Tom Herrington

University of Georgia

BS

Biology

1980

Univeristy of Georgia

MBA

1983

The "Art" of Influencing and Leadership

Tom Herrington, Senior Partner, The PAR Group will reveal and demonstrate the skill of influencing, the ability necessary for the most critical elements of business: Leadership, Teamwork, Supervision, Coaching, Sales and Service. During the session he will give opportunities for practice with specialized coaching.

In America, business people are typically taught to obtain results by simply applying logic. Howﾬever, this does not describe the prime competency of the most successful performers'the leaders at all levels who can instantly cause teamwork, influence decisions, serve customers, close sales, and get things done with and through others. Certainly, they are logical, but their main interest and skill is in causing a "meetﾬing of the hearts," not just a "meeting of the minds."

Nobel Prize-winning research in Economics, conducted by Herb Simon in 1976, supports this conclusion. The way people actually do business and make decisions is in a pursuit of comfort or confidence, whether or not logical cost-benefit-payoff is optimized!

The skill that sets top performers apart is the ability to do business with people in a way that causes mutual buy-in to some tangible action by the end of the conversation. This is not a soft, vague or incomprehensible ability. It is specific and measurable.

This ability involves three major components that blend together as if they were a single skill.

1. Probe: Exemplary performers accurately read emotions first, logical content second. The only way you can tell whether or not buy-in is occurring is to see degrees of positive, neutral, or negative inclination during decision-making conversations. Willingness levels are different and logic is different depending on people's feelings about an idea.

2. Align: In business the ability to emﾬﾬﾬﾬpathize is fairly useless without the logic to make a business c-onnection. The hallmark of top performers is their ability to connect logic to the viewpoint of