PARTICIPATION

Have you ever heard of a hassle graph?

Maybe not. But you’ve probably been on a team that tried to move fast by skipping all the “getting to know you” stuff, only to stumble and struggle later on. Andre Alphonso, former managing director of Forum Australia and founder and CEO of Forum India, recalls:

In Influence programs I would draw a graph: on the vertical axis was hassle, on the horizontal axis was time. Typically a project starts off very low on hassle, and hassle increases over time. When you really want stuff to be working, later in the project, that’s when hassle gets high. You need to move some of the hassle up front, with discussion of roles and ground rules. You need to front-load the hassle so it goes down over time, instead of up. I called it the Hassle Graph.^*

In Membership, the first stage of any group endeavor, we can begin to smooth out the hassle graph by inviting participation (see Figure I.1). Leadership development expert Maggie Walsh, who for several years headed Forum’s leadership practice, echoes Andre when she says inviting participation is about “front-loading buy-in.” The more time and effort we invest early on to create a real group—that is, one whose members feel welcomed and integral rather than overlooked and dispensable—the more time and effort we save later, when problems inevitably crop up and unity is tested. This is true whether the group consists of two people or two hundred.

The specific influence practices we’ll explore in Part I are:

1) Demonstrating care for colleagues

2) Encouraging others to express objections and doubts

3) Exuding appreciation and good cheer

4) Taking time to develop a shared outlook

Figure I.1: Inviting Participation