Relentless Goal Achievers

Master Influence Without Authority: Fortune 500 Leadership Secrets with Ellin Sidell

Episode Summary

Most leaders rely on their title to lead — but the real power comes from influence. Fortune 500 leadership strategist Ellin Sidell shares how to get buy-in, build trust, and lead without authority using proven, ethical influence techniques.

Episode Notes

Influence is the most underrated leadership skill in business — and most leaders are missing it.
In this episode, leadership strategist and executive coach Ellin Sidell (Cialdini Institute founding member & co-author of The Influence Advantage) reveals how to ethically gain buy-in, build trust, and lead at any level — even without a big title.

You’ll learn:

Why 72% of C-suite leaders want to master influence without authority

How to know if your team follows you for your title or your trust

The pre-meeting moves that create massive influence wins

Robert Cialdini’s persuasion principles applied in the real world

How reciprocity & intangible gifts deepen relationships

Why strengths-based leadership boosts engagement and retention

Ellin has worked with Microsoft, Costco, Nestlé and more, helping leaders inspire action without relying on command-and-control leadership styles.

Episode Transcription

Eric Konovalov (00:00.846)

Hey everyone, today you're gonna learn how to master the most underrated leadership skill in business. And that skill, my friend, is influence. My guest, Ellen Seidel, is a leadership strategist, executive coach, and co-author of the Influence Advantage. She's worked with Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Costco, Nestle, helping leaders get buy-in, build trust, and lead without a big title. Now as a Marine, that's like an out there.

concept for me, so I'm excited to learn more. As a founding member of the Cialdini Institute, yes, you heard me correct, that's Robert Cialdini, the guy who sold over a million copies of his book, Influence, Ellen brings science back, ethical approach to persuasion that works in the real world. And in the next few minutes, you'll discover the simple shift that one can make that gets people to listen to you, even if you've been overlooked before.

Alan, welcome. How you doing?

Ellin Sidell (01:01.906)

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me here.

Eric Konovalov (01:04.778)

All right, so I'm just going to jump in. You're obviously an expert in leadership, influence, getting people to listen and follow. What's like when you're working with leaders, when you're coaching them, training them, what's one challenge that you see continually repeating itself as you're in front of leaders?

Ellin Sidell (01:29.3)

Sure. Well, I found a really interesting statistic, which I'll tell you in a moment, but basically influencing without authority is something that everybody is interested in, even the C-suite. So, Corn Fairy did a survey and they found out 72 % of C-suite leaders said they wanted to increase their ability to influence without authority, which kind of shocked me, honestly. I mean, yes, they're managing up to the board.

the word, you know, people, but still, why was that so interesting for them? And I think that in this, you know, world that we're living in, things are way more complex than they used to. People are working virtual in person. People are working distributed workforce across, you know, many different regions. And so that ability to influence and overcome all that complexity, the C-suite is realizing that to establish that trust and to do that, they need to have influence.

and skills beyond the tile.

Eric Konovalov (02:28.088)

What do think that means? Like, they're just sitting around, like what's a problem that they're having that's getting them to think, if I only was able to influence without my title or position, then people would do what? You know what I mean? Like what's happening that's getting them to cause this or to think this?

Ellin Sidell (02:44.308)

Yeah.

Well, mean, yeah, my background is Fortune 500 companies. So high stakes meetings. I mean, you have to do a lot of preparation, especially, you know, I was in the IT arena and supply chain. So, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, complexity in projects, you know, new initiatives and you have to get buy-in, have to have, you know, stakeholder management is one of the things that we used to talk a lot about in IT, but even in small businesses, you know, everybody has got more to do than the time.

And so even from a prioritization standpoint, these leaders have to get their point across. They need to be able to support what the key initiatives are for their company. And so that's communication, that's influence.

Eric Konovalov (03:29.526)

And what, give me an example of an organization that, like, what does it look like when they're not leading through influence? So it's either you're leading through influence or you're leading through a position of authority. that, are those the two kind of ways that we're talking about?

Ellin Sidell (03:45.724)

Well, mean, you know, yeah, being a John Maxwell, you know, person, I wouldn't necessarily say because he's got the five levels of leadership. But the first one is positional authority. And so if you're a manager at any level, I mean, you could be, you know, a CEO and you're still a manager, you're managing people. If people are giving you the respect of the title and nothing more than you're only at the positional authority level. The next level would be, people are saying, yes, I want to follow you, you know, so that's more permission level.

And then from there, goes up to, you know, the third level is productivity. You're helping the team be more productive, know, productive, getting more done. And then beyond that, you're now helping leaders become leaders themselves, and then leaders that help leaders become leaders. And so those are the five levels. And so what I'm saying is that title alone is not going to mean that people are going to follow you and that you're going to get your point across when there's a lot of complexity and a lot of multiple.

priorities that most people are dealing with right now.

