Great Leaders Don't Control. They Influence with JonRobert Tartaglione

Full Episode Transcript

This is the full recorded conversation from The Human Protocol Podcast, published by The Human Protocol Group. © 2026 The Human Protocol Group. Please link to and attribute the original episode when referencing this conversation.

mykel (00:01.59)
Managing people is about task. Influencing behavior is about what they believe. Welcome to the Human Protocol, the podcast about staying human while building the future. I am your host, Michael Solomon. Everyone is racing to adopt AI one way or the other, right? This is the times that we're living. Almost no one is asking the harder question.

Which is how do you actually get people to change? Because you can buy the technology and you still can be stuck on it six months from now. Because the humans that need to be part of the implementation of the project didn't move. My guest today is Dr. John Robert, or Tat, as we call him, a Cambridge-trained psychologist and behavioral scientist, founder of Influence 51.

And co-author of a book on the neuroscience of human connection. His entire craft is the thing AI cannot do for you or for us, which is moving people, shaping attitudes, shifting decisions, changing behaviors. So welcome Tat to the human protocol.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:16.759)
Thank you so much, Michael, for having me. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

mykel (01:20.514)
Same, I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're you're based in is it the UK that you're based at?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:25.931)
Yeah, yeah. calling for in from London right now, which is suspiciously sunny. So we we we've learned to kind of look upon that with a little bit of skepticism 'cause that won't last.

mykel (01:36.36)
Yeah, I know. It but I know that you guys in Europe as well, this summer has been it's been a tough one, right?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:43.915)
Been hot, you know, and I think the big thing about the UK, especially, and I'm not gonna get the the data point exactly right, but this is the the basic gist is that you know it doesn't hit the temperatures you're calling from Miami right now, right? Like Miami gets quite quite hot. The UK doesn't often get as hot as Miami, but the big challenge is from an infrastructure standpoint: not many people here have ACs. I think something like five to ten percent of buildings in the UK or residences in the UK have air conditioning, and so

When it does get hot, even moderately hot, it becomes very, very oppressively hot for people indoors.

mykel (02:13.996)
Wow.

mykel (02:19.765)
Yeah, I can imagine because during those days or weeks, if it's really hot and you don't have the infrastructure to really cool you down in a bit, it can be it can be a lot. All right, Tad, so I know that when we first connected, these are topics that you're passionate about, that I'm also passionate about, and we're gonna be discussing a lot today about why influence and persuasion get more valuable, not less.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (02:28.054)
It's not nice.

mykel (02:49.799)
as we see machines taking over in the future and how we gonna position ourselves to really lead people through a transformation that many of them may be afraid of to begin with, right? Because we are human beings at the end of the day.

So I want to start with the craft itself, right? I know that you are a Cambridge trained behavioral scientist, and and the first question that I would like to ask you is when we say great leaders don't rely on authority, charm, or luck, what do you think they really rely on?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (03:30.644)
Yeah,

Leadership is a really interesting topic to start with, right? Because a lot of people have very different philosophies on what makes a great leader. And I think part of the challenge is that the leaders we tend to see, the leaders that get visibility, often do get visibility because of the things that you just said, right? They are the ones that are charming, the ones that are charismatic, or the ones that are, you know, incredibly authoritative. And some people seem to really admire that. But

You know, what we find is that the leaders who are really skilled when it comes to what I refer to as moving people, right? Actually changing the way they think or the way they make decisions, these individuals have a very different type of skill set. In a lot of ways, it's kind of diametrically opposed to things like being an authoritative leader. You know, being authoritative, being charming, a lot of times what that can generate is you can generate compliance.

