How to Persuade Others You've Made the Right Decisions - Kim Scott

Your team has managed to come to a decision, but there are still people who don’t agree with it — the same people who will be responsible for helping to implement it. If you’re working efficiently, not everybody on your team is involved in every step of the listen-clarify-debate-decide process for everything — just the relevant people.

Now that a decision has been reached, it’s time to get more people on board. This isn’t easy, and it’s vital to get it right. Persuasion at this stage can feel unnecessary and make the decider resentful of people on the team who aren’t fully in agreement.

The decider has painstakingly gone through the listen, clarify, and debate steps and made a decision. Why doesn’t everyone else get why it’s obvious we should do this — or at least be willing to fall in line?

But expecting others to implement a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results. And don’t imagine that you can step in and simply tell everyone to get in line behind a decision, whether you have made it or somebody else has.

To help you be more persuasive, and to teach the “deciders” on your team to be more persuasive, the rest of this section will cover, briefly, Aristotle’s elements of rhetoric — pathos, logos, and ethos, which I’ll translate loosely as emotion, logic, and credibility.

1. Emotion: The listener’s emotions, not the speaker’s when trying to persuade
2. Credibility: Demonstrate expertise and humility when persuading
3. Logic: Show your work when persuading your team

https://kimmalonescott.medium.com/how-to-persuade-others-youve-made-the-right-decisions-a7a38a4555db

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