The podcast by project managers for project managers. If we can identify the reasons why people say no, we can be more effective in getting them to follow our requests. Patrick Veroneau introduces an acronym called GREAT to understand the resistance we may be facing from our team. An offshoot of effective leadership is being able to inspire other people to say yes to our requests.

Table of Contents

00:32 … Rise Against Hunger01:57 … Meet Patrick03:39 … Six Principles of Influence05:49 … Signs of Resistance07:02 … Goodwill09:21 … SCARF13:07 … Reactance14:56 … Self-Awareness16:41 … Expertise18:46 … Build Credibility20:55 … Kevin and Kyle22:02 … Apathy24:51 … Trust and CABLES26:16 … Congruence27:22 … Appreciation27:35 … Belongingness27:48 … Listening28:22 … Empathy28:37 … Specifics30:45 … Contact Patrick32:15 … Closing

Rise Against Hunger

WENDY GROUNDS:  We visited Rise Against Hunger as a company, Velociteach, and we did some meal packing there.  We packed over 1,080 meals that were sent to – I think these ones were going to Zimbabwe.

BILL YATES:  Nice.

WENDY GROUNDS:  But it was going to people who are not in the position to just be able to get food as easily as it is for us.  Rise Against Hunger is an amazing organization.  They target remote communities with hunger pockets, and they send their packages of food there.

BILL YATES:  We had such a great time as a team preparing these, you know, helping put these meals together, packaging them.  And we ended up with all these boxes of packaged meals ready to go.  It was so fun for the team to be together.  It was a team-building event with a purpose.  Those are our favorites.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I highly recommend it as a team-building event.  I think that was really fun.  Everybody really pulled together.  We packaged a bit too quickly, almost.  We were so excited about doing this that we got finished too quickly, and then we had to wash dishes; didn’t we.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  But there’s nothing better in terms of bonding than seeing your coworkers wearing hair nets.  It was just...

WENDY GROUNDS:  Oh yeah.  Oh yeah.

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WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.

We’re talking to Patrick Veroneau today.  And he’s the founder of the Emery Leadership and Sales Group, and they focus on helping employees and organizations bridge the gap between engagement and excellence.  He had his first management position with a division of Van Heusen Corporation, and he spent over 15 years in the biopharma industry in sales training and leadership development.  He continues to develop and refine leadership and sales models that blend evidence-based research and theory with what happens in the real world.  And what happens in the real world is often we’re trying to lead or to manage people on our projects, and we get resistance.  And so we’re going to be talking about that resistance today.

Meet Patrick

Hi, Patrick.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re so glad you’re here today.

PATRICK VERONEAU:  Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity to be on the podcast.  Always great to talk about resistance.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  First of all, tell us about your company, Emery Leadership Group, and what inspired you to start it.

PATRICK VERONEAU:  So Emery Leadership Group is primarily an organization that helps other organizations to develop better leaders and really to become more productive.  If you don’t have good leaders, right, if you don’t have people that can inspire other people to say yes to requests, then it’s very difficult to, I think, be as effective as you could be.  And there’s a lot of research in terms of what are the things that inspire individuals to want to say yes to our requests.  And that’s all that leadership is.  It’s an offshoot of influence to be able to lead people effectively.

And that really is my background was in biotech for over 15 years.  I was a sales rep.  I was involved in training.  I managed.  And the benefit of that, in being in that industry in particular, was that all of the things that we did were focused around what’s the research that suggests that this is the approach that a provider should take with their patients, whether it was cardiovascular or oncology.

And I had the opportunity to take that same approach in regards to leadership development, saying that there’s research that backs up why we make certain decisions.  If we leverage that, it doesn’t work all the time, just like treatments don’t always work, but there is a pattern that you can follow in terms of, if you behave in certain ways, the outcomes can be much more predictable.  I took the same approach again to leadership and also sales training, which is what I started at.

Six Principles of Influence

BILL YATES:  Patrick, we were talking just before we started recording, there was someone early in your career that influenced that.  And when we talk about “yes” versus “no,” it’d be interesting, I think, for people to know that background.  Talk a bit about the person that influenced you.

PATRICK VERONEAU:  So while I was in the pharmaceutical industry, again, I had access to a lot of trainings and was always sort of looking for how do I continue to sort of develop my skills?  And to me, I thought, well, we sell science.  Why not understand the science behind influence to be able to be more effective at doing our jobs? 

And there was a gentleman out of Arizona State University, a world expert in influence named Robert Cialdini, who’s written a number of books in that space.  And I was able to go through his workshops.  Most of his stuff is best known for the six principles of influence that he identified through all of his research, which are around things like liking and scarcity and authority and consensus, where those are our activators for us.  They’re almost like pulling levers for individuals to get them to say yes to our requests.

And what always stood out to me was we talked about it in a way of ethical influence; right?  These same tools can be used either way.  And you see it quite often when people do the wrong things.  Bernie Madoff is somebody that’s probably an example that most know about that, if you were to go back and look at the tools of influence, he used many of those influence principles, but just for the wrong reason.

So for me, the challenge that I found was these are great principles, right, the six principles of why people say yes.  But what I was finding and experiencing and I know for myself is that oftentimes I start from the place of wanting to say no; that I needed to get past that hurdle first.  And if I understood the reason why somebody was probably saying no, or what might prompt them to say no to a request, then at least for me what I found and what I was developing in those people that I was working with was that identifying the reasons why people say no allowed me then to decide which of the six principles probably would be more effective to use ethically to get them to follow my request.

Signs of Resistance

BILL YATES:  One of the things I want to talk with you about is formal authority and informal authority because project managers often have to lead people, even when they don’t have official authority over them.  Those team members don’t report to the project manager.  This can lead to resistance; you know?  I mean, that’s my nature.  If I have two bosses, so to speak, an official boss, and I’ve got somebody that I’m supposed to report to on a project, you know which way I’m going to lean, you know, which way is best for me.  That’s the manager I’m going to listen to.  So how can we recognize the signs of resistance from our team members, if it’s related to this idea of informal authority?

PATRICK VERONEAU:  Sure.  So there’s an acronym that I use called GREAT.  And the reason I created that is because, to me, the question that I would ask myself, and still do in the work that I do, is how great is my resistance?  So I’m almost – having to answer that question then tells me where I’m going to go from there because that’s what we deal with is resistance.  So the GREAT model is an acronym for five resisters, the first one being goodwill, the next one being reactance, the next one being expertise or experience, the next one being apathy, and the last one being trust.

Goodwill

WENDY GROUNDS:  I think this is an excellent model for us to just go a little deeper and to discover what you mean by each one of these.  So let’s look at goodwill first.  Can you give us examples in ways that we can demonstrate that our request is in the best interest of the person that we’re putting that request to?

PATRICK VERONEAU:  Yeah.  So goodwill really is about a feeling as though what you’re asking me to do doesn’t just benefit you; right?  If I’m managing a group, and I’m asking them to complete a project for me, if it’s myself that’s going to benefit from them doing all the work and really not showing any type of appreciation for them and what they’re having to do or how this is going to impact them, as well, then that immediately starts to build resistance.

So if you think about the industry that I came from where, if I’m asking a provider to use a certain treatment, they’re often thinking first, is this really what’s best for my patient, or is this what’s best for your quota?  That’s goodwill, and we need to be able to demonstrate that; right?  And if I just came in with the “This is what you should use,” oftentimes the providers are going to be thinking, wait a minute, I know that benefits you.  You’re going to benefit from this.  But is it really what’s in the best interest of what my patient needs, or what we’re trying to do here as an oncology unit?