Right. You can generate this idea of people doing things in the short term because you've asked them to do that or you've kind of threatened them with some sort of potential consequences, whether it be financial or social consequences for not doing it. And that generates compliance in the short term. But compliance is exactly that. It's a short-term strategy because once that pressure is removed, right, once that force that was generating the compliance

Is removed from the equation, the compliance goes as well, right? People go back to doing or thinking exactly what they originally thought. And sometimes people go further back, something we call the rebound effect, where they actually end up kind of thinking less like you wanted them to. And so when we talk about leaders that are actually good at changing, generating change rather than compliance, these are leaders who take an approach that is kind of paradoxical in a way.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (05:28.053)
Right? These are the leaders that rather than pushing people to do something, kind of pushing them to say yes or change their mind or shift their behavior, they find ways to get these people to pull themselves in that same direction. Right. Rather than forcing a conclusion upon them, they create spaces where people can arrive at that conclusion on their own and thereby have greater a feeling of ownership over it.

And become more committed to changing in that direction.

mykel (06:00.757)
And it's really what makes great leaders to be great leaders, right? It's the the what they are able to do to make people change their minds sometimes, their behaviors, to embrace the culture and the organization missions in a way. Not because they were forced, because they were actually influenced to believe that that's the better way moving forward. And and I know that you work with a lot of organizations, TAT.

from McDonald's to Nintendo, if if I recall correctly, right? To trial lawyers. So you have been in different organizations, different industries. What is the same? What have you noticed to be the same underneath of all of that?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (06:49.077)
So let me let me start off by talking about something because this is this is a really interesting topic when it comes to like what it is I do. And I'll just very quickly explain that what I'm doing in every one of these organizations, because you're right, Michael, right? Like I work with corporate leaders, I work with law firms and trial lawyers, I work with financial advisors and wealth professionals, I work with nonprofits.

I'm doing the same thing for all of them. Okay. What I'm doing for all of them is I'm teaching them how to leverage insights from psychology and behavioral science about things like influence, persuasion, strategic communication, but I'm doing it in different contexts, right? So what I might teach a corporate leader about strategic communication applied to their role.

It's gonna look a little bit different about how we're going to apply it to a trial lawyer's role or how we're going to apply it to a nonprofit director's role. But ultimately, I'm teaching them the same concepts. We're just doing them in slightly different contexts. But if we were to take kind of an aggregate of what I've learned across all of these fields, the biggest challenges when it comes to influence, persuasion, strategic communication change are.

Misapprehensions about what actually causes these things. Okay. And so there are a lot of beliefs about influence and persuasion change that don't actually align with how humans actually operate. And so what I ended up doing is I ended up creating what I call the five principles of influence. And these are really the five things that if I could distill the most important things to know about how people think.

How they make decisions, how they decide whether to change their behavior or not. These are the five things. And it it starts off with principle one, which I think is the biggest misinterpretation of all when it comes to human beings, which is that the human brain is not a computer. So many people operate under this impression that humans are these perfectly logical decision makers, right? That if I just give them information.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (09:04.147)
Then if the information is good enough, they will be forced to change their mind. And then what ends up happening is leaders in all these different industries give out great information, they find great evidence and great data, they put it before someone, and then they get incredibly frustrated when nothing changes. They don't understand because they're operating under the wrong model.

mykel (09:25.279)
And that's where these five principles of influence come into play, because it's this is the model that can be applied to every human being, doesn't matter your role, doesn't matter the industry, where you have understood what really would take to really change people in a way.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (09:45.271)
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And and I think, you know, let me I'll give you a quick example, right? Let's start with principle one, because principle one is probably the one that all the others build off of. Michael, when most people think of human beings and how we think, how we make decisions, right? They assume humans are are perfectly rational decision makers.

It's probably more appropriate to describe human beings as rationalizing creatures as opposed to rational creatures. And that's a really important distinction to make. If human beings were rational creatures, our brains would work kind of like scientists do. They would take every piece of information, they would analyze them objectively and impartially, and it would try to render the most accurate, truthful conclusion that it possibly could.

