How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

“Someone like you said yes already.”
Tell your colleagues that one or more
of their peers have agreed to what you’re asking. (And—ahem—do make
sure that this is true.)
Recruit the influencers.
If you’re trying to reach a group of people, it’s
worth enlisting group members who have influence, so you can say, “People
like 
them
are on board.” Here, I don’t necessarily mean influence in terms of
seniority. Look for:
• Experts: people widely respected for their knowledge or skills
• Hubs: social types who are well liked around the water cooler
• Gatekeepers: people who control important resources or processes
Greg, our crowdfunding entrepreneur, is always keen to publicize the
investors he’s already got on board—with their permission—knowing that it
will help draw others in. “It helps people feel validated,” he says. “And I

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always work extra hard to convert the thought leaders and people with big
networks. If I can get 
them
to invest in funding new research, they’ll want to
tell their friends about it, and their friends will want to follow.”
GET THEM INVOLVED TO GET THEM ON BOARD
As you might suspect from the affection you feel for your pet projects, we tend
to become attached to things that we’ve played some part in shaping. One of the
most pointed demonstrations of this comes from another study by psychologist
Ellen Langer, whom we met earlier in this chapter (in the line for the
photocopier). In a famous experiment, she sold a bunch of office workers a
lottery ticket for $1 each.
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Half of them were handed numbered tickets at
random, while the other half were allowed to choose their own ticket. A couple
of days later, before the lottery draw was to take place, the ticket holders were
approached with a request to give up their ticket for a price of their choosing. At
this point, the 
endowment effect
(which I talked about in 
Chapter 12
) had kicked
in, where people overvalue things they already own, even when there’s no
sentimental attachment involved. So people who’d been issued tickets at random
now wanted about $2 to relinquish them. But the key finding was this: people
who chose their own ticket asked for far more. They wanted a whopping $8.
Other studies have found similar effects in real-life settings. For example,
when receptionists at two British doctors’ offices asked patients to personally
write the time and date of a follow-up appointment on a reminder card, rather
than simply being handed the completed card, it led to an 18 percent drop in
missed appointments.
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Why do people place more value on things they’ve participated in or
contributed to, even if their input is minimal? Partly, it goes back to the
importance of autonomy as a motivating force. Being involved gives people a
soupçon of control, and that’s highly rewarding for their brains.
This has huge implications for the way we communicate. It seems efficient to
just tell people what we want or need to have happen—and that can be fine when
the stakes are low or the negotiations simple, when it’s good to apply my earlier
advice on making the first suggestion. But if we’ve got ideas that require real
buy-in and belief from our colleagues to be a success, the advice changes: we
shouldn’t foist our demands on other people. If we do, they’re less likely to be

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positive and supportive than if we’d given them just a little space to come to
their own conclusions about the wisdom of what we’re proposing. You need to
let people choose their own lottery tickets.
Emma took this into account when she set up a meeting to tell a larger group
of colleagues about her new teaching techniques. “Usually staff training sessions
are very dry. You want to shoot yourself by the end,” she says. So she decided to
run a very different type of meeting, one that left the teachers feeling that they
had a hand in creating the project themselves. “I had people presenting their own
ideas rather than having me lecturing them. I staged an event I called a ‘village
fair,’ where ten staff who had excellent ideas on new teaching strategies each
hosted a table and teachers wandered around each table to see them demonstrate
their ideas.” She let her colleagues discover for themselves what was interesting
at each stop, and let them roam as they chose, and take notes about things they
particularly liked. She let them talk to each other in small groups, to decide what
they wanted to take away from it all. She created the frame for the conversations,
and provided the information to guide them, but she let people take control of as
much of the session as possible. “And after that, we built momentum very
quickly,” Emma says.
So how can you give people a sense of ownership, so they’re more invested in
whatever you’re interested in doing or changing? Here are three suggestions for
three different situations: