Being a leader, you need to understand how to influence your people. As I describe in my book Before Happiness, one of the most powerful ways to share a positive message is to recruit other people to spread it.
A colleague, Adam Grant, Ph.D., of the Wharton School of Business, looked at the effect of having a company’s leader give a motivational speech to a team of new hires at one of his call centers. With his message alone, the positive leader created a moderately good bounce in revenue for the call center—300 percent over the results of a control group who didn’t hear the speech. But if the team heard both the leader and a grateful “beneficiary” (in this case, an employee who had been at the call center for a while and was positively affected by the work being done there), something incredible happened.
For this group, revenue increased by 700 percent compared to trainees who heard no motivational messages. That’s not a misprint—700 percent.
This study also shows that people are much more likely to adopt your reality when it is both real and emotional—the grateful employee lends credibility to the leader’s message. If you’re a leader, your positive messages will be far more powerful if your team also hears them from someone who is authentically affected.
If you want to create a positive message, start by finding a beneficiary to help you ripple out the happiness advantage to your team.
