken, Ivan Bosky, and the firm Drexel Burnham Lambert -- were so influential that people practically hung on their every word. They influenced market behavior, corporate strategy, and career decisions of freshly minted MBAs.

In the nineteen nineties, the stock market boomed, culminating in the dot-coin bubble. Inside the speculative bubble, persuasion replaced reality. Instant wealth was the primary appeal; the wealth was to come from IPOs and stock run-ups, not profits. Just about anyone with an idea, good or bad, could persuade investors.

Venture capital firms, such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and analysts, such as Henry Blodget (the so-called "Internet Bull") and Mary Meeker, spoke for a time as the oracles of the New Economy. Their words moved markets. At one point, I was working for Amazon.com and watched as a single analyst gave us a favorable buy rating. The stock nearly tripled in value in one day.

And now, at the beginning of a new century, we have the Enron collapse (among others). Again, the power of influence was center stage and not in a flattering light.

Course content

We seem to need as much help as we can get in reality-based decision making. One large component, ethics, is not addressed in the Harvard course. But it teaches influence and motivation grounded in relationships and collaboration, and both can be effective deterrents to persuasion grounded in deception and fantasy.

The course is centered on the case of a 60-year old insurance company. Its product line that once had broad appeal is not being well received by younger customers. The situation is critical, and the company must adjust quickly. As the newly hired Director of Operations, you are supposed to save the company.

You are the new kid on the block and face an uphill battle, stepping into a stodgy culture and having few allies. In your role, you have many options before you, but you also must persuade people to support decisions and motivate them to carry the decisions out. You need to improve employee performance. But how? Should you work with the old guard and teach them new tricks? Or should you go with the young turks and hope they're up to the task? How do you ensure that your proposals are accepted by senior management?

The course focuses on demanding and getting better results, motivating employees, leading peers, establishing goals, persuading through negotiation and compromise, establishing credibility, framing goals on common ground, and connecting emotionally. It contains many of the ingredients for not only influencing and motivating others but also gaining power and influence to affect change and produce a positive outcome for the company as a whole.

A standard feature of HBS media-based courses is a library of articles drawn from the School's large collection. In this course, they include "Demand Better Results--And GetThem" by Robert Schaffer, "One MoreTime: How Do You Motivate Employees" by Frederick Herzberg, and "The Necessary Art of Persuasion" by Jay A. Conger.

There are also related leadership articles including "Power is the Great Motivator" by David C. McClelland and David H. Burnham, "Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People" by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, and "Meetings That Work: Plans Bosses Can Approve" by Paul D. Lovett.

In my own career, I have used some of the skills taught in the course. As a new business development manager at the Dialog Corporation, I was an unknown. I realized that I needed some quick wins to gain credibility. To understand the company and the people, I spent a lot of time building relationships that helped me tap into the vast quantities of information and knowledge, much of it in peoples' heads. As I started to establish myself, I was asked to take on higher profile projects and soon found myself in a position, with a team, to encourage the CEO to set up a firm to invest in early Internet start-ups.

Features and interface

The program homepage has links to the case, tools, resources, and quiz. Students should click the overview page link to familiarize themselves with the program pedagogy and learning objectives. The page also explains how to use the course interface, gives technical tips, and has a privacy statement The course content listing includes circles next to each item indicating if they've been visited or completed.

Please note that you can only leave the course via the exit link, or you risk losing your work. You must also keep the window open at all times while taking the course.

In the interactive case section, a summary sets up the situation for you. To proceed, you can play video with an audio track or read the case. I preferred to read the case because I have bandwidth problems downloading video and voice data. Throughout the case, you are asked to make decisions. You are then faced with different scenarios depending on the choice you make.

You can always return to the decision point, choose another option, and play out the next scenario. I often did this to learn from the consequences of different decisions. As I learned at Harvard Business School, there are usually no right or wrong answers, just decisions with better and worse outcomes.

When you complete the case, the program gives you feedback on your decisions, refers you to the leadership concepts of recognized experts, and reviews key points derived from the case. The articles mentioned earlier and other print materials are available as downloadable and printable PDF files.

The tools section includes an option to work with a mentor. You must recruit the individual from your workplace. The course emphasizes the value of working with someone you trust to provide constructive feedback and help monitor how you transfer your learning into practice. I think the mentor suggestion is an excellent one. A mentor can provide additional motivation to keep the learner moving through a self-paced course. Many well-intentioned users of self-paced courses run out of gas and never complete the courses. A mentor also makes the learning collaborative and helps in the difficult work of transferring learning to the job.

Other tools include a series of skills assessments that provide preprogrammed feedback. The follow-up section offers you a chance to make a priority listing of the changes you want to make in the way you lead. The section is action-oriented: it asks what you plan to change, how you plan to change it, and how you will know it has changed. You can set up email reminders of your goals.

The end-of-course quiz assesses your performance. The results are confidential; only you have access to them. However, if you are working with a mentor, he or she may find the results useful for helping you to improve.

Recommendation

Influencing and Motivating Others from Harvard Business School Online can be important for leaders and managers. Managers come and go in companies, but leaders who have mastered influencing and motivating others generally have more control over their careers. Both skills are primarily built on relationships with people within and outside an organization, not on flashy PowerPoint slides or on being the smartest person around. Motivating employees with financial rewards is one thing, but developing employees who perform at a higher level through intrinsic means is an art that even Picasso could appreciate. Interactivity could be more varied and dynamic, and a stronger set of online collaborative tools would encourage more of the peer-to-peer learning for which the classroom-based case method is famous.

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