Zoe Chance

The ability to influence and persuade is a key leadership skill, and yet employees and managers struggle to get others on board with their ideas. In this session, influence expert Zoe Chance, Ph.D., analyzes how people successfully influence others in business. Concluding that ultimately people’s minds cannot be changed, she offers a comprehensive toolbox of strategies for influencing their behavior. These tools can be customized to various industries and audiences – to elicit positive reactions, change perceptions of value and bridge the gap between intentions and behavior. Drawing on her Fortune 500 practitioner experience and her Harvard and Yale research expertise, she’ll provide strategies to help practitioners assert influence in diverse business settings: employee engagement and retention, negotiating multimillion dollar deals and multilateral treaties, securing grants, connecting with celebrities, improving work relationships with bad bosses and entitled employees, increasing sales, and obtaining recognition and flexibility at work.

Often, the most challenging aspect of influence isn’t changing people’s minds, but changing their behavior to match their intentions – or changing our behavior to match our intentions. The genius of behavioral economics lies in decoupling intentions and behavior and addressing desired behaviors directly. Zoe Chance, Ph.D.’s, research at Google, for example, has shown how people can eat healthier without taxing their willpower. In fact, simple tweaks to the food environment can help people eat healthier without even realizing it. Chance has created a framework to help practitioners apply the varied nudges tested by behavioral economists in diverse contexts to virtually any challenge in any domain. In this presentation, Chance will help you start thinking about how to make desired behaviors easier and more pleasurable, and how to make undesired behaviors more difficult and less pleasurable. You’ll learn to “hack” cognitive biases to leverage them in positive ways.

The discipline of sales has gotten a bad rap because of pushy salespeople who don’t just lack respect; they lack understanding of consumer psychology. Refusing to take no for an answer generates resistance that creates backlash and can fuel buyer’s remorse. Customers hate being pushed, says Zoe Chance, Ph.D. What works is to gently nudge them toward the desired outcome. When data-driven insights are combined with psychology and viewed through the lens of behavioral economics, many barriers become predictable and can be systematically addressed. Respectful nudges in the sales process can forge long-term, profitable relationships that don’t feel like “sales” at all. Ironically, making it acceptable for customers to say no prevents backlash and thus increases the chance they will say yes. In this presentation, Chance shares research-based, actionable strategies for influencing customers to make better decisions and to follow through on purchasing your products or services.

Charismatic people are more likely to obtain influence at work, get promotions, win elections, and advance to positions of power. But is charisma an immutable trait, or is it a skill that can be learned? Zoe Chance, Ph.D., a theatrically trained persuasion expert, says the key to charisma is not to try to “be charismatic” (you’ll just sound like an arrogant fool), but rather to focus your attention. In this session, Chance translates the art of charisma-building in the theater to business settings. Senior leaders, mid-level managers, and entry level employees alike, as well as aspiring politicians and orators, will learn how to cultivate charisma through an approach that emphasizes ongoing development of charismatic traits. Even the shy and introverted will walk away from this workshop with the competence and confidence required to influence others and rise to positions of power and authority.