Eric Konovalov (04:49.582)

Yeah, but okay, but old school leadership, right? I agree with you. I'm just kind of putting my devil's advocate hat on. As long as the job gets done, who cares if they're following you because you're influencing them or if they're following you because of position of authority? Like, why is that? Who cares? You know what I mean?

Ellin Sidell (04:54.729)

Yeah, yeah.

Ellin Sidell (05:07.784)

Well, but I guess the bottom line is not a lot of people are following a lot of people because of those complexities I just told you. Again, my background's IT, but I think this is probably true for even small businesses. Small business owners have way too much coming at them at once. How do they know that their team members know what the priorities are and the priorities have to come from that business owner? It's a matter of making sure death by a thousand paper cuts can happen.

You know, you're a business owner, so you probably have a lot of pull on your time. And so it's really about effectiveness. know, are you truly influencing? Are people following you? Are they working on the priorities that are going to make the difference?

Eric Konovalov (05:52.696)

How does one know if people are following him because of influence or because of their position or title?

Ellin Sidell (06:01.81)

Well, in my world, when a leader would have positional authority only, they'd call a team meeting and they would get no questions. Because after a while, after a while, people don't want to throw out ideas or even ask questions if they know they're not going to be listened to. Those are the, those are, it's kind of potent. If the leader's aware, you know, they may not even be aware. They have to really be outside themselves leaning in like, why isn't my team asking me any questions? Why aren't they?

Eric Konovalov (06:12.398)

Ellin Sidell (06:31.54)

Three not eight yes. It's not.

Eric Konovalov (06:33.624)

So if leaders are having meetings and nobody's asking questions, that's a good sign that they're leading through positional authority, not necessarily through influence. And so give me the opposite of that. What happens in a meeting where a leader is leading through influence?

Ellin Sidell (06:49.064)

Right.

Ellin Sidell (06:59.188)

Well, person who's leaving influence has done pre-work. They've talked to some of their team members that have outsized influence themselves on teams. You know, it's a really interesting thing. Sometimes the quiet people are the most impactful on a team, you know? And so that leader needs to kind of figure out like who are going to be the early adopters on a change or initiative or something? Who's going to have some like rough questions? And if I'm that leader, I'm going to that person first.

Because I have an idea that I want to sell, but I don't know all the answers. And that person is going to bring up really good feedback. And it's going to make me more prepared to have that conversation. So most of it's happening before the meeting. But then in the meeting, maybe that person that you already talked to is going to bring up the issue because they know everyone else is thinking of it. And now you have, in a way, partnered with them. And you've come up with what you think the answer is. And if not, you can say, look, this is a problem. And I need us to solve it.

And so it's more of a bringing inclusiveness in and saying, you know, how are we going to address this? You know, I need your ideas. I'm not, you know, on an island.

Eric Konovalov (08:06.776)

You know, being a small business owner, looking at companies like, you know, Walmart, Costco, some of the Fortune 500 companies you've dealt with, it seems like they got it all figured out, right? Are you able to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit? What are some leadership issues that you've seen happen? You don't have to give us names, but no names, but what are some challenges behind closed doors and...

Ellin Sidell (08:26.963)

Yeah, no need.

No.

Eric Konovalov (08:34.666)

Once those challenges exist, what does it look like for them as it comes to performance?

Ellin Sidell (08:39.668)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really amazing. You my career has been very amazing and I felt very honored to be able to work at some of these companies, but you're right. You know, that's what's so funny. It's like they call these companies world class and yet, you you look at small businesses, medium sized business, large, they're all dealing with the same types of issues. It's just what's the scale. So like, for example, I worked at Microsoft when in the Balmer days, when he's like, let's do this, what he used to call the big bold bet.

And that was creating a multi-billion dollar supply chain in 18 months. I'm like, there's no other company in the world that would even try to do that. Now it was the Xbox supply chain. And so, so I'm pulling the curtain back to say that the scale is different. The timelines are more aggressive. You know, the resources are also there though, but still like, you know, like we know there could be too many kicks that cooks in a kitchen. Sometimes that's not going to make things go faster. And so.

A lot of really smart people have to really understand, okay, we're going to try to do this goal. Like what's the plan to get there? What's, you know, I call it the long pole in the tent because I'm an ex project manager, you know, what's the critical path, you know, so for every day you miss that deadline, the whole project is missed a day. And so managing that's just the same blocking and tackling that any business owner of any size has to do.

Eric Konovalov (09:59.758)

How do they do that? How does a leader in small business, medium-sized large business, how do they cast the vision? Because I'm assuming that's probably the first step is helping people understand. All right, I'm kidding. I'm not assuming. kind of had some leadership training and background. I've led teams. And what I know is successful leaders are able to cast that vision clearly.

Ellin Sidell (10:12.084)

You

Eric Konovalov (10:26.882)

They're also able to weed out the people that are not gonna follow that vision, that don't buy into the vision and then bring people on who will. What are some of the, but you're a process person. So like, what's the actual process for an influential leader to cast that vision for their teams?

Ellin Sidell (10:34.473)

Mm-hmm.

Ellin Sidell (10:49.81)

Well, I mean, it's my mom had the same from the sublime to the ridiculous, which was I translated to, you know, it's really amazing to have the big vision. Okay. Let's build a multi-billion dollar supply chain in 18 months. But then the ridiculous may be absolutely every blocking and tackling thing you need to do. Everybody on the team to make it happen. And so, I mean, there's a huge range between all that. So it's hard to like give the complete nutshell answer in a podcast.

you know, in a few minutes, but I will say this. Sometimes the leader and the sponsor has to put their foot down. Like here's one example, another example from Microsoft. When I started there, they said, well, the year 2000, we have to put SAP in place. And I kind of laughed because my employer, we've been trying to do that for seven years. And I'm like, that's so funny. Tell me another one. I almost lost the job right there because they're like, no, no, no, we cannot.

collect revenue unless we have this. And so what did that sponsor do? They had an iron fist. Everybody knew we're putting vanilla SAP in because revenue is the most important and every challenge to that timeline was handled appropriately with that particular project sponsor and all their project managers to say, we don't have time to make it elegant. I mean, we will make it more process wise elegant later because we've got

to get revenue going and they made it happen. And I don't know of another company that could have done that, honestly. So there's an example of, know, in that place, influence was more of a, you know, kind of iron fist, you know, well, if you will, but, you know, the kind of influence that I'm talking about can, you know, there's lots of influence principles, right? And it's, it could be super subtle, you know, it could be like, I'm a new person in a team and I want to understand my

You know, and help my boss. Okay, well, how do I do that? You know, well, first of all, I listen, I ask them a lot of questions. You're the question person. So thank you for helping me on that. You know, find out what their goals are. What can I do to make them hit their goals? You know, how does what I do map to every level of my upline? You know, of course, I've been a big company. So it may not be that many levels in a smaller company. But then I'm putting my own thinking to bear and

Ellin Sidell (13:13.384)

Look, so what are the subtle things? wow. You know, I could help him or her. Like, you know, we love reciprocity is one of the influence principles. You know, what are intangible gifts I could give a boss or even a colleague? You know, they're really struggling, but they are part of the larger team. Well, you can listen, you can help them be more productive. can, you know, I mean, there's tons of intangible gifts that we can give and we do that freely. And all of a sudden you've built, you're building relationships. You're building strong partnerships.

with fellow managers or fellow employees. And that's a really subtle and important influence technique that has served me well in my career. And I'm sure you've had people help you. I mean, like it happens. We all do that. But what I, you know, what I'm saying is that what my book is primarily about was that I discovered these through trial and error for 25 years when I could have just read Dr. Chalini's book and it had been published the whole time. And putting these

principles in place in an ethical way, kind of at the right time, can grease the skids. It can make things happen faster. I'll give you one more fun example out of my book. So I had a kind of quirky boss, but we got along great. And he was late on giving me my review by 45 days. And I was like, I had asked him, he wouldn't do it because he's very busy. And so finally I decided to do something kind of funny.

So I used his, he had this coin jar policy. If any of us ever showed up late for a meeting, we calculated 25 cents for every minute. He was the one that was the most late. So he was definitely difficult. He was putting most of the money in for our pizza parties and stuff. And I calculated 45 days times 24 hours. And I made this little certificate of delinquency and how much he owed me at the 25 cents.

And then I said to him, but all of that will be forgiven if you go ahead and schedule my review. Now, it wasn't that I was not going to get my money, but it wasn't in my bank account. It was in the company's. So in a funny way, I did the consistency principle and the contrast principle because it was very funny. What I was going to get was way less than the coin jar policy calculation. And it was using his own policies, own words. so like within a week, we had the review and it was fantastic.

Ellin Sidell (15:32.776)

So these are just some examples. The influence doesn't have to be at a corporate fortune 500 and complexity and project management. It could just be establishing really, really amazing relationships. my book talks about looking through these principles through the lens of building partnerships where people share power, mentorships where you have like a thinking partner, because the etymology of mentorship is men to think, and then sponsorships.

And having a sponsor in a company, or large, is just amazing. And sponsors are someone who are in a room you're not in, putting their political capital on the line for you, for either a more advantageous project or more visibility or possibly even a promotion. And so all three of those relationships are something we have control over in our careers because we can influence.

Eric Konovalov (16:27.522)

Okay, if I asked you to write another book and I said, influence simplified from any level inside the organization. And I love how you went because what I was thinking about is top down influence. How do we influence people to follow us, our vision, things like that. But you went straight to, it could be the assistant.

You know, and the way we influence is you find out what the goals are and then how can I help that person reach their goals? Okay, but help me connect the, I know how that's gonna lead down the path of they're gonna see your value, they're gonna see that you're a great worker, that you're an asset to the company, but.

Ellin Sidell (17:04.872)

Yeah, pretty much.

Eric Konovalov (17:20.642)

I'm not seeing the influence part. Let's define influence first. Can you define what influence is?

Ellin Sidell (17:26.74)

Well, Dr. Maxwell says it's leadership, nothing more, nothing less. So in the world of the academic world, they call it compliance, which sounds kind of strange, but basically working with people to get a yes. A yes to your idea, project, mean, fill in the blank. What do you want a yes to? A promotion, a new assignment, mean, fill in the blank. It's getting a yes. So that's what influence is.

Eric Konovalov (17:54.872)

Okay, so that's what influence is. So if we take your example of the assistant who's getting, who's looking at their boss, let's say, and they figured out the goals and they're now gonna do everything they can to help that leader achieve his or her goals, how's that influenced? where are they getting a yes because they're doing, because they're helping them achieve goals?

Ellin Sidell (18:22.024)

Okay, so that's fantastic. Okay, many companies have situations where the employee, this assistant, may have an idea for getting the boss to reach their goals, but they don't have the delegated authority yet. So you have to get a yes, you have to go to the boss and say, well, I'd like to help you, but that means this is a project kind of outside my regular duties. Would you make sure that I could, will you delegate that authority?

That's one example of getting yes. And maybe they have another idea, an idea that's outside the normal business process. Hey, can we take a look at updating the process? And so I'm not saying that in every case we have to ask permission. We could be influencing others and then tell your boss afterwards because everything is kind of context dependent. And I don't want to be like a career counselor here from afar. But these are some examples. Is this helping kind of come alive for you a little bit more?

Eric Konovalov (19:18.722)

Yeah, for sure. if I heard you correctly, what you're saying is in order for me to get a yes to do what I want to do, it would be a lot easier if I was able to tie in what's important to that person into what I'm trying to do and make that clear.

Ellin Sidell (19:37.694)

Yeah, absolutely. Because I mean, we all have our own goals, but honestly, and I think most people, you know, want to do a good job, you know, be get proper salary recognition, you know, work normal hours so they can have a family life and fulfilling life, get meaning in their work. But what that person thinks is meaningful work may not be what the boss thinks, and it may not even be what the job is. So just as an aside from influence, the other thing I'm really excited about this year.

that I'm leaning into the strengths-based kind of awareness. Like what strengths, know, there's both, there's sort of two companies that I work with. One is the Strength Finders used to be called, now CliftonStrengths, and there's a ton of amazing research on when people know their top five strengths and they're working in that strengths. Productivity goes the roof, you know.

engagement, which in many companies is leading indicator before people leave the team. And I'm just the statistics person, sorry. But between 50 and 200 % of salary if you lose a good employee, or even if you lose any employee. And that's not the hard cost of the lost productivity of that person in the role. So it's very expensive in the US to lose an employee. And you want to try to keep them. And so that's the one thing I'm working with. And then on top of that, I work with core clarity.

There's two different perspectives for these instruments because they're assessments and reports. The CliftonStrengths is how do other people see you, which in a way is sort of your brand. Like if you had to distill, everybody thought of Ellen, what did they think of? You know, they thought of when she says she's going to do something on time, it will be delivered. So that's kind of like other people's experience. Where core clarity is how we experience ourselves. So here's an example of where

I think starting with how we experience ourselves is more important. I was a really good project manager and it was constantly burnt out. I have learner in my top five. I needed to be learning. I needed to be that curious person asking all the questions of the business person on their business process and how they measure success and all that, which as a project manager had me in too narrow a realm. couldn't, it wasn't part of my job to ask those questions. So I had so much more energy when I was in using my strengths.

Ellin Sidell (21:52.99)

So when you combine influencing others with knowing yourself, having that clarity around your strengths, then I think, you know, people are just gonna find so much more meaning in their lives, so much more, you know, success because it's, you know, by definition, what you have strength in. So I don't know, I kind of went on a tangent there, but I wanted to pull that in together because I think that's it, because I don't wanna make it sound like influencing is always someone else's goal. Like we...

You know, and I'm mostly talking about knowledge workers. So people that are there, you know, because of the knowledge and expertise they brought to their company, they have their own thoughts about things, you know, and so, but you want to work in teams because we're always working in teams, you know, with management across to make sure that we get the, you know, the yes to hopefully win, win outcomes, moving the ball forward, not only for that person's career, but for their entire department.

Eric Konovalov (22:51.97)

You know, I'm listening to you and my sales hat is like, okay, but how do you sell this? How do you sell this type of training? Because if I'm a leader and let's say I'm used to leading from position of authority, every time I'm in the meeting, nobody ever asks a question. I think I just did a great job with that meeting. I'm like, yeah, I killed it. I crushed it. Nobody had a question. They get it and they're off, right? My level of awareness is super low at this point, right?

Ellin Sidell (23:19.348)

Mm-mm.

Eric Konovalov (23:21.196)

What are the challenges that, like, what are you saying to them that you can help with that clicks for them that they're like, I need this? Because if you say, hey, we help people find their strengths, they're like, we're good. People don't even ask me questions in meetings. Our people know what their strengths are, you know what I mean?

Ellin Sidell (23:40.594)

Well, so you bring up a really good point and that is, you you are kind of in a, obviously the military is very top down commanding control. So I think you'll understand this. in, you know, many decades ago when I was earlier in my career, that was kind of a form of management that was very much adopted and accepted. It doesn't work anymore for the younger generations. And it sort of doesn't work even for us, baby boomers who want to have more flexibility with time per se and do some other things.

And so if managers at any level want to retain good employees, they're going to have to adopt a management style other than command and control. Now here's a perfect example. I lived through an IT kind of journey, if you will, where most of the projects were do, were done in what they called waterfall. And what did that mean? That meant everything we went and did, we like talk to the people who are the business, figured out what their requirements were, did all that in one block.

for like a multi-year project, went away, figured out the engineering, kind of went dark on the customer, maybe they didn't hear us, or internal client for a year, then we like surprised them with software. Well, Waterfall doesn't work very frequently. And so what do they do? They develop this agile software development philosophy. And what's that? Small working teams who experiment. have a two to four week

Outcome of working software where they've got a small You know feature that they're gonna work on they've elicited the requirements. They've talked to the clients They do the two and four weeks worth of work and then they show the client and the client goes well, that's exactly what I had in my mind. Can we do that? Can we do this? And then what do we have? we have a perfect example of the difference between command and control management and a self-organized team because these

working teams developing software are self-organized. And the manager is now a leader that is, you know, like a manager who is, you know, helping their team, removing roadblocks. They're not saying here's, they can say here's the goal, but even in working software, the goal isn't which feature, you know, that's pretty granular.

Ellin Sidell (26:03.304)

But at the rest of the time, they're there to remove hurdles, to support the team, to make sure that they have the resources. And so it's a completely different management style.

Eric Konovalov (26:14.83)

But that's not what they're being graded on, if you would. They're not in their meetings with their boss. The manager's not in the meeting with their boss. Oh, they are? Okay.

Ellin Sidell (26:20.264)

Sure.

Ellin Sidell (26:24.756)

Sure they are. Because it's productivity. Why it's productivity. I mean, you don't have to be productive only through command and control. can have self organizing teams with, and there's lots of different roles there. I don't want to explain on a podcast all the eight. I'm trying to give the flavor of this idea of servant leader or even this idea of manager as a coach. They don't have all the answers. And I'm talking about knowledge workers. This is a very,

Eric Konovalov (26:31.68)

Okay, got it.

Eric Konovalov (26:42.744)

Yeah, let's not do that.

Ellin Sidell (26:54.94)

specific area for me to clarify. Because when I moved to Costco, it was very surprising to me. Many of those people had come from working in the warehouses and they were brilliant and they went, in some cases, even got their IT background, but they were like hard pushers that then became knowledge workers. And so in the knowledge worker space, keeping employees, retaining employees, getting progress, productivity, and engagement is not going to work universally with a top-down leadership style.

There has to be more of a leadership as a coach, leadership like a servant leader. And so that means the role of these managers at any level are completely different.

Eric Konovalov (27:35.49)

Yeah, I gotta tell you, when I left Xerox, I was managing a team there and I became a director of sales for a much smaller company. And Xerox was that like hierarchy kind of leadership approach, my way or the highway. Well, I get to this smaller company and I took over a team where it was a smaller team. was like four people, maybe five at the time. They were all older than me.

all sold more than I did and they were all connected. So the company was, you know, it was a smaller company. They all knew each other from either church. They worked together for 16 years, had no managers. Like the president, them. And the president now brings me in to grow. And so we're sitting in a meeting and I'm like, all right guys, let's work out a, you know, cold lead gen or prospecting strategy. Let's do some team cold calls and.

After that meeting, I got no questions, surprise, surprise, and all of them went to the president's office and they're like, why do we need this guy here? We did just fine without him, right? Can you get rid of him? I couldn't influence to save my life. And that's actually how I got involved with the John Maxwell team and why I decided to go through that training. Cause I was aware that it's not, it can't be all of them. Something I'm missing something, something I don't know. I'm not leading.

because firing them wasn't an option. They're all best friends with the president and bringing my own team in. That was off the table. So now I'm like, okay, how do I turn this ship around? How do I get them to listen, to like me? How do I build that rapport relationship? And one, I realized I gotta really start liking them first. I gotta stop trying to prove how valuable I am. And I gotta really see...

What is it that they, why have they been here for 16 years? What interests do they have? What do they, you know, what's their family like? What's their sales approach like? What challenges do they have? And as I began to focus more on them as human beings, they started inviting me to meetings. It took months. This wasn't like an overnight thing. But where I won, I feel like I had like my Eureka win moment was,

Eric Konovalov (29:54.732)

when I got invited to a barbecue on a Saturday. So it's like, okay, this is a win. But what I thought initially, where, know, like, come in, tell everybody how smart you are, give great ideas and they'll just follow, flopped. Like I had my 90 day plan, nobody even cared about that plan. Nobody was looking at that plan because they didn't buy into me first. So,

Ellin Sidell (29:58.024)

You

Ellin Sidell (30:18.056)

Ha ha ha!

Eric Konovalov (30:23.764)

If there are leaders out there who don't have that influence, who don't have that relationship with their people, what are the first few steps you'd recommend they take to change that?

Ellin Sidell (30:37.15)

So Dr. Chaldini told a really cute story about liking, since you brought it up, I thought I'd bring it up. So he had a granddaughter who was like two or three, this is probably maybe 20 years ago. And he loved hanging out with her. her mom was his daughter. And so one day the daughter called and said, you won't believe what just happened. And he's like, what?

He goes, I asked my granddaughter who her favorite person was. And without missing a beat, she said, grandpa. And then, and she goes, and I asked her why. And she said, because he likes me. This is like the expert who's like told and taught the world what the liking principle was about. And it was like perfectly described by this three year old. And I mean, it's super simple. I mean, you know, smiling.

You know, we have an energetic presence when we come to meetings, you know, being interested in the other people. You know, I mean, there's more to it than that. But even just starting that way, I think that, you you hit it on the head when you said you started asking questions. Like I had this one example, I won't get into a lot of detail, but I came across a really cool article on the framework for building trust. And it's an acronym based on the word oxytocin, which is a neurotransmitter.

So every letter O-X-Y means something. And I bet you, could go through and figure out what you did wrong. And I won't, you know, if anyone's interested in your audience, I can give you the information. But like the O is ovation. So what is ovation? Recognizing excellence publicly. I mean, like this, and this guy is, he's a neuroscientist. I mean, like oxytocin is obviously a neurotransmitter and it's called the neurotransmitter of trust, but there's an acronym which,

brings out some of the elements of trust. One is expectation, X, you'll love that. Set challenging but achievable goals. And so if you really think about what we do, and I'm kind of relating this to liking, but it's really related to building trust. And I think many of us have done this in our career over and over again, but we're not a neuroscientist, so we don't necessarily have this type of research. When we think about what we want to do to build that trust, it's just

Ellin Sidell (32:56.436)

That's what influence is. It starts with building trust. And how do you build the trust? And it's kind of what we would want someone to do with us. Listen to our ideas or ask us questions. You were brought in. So the CEO had some idea of why he was bringing you in. That may not have been fully communicated to the team when you showed up. And so then it'd be like, OK, why do you think? How can I help? That's kind of like what a servant leader would say.

How can I help?

And then what are those people going to say? They're going to be like, well, I have this hurdle or this is going on or we're scaling or we have this new product line. mean, whatever the answers are. And so it's reverse learning your, your role, because now you're finding out what you need to do based on your team. So that's an example of servant leadership.

Eric Konovalov (33:29.548)

Yes, very good.

Eric Konovalov (33:39.534)

That's very good.

Eric Konovalov (33:49.334)

Okay. So you're the expert on influencing without authority. You're the expert here. And by the way, we're pretty local. So that's pretty cool. I get to see you often. You're also the expert on strength based workshop and facilitation. what are companies that could really benefit? What are some symptoms companies might be having that they're not aware that your programs could help them? What does that look like?

Ellin Sidell (34:17.224)

Yeah. Well, I mean, I would say that the, the strengths based leadership approach and those workshops really help teams in sort of, you know, two ways, you know, team building and team productivity, team performance. And the reason is that, mean, yes, it also helps with, know, just getting to know team members in a deeper way, because we're learning what each other's strengths are, but

I know that you're also a facilitator. So it's kind of interesting because in disk you sometimes see challenges, right? You see communication, you know, tension on the team. Well, the same thing could be true for, you know, these strengths. So I tease people that, you know, sometimes people can get tripped up and like, you're doing this to drive me crazy. No, they're not. They're not really, you know, people mostly aren't doing something to drive you crazy. They're just being themselves, right? And they can just be themselves.

in a communication way and in a trust way, I mean, in a strength way. So for example, my number one strength is input. And so I'm sure now retrospectively looking back, I drove either team members or my actual direct reports crazy because I wanted a lot of information and someone with input can take tremendous amount of information. It wasn't.

a coincidence that I was a forecasting manager twice because I had a lot of data to look through, a lot of trends, and I was happy. I'm in my happy place. Well, for someone who has the strength, who wants to think critically and kind of zero in on something, they don't want to listen to me asking for more data. So at the end of the day, what I'm describing is these tensions can be completely dissipated because people are like, you're just wired that way. You're in your input mode.

wanting more input, you you're in this mode. And so it's, it's a tremendous for team dynamics. And it's also great for team productivity, because again, these knowledge workers, they have a job title, but then the way they go about doing that might be really conducive to like someone partnering, like, you're really good at that. can you do that part of that job? And I'll do that part because I get more energy. You get less energy.

Ellin Sidell (36:30.964)

And all of a sudden we're doing these mini alliances within a larger team and our productivity source and even profit. have Gallup has all sorts of amazing statistics about the goodness of these teams. But that's the second workshop, the team dynamics. The first one is just to understand and it's a discovery workshop. It's the awareness. Like what are those top five strengths that we all have, you know, each of us have?

Eric Konovalov (36:54.04)

top five, what are some examples? Have you ever been leading a workshop and somebody realizes that they're working outside of their strength zone?

Ellin Sidell (36:55.465)

Top five.

Ellin Sidell (37:03.596)

yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the first things we do is we do a gains or drains exercise. yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you want to do one? Well, now I want to, I'll gift you a key code so we can go through this off camera unless you want to do a follow up. We can do a follow up. That'd be kind of cool. But anyway, what you do is I,

Eric Konovalov (37:05.582)

Tell me about that.

Eric Konovalov (37:12.539)

can we do that?

Ellin Sidell (37:31.44)

We go through the strengths. Well, first they do the games or drains. They spend maybe 10 minutes thinking about what activities drain them, what activities give them, you know, energy, you know, and then you kind of put that aside. Then I'll go through each of the five strengths and we kind of look through the definition kind of, you know, you know, maybe even one cautionary statement because someone might have a talent that they've made into a strength. That means the cautionary statement is they've already addressed it. And I won't know that.

But the database will see, you like this? Cautionary statement. And they'll be like, nope, I've addressed it. But here's the deal.

Eric Konovalov (38:04.888)

But when they take an assessment, it show as their strength or would it show as a natural drain?

Ellin Sidell (38:10.068)

It'll it'll it depends on which Gallup when you do but there's one that top five or the or the sequence of one through three four But we only need the top five to do the core clarity work And what's different like I said about core clarity is they have a lens of how we experience ourselves So we're talking about these strengths and I'll be like, okay now that we've gone through this does you know? How does that connect to your gains or drains? have you thought of any more and people like my god this this drains me because

I can't do X, Y, Z because I'm doing A, C. And so the people themselves are making the connections as we go through and we discuss these strengths. that's the favorite part of what I do. Just seeing people's aha's like, my God, this explains so much. And then now they could do something different, you know? And we can use the influence techniques, you know, to do something.

Eric Konovalov (39:02.958)

Meaning what? They leave? like, they're like, oh, this isn't my strength. I gotta go find another job. Or they're like, no, no, no, we're gonna take this task off your plate.

Ellin Sidell (39:08.884)

It's okay. Yeah, it's not so black and white. You know, let's think about this, you know, in a team, let's say for, for example, that, often make a fictitious example on the, what we'll do when that kind of was like project management for me. you know, putting things in a, you know, database to track the critical path I was just telling you about in a project, isn't like my cup of tea. I would rather have an interview with a stakeholder to understand.

you know, how much do they buy into the goals of the project? You know, do they have any big, you know, question marks? Do you have any risks mitigation they want to do? So for me, and that's probably my eye, because we also did this, the having the conversation would be much more energetic for me. And if I had an assistant and we shared these responsibilities, because I was in big companies, so then they could do the input and I could do the interviews. So it's just. I'm DI except for.

Eric Konovalov (40:02.53)

What's your disk style?

Ellin Sidell (40:06.566)

I'm always busy so my C goes above the midline because my natural, you know, my C goes up really high. So I'm a C.

Eric Konovalov (40:15.778)

Yeah, what a unique combination.

Ellin Sidell (40:20.742)

It can be. And the funny thing is, is that the more you, we all learn these, I don't know if you're like this or your wife, but I, in my mind will go, just switch to I mode, just switch to D mode. Well, people can do that with their strengths. I just went into maximizer mode. So people that are maximizers get their, their motivation by rallying the troops of other people. Like, isn't this a great idea? Let's go do this. We'll go fantastically. And I am helping take teams from good to great.

I don't suffer fools gladly. Anyone with Maximizer. We want the people that are already poised and ready to figure out how to go and be fantastic. And that's the teams. And when I was on a team, I made the team better. You know, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but like I was always asking questions. And so people like, wow, I never thought about that. You know, and so I just sort of the way I was wired helped teams become more aware of certain ways of, know, becoming more productive. And that's kind of what happened.

And that's the same thing that I want to do with other companies who teams are fantastic already, but want to go, they want to scale faster. They want to be even more productivity. They want to invest in their employees and keep their employees happy doing what they're good at.

Eric Konovalov (41:33.834)

Okay, so if I got something out of our time together, if we have a leader listening who just wishes they had better relationships, better friendships, better levels of influence at work with their people. And when we say leader, this could be you wanna lead up, you wanna lead down, you wanna lead sideways, because we can lead in any direction, right, according to you, because leadership is influence, it's not a position.

The fastest way to do that is to show people that you like them, that you care about them, and that you're vested into their personal goals and dreams. What's the second thing they can do?

Ellin Sidell (42:17.438)

Well, we all have different favorites at different times, but right now I'm really leaning into reciprocity and I'm doing it here in my local community. just be aware of how you can give either a tangible or intangible gift. Now there's a little secret, which I'll tell your audience, not everybody knows this, so lean in. So the idea of a intangible gift is like a light switch.

It has to be in the eye of the person who's receiving the favor. They have to see it as a favor. So if you're giving, and we do this a lot, and I know I did, where I would sacrifice and not tell them I was sacrificing and then help them and then they would go about doing whatever they were doing. And then they didn't know it was a favor. So being in a salesperson, you probably use some of these different language patterns, but it's like, well, I normally would only give this type of information to someone who's in my program X.

but I can see that you're really challenged right now, so let me help you. Completely ethical, because what you just said was true. So you sacrificed a bit, because that was something that some knowledge, some advice that they were going to get when they were in some other different program, but you helped them anyway. So if you bring to top of mind to the people that you're giving intangible gifts that this is a gift, then they recognize it, and it invokes reciprocity. And what is reciprocity?

It's this feeling that you want to give back to someone who gave to you. Completely ethical, we do it all the time and it's kind of how, and it's a helpful thing and I think it does come after you've liked someone. It's like, yes, I like you, I really want to help you. Let me lean in and do something. So that's the second one. And right now I'm really all about intangible gifts. mean, there are actual gifts you can give people like a book, have you read this book? That sort of thing. But intangible gifts.

There's just so many of them and they have amazing impact, positive impact.

Eric Konovalov (44:17.09)

That's awesome. Ellen, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you were hoping I would?

Ellin Sidell (44:23.848)

No, I think you covered it. This was fantastic, Eric.

Eric Konovalov (44:26.742)

Yeah, this is great. How can people find out more about you and some of your programs?

Ellin Sidell (44:32.468)

Well, they can go to my website, ellensidle.com with Ellen with an I in there. And you could check out my book page too, but I cover all of my offerings, whether it's those workshops I was talking about or executive coaching or group coaching, they're all on my website. And I'd love to help people.

Eric Konovalov (44:49.346)

That's awesome. And we'll have all those linked in the comments. My friends, thank you so much for tuning in to this amazing episode of the Relentless Goal Achievers. Ellen, you brought it. You gave us so much to think about and you've improved us as leaders. We'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye everybody.

Relentless Goal Achievers

Master Influence Without Authority: Fortune 500 Leadership Secrets with Ellin Sidell

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