In reality, our brains work much more like a trial lawyer does, where it has particular ideas, particular worldviews, particular opinions that it wants to defend, that it wants to justify. And it goes about selecting information in a manner that will allow them to create the best narrative to justify their point of view. And this is why, when I say humans are rationalizing creatures, right, it doesn't mean

That they are going about trying to come up with the right answer. They're trying to find ways to justify the answer they already have post hoc, if that makes sense.

mykel (11:14.857)
It does and and that's that's why you consider this to be kind of the door that it opens to better understand how you can help that human being, right? Yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (11:23.808)
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's right. Because if you if you're operating on the wrong model, which is the whole point of these five principles, right? They all get to something that is either not very well known or misunderstood about human nature, right? And and and and once you understand that thing better, once you have a better appreciation of how these different mechanisms work, then you can start building strategies and initiatives that don't run counter to human nature, but actually work.

with human nature, and that's really important.

mykel (11:57.655)
Where all this started for you? Where this obsession of really try to understand what is it that moves people, right? And and all the psychology around it. how how things got started for you in that?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (12:10.016)
It's it's it started so back in undergrad. I I came into my undergrad wanting to study law. Okay. I wanted to be a lawyer. I quickly realized that I was less interested in learning about the laws, more interested in learning about like why.

we consider certain things just, why we consider them right or wrong. And so long story short, I got shoved into the philosophy department, right? They said, you're not cut out to be a lawyer, like go study philosophy. now philosophy is a really I I I tease myself about being a philosophy major and I make jokes about how the job market is very anemic for a philosophy major. Not many not many, you know, institutions are looking for people to come in and theorize about stuff. But

In reality, philosophy is a really valuable discipline because it teaches people how to think critically. It teaches you how to ask the right questions. So I credit philosophy with kind of starting my interest in human nature because a lot of what philosophers are trying to do, especially the ancient philosophers, is they're trying to kind of figure out like what makes us tick? What makes humans fundamentally humans? And so all of that kind of theorizing was very intellectually stimulating for me.

So when I graduated, and I didn't find a job right away, right? I was kind of trying to figure out like what my passion is. And I realized that that's something that really held my attention, this idea of kind of the these debates about human nature. And so I wanted to find a way to add a little bit of an empirical layer to that, right? Like beyond just theory, like what do we know about what makes people tick, what moves people? And so that's kind of where I started

Getting interested in psychology. I was fortunate that like I didn't study psychology as an undergrad. I just started reading. I started reading psychology books, and I was very fortunate the first book I ever picked up is still to this day my favorite book. it's called The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson. there's one The Social Animal by by David Brooks, which I'm sure is very good. I haven't read it, but the one by Elliot Aronson is an absolute masterpiece. it is

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (14:23.212)
Called by some like the the Bible of social psychology, the beginner's Bible of social psychology. And the way in which he talked about people and explained kind of how people think and how they make decisions and what are the invisible forces that kind of guide in which direction we we we intend to go, it was absolutely revel revelatory for me. And so I went from starting there and I was I love social psychology.

And then I got interested in evolutionary psychology. And then I got interested in political psychology and moral psychology. And I just kept reading and reading and reading. And here we are today. And I think part of the reason is I work across so many different industries is because I was so interested in so many different forms and factions of psychology that I just see applicability in a bunch of different places.

mykel (14:58.413)
And that's it.

mykel (15:12.865)
Yep, absolutely. And that's why this conversation I was very excited to have this conversation with you today. As you know, the the the show is called the Human Protocol, right? I'm a technologist myself, been in technology my whole time. but we're still human beings, right? And I'm still trying to find what is it's this path forward for us humans to build that society that we're still gonna be able to, you know, be the best humans that we can be. And

You know, in my field, everyone is studying the technology, everyone is discussing the technology, but no one is making an effort to really understand what is it that's you know, how we can study better our behaviors, right? The human beings that are actually running things today. And and it's the technology is important, but more important is really to understand those human beings that you need to work with, that you need to influence, that you need to lead.

why this is a topic that is very dear to my heart because I really want to understand how we can be the best leaders that we can and not only for our teams, right? For the people that report to you, but really great leaders are for those that even don't that don't report to you, right?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (16:30.765)
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And I really think, you know, we are at such an interesting point, rather a bit of an inflection point, you know, a as a society when it comes to things like the advent of AI and how we integrate AI. And you know, I think Michael, it's interesting, right? If you talk about good science, right, the the process you want is kind of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, right? Like someone makes a proposal.

Right, I think this, and they give their reasons why. Someone makes a counter proposal and says, here's the flaws I see in in your reasoning or in your argument, and here's where maybe I see see merit. Ultimately, we end at this kind of more moderate place where both arguments are taken into consideration and we say, Okay, well, what can we agree on? Right? Where can we find things that we're confident both sides saying? And I think AI is going to kind of

Have a similar trajectory, right? Where, you know, we're at that point where there are so many people believing that AI can do everything, right? And don't get me wrong, AI has blown me away. As a psychologist, you know, there were certain things that I think, you know, from an ego defense standpoint, I was like, it'll never be able to do this, never be able to do that. And it's doing some things amazingly, amazingly well, right? But ultimately, there are certain things that that AI cannot do. And so we have this thesis here that like AI can do everything.

And now research is coming out showing kind of where AI struggles. And to give you an example, right? When it comes to navigating and orchestrating social dynamics, team dynamics, right? AI just simply cannot do that the way human beings can do that, right? They don't understand the subtleties of dynamics, of team dynamics and organizational dynamics the way humans do. They can't understand cues, sometimes very subtle social cues that impact.

How someone has received information or how they're going to deliver that information the way humans can, right? And so we're kind of starting to get this antithesis, you know, point of this process. And ultimately we'll come to this nice synthesis where people say, okay, here's what AI is really, really good at. Here's what it's not so good at. And for the what it's not so good at is really where the opportunities for people like myself lie. And what it seems like the interests for people like yourself lie, right? Like

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (18:55.519)
Where is there still a lot of room for humans to be even better at the things they already do well? And I think that's kind of the way we need to think about AI: is AI, hopefully, in some of the more savvy organizations, is not simply going to be a replacement for humans, right? It's going to be a way to augment human capacity. It's going to be a way to scale what humans can do.

While also freeing up time for them to do what they do especially well, even better than ever.

mykel (19:30.753)
Yeah.

When I created this podcast back last year, Tat, I came up with it because I back then and I still really believe that, I thought that there was a need to talk to people about what the future will be, what the future may be, but most importantly to talk to people, make them realize that we need to talk about ourselves a little bit more.

need to understand ourselves a little bit more if we really want to have a future where human beings are part of it right and and part of it is people understanding and and me having conversations with people like you to let them know what are the skills that we think are are gonna be more valuable in the future and one of them is how we're gonna continue to influence people right and why this skill skill

of influence people and that ability that we have to to get there it's gonna continue to be more important and you know and we have an intro call when you tell me yes my focus is not AI and and I really understood and that's why I told you because this conversation is not about the technology it's really more about this other side which is our behavior understanding the human part even more

And and one of the things that you told me was that that I still recall you told me, you know, the brain is not a computer. And every time that you say that, it makes me think because sometimes we operate under that assumption and we don't take a step back to really think through. And I think we need to repeat this more and more to ourselves and to others because we are not a computer and our brain is not. Why do you think?

mykel (21:32.959)
We live in this type of environment, I mean this era that we the majority of us we run through our days thinking that our brain is still a computer when it's not.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (21:46.169)
I I think it's it's probably the fundamental misunderstanding about how the brain works, right? Is most people, you know, here's the challenge, Michael, right? Is that human beings have the capacity to be logical thinkers, right? We have the capacity when given the time and the space and the opportunity, we can think very, very logically. We can operate kind of like a computer does.

But that's not what the brain evolved to do. Okay, the the brain evolved to help people survive, okay? And what that means, sometimes that means being accurate, right, and being truthful. But not always, right? The brain tries to find a balance between accuracy on the one hand and speed on the other hand.

Right? That's ultimately how we get to survival. And what that means is that we have a lot of cognitive shortcuts, these little quirks that kind of influence how we make decisions, how we think. And I think that individuals tend to believe that logic is what drives us, but that's not what drives us. That's simply one of the ways we can be driven. But to give you another idea of what matters when it comes to kind of moving people.

We are hyper-social creatures, right? and as a matter of fact, my so my second principle, I often like to say that belonging, right? This kind of craving to be part of the group is a survival instinct. Okay. And what I mean by that is if you were to go back 50,000 years, right? We were dealing with predators that we could not beat in a fight one-on-one, okay?

We were trying to take down prey that we could not take down one on one. Okay. Meaning we needed the group. If you did not have the group to help you fend off predators and defeat prey, you died. Okay. That was simply what it meant. And so human beings have evolved to experience social disconnection in a similar way to the way they experience physical pain, because both of them were threats to our survival.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (24:10.84)
Now, what does that mean? How does that show up when it comes to things like influence? Well, it means that oftentimes we are not making decisions as isolated logical thinkers. We are making decisions as socially embedded creatures, right? We are looking to others to understand what is the right thing to do. Oftentimes, what we determine to be the right thing to do, or at the very least, the safe thing to do, is what are others in my group doing? Now

This isn't a really important insight, but it's also a really important tool that we can use in things like organizations, right? This inclination toward what we call social norm adherence, toward doing what our group is doing, is one of the best ways that we can catalyze behavior change at scale. I'll give you a really quick example, right? If you take something like binge drinking on college campuses, okay.

If you go and ask people, students on college campuses, what percentage of their peers binge drink, you're gonna get a dramatic overestimation, right? Students guess that 70 or 80% of their peers are going out and binge drinking, when in reality the numbers are closer to like six to 12%. This is what we call a misperceived norm, right? They're kind of overestimating what the norm actually is. Well, research has shown over and over again that all you have to do is correct this norm.

Right. And say, hey, actually, you guessed it was 70%. The real number is 9%. And by correcting this misperception, you see a dramatic decrease in binge drinking on campuses. Organizations have the ability to do the same exact thing. Here's an example I give to organizations, right? When they bring me in and they want to generate behavior change at scale, I say, tell me about the kind of engagement surveys you send out all the time.

And chances are if they have an engagement survey or a pulse survey or whatever, they something to send out every quarter, they're gonna have questions on it that sound like this. do you want to hear more voices that challenge the opinions of the group? Right? They're gonna be questions that kind of sound something like that. What they don't have is a question that sounds like this. And this is the most important question, right? What percentage

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (26:34.285)
Of your peers, do you believe agreed or strongly agreed with that statement? Now, this is the critical type of question because this is where you can start to identify misperceived norms. Because guess what? If 80% of people agreed with that original statement, but people thought that only 50% of people would agree with that original statement, well, guess what? You've got a misperception. And the only thing you need to do to change behavior, to get people

To talk more about how they disagree with the group, right? To bring up opinions that go counter to the group is make this misperception visible, to correct that misperception. And so understanding things like we are socially embedded creatures. We do have this tendency towards social norm adherence. This is just one of the ways a better understanding of human nature leads us to create strategies for change that are more aligned with how humans actually are moved.

mykel (27:34.345)
And I would think that in every or the majority of your engagement tat you find misconceptions in organizations. Right? At a high scale. I was listening to you. It may it make sense. We are human beings, we we all have an opinion and we all we usually people tend to have a misconception about things.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (27:47.653)
Yes. Yeah. That's it.

mykel (28:04.127)
without facts to analyze any situation just because we think, right?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (28:09.807)
Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. I think that, you know, thing is, Michael, that's hard, right? Is that

In order to navigate your world, right, in order to na as a person, just as a person, in order to navigate a very complex social world.

We need to come up with theories about how people think, how they make decisions, right? And in this way, researchers call people folk psychologists, right? Everyone in a certain way has to be a little bit of a psychologist. They have to try to kind of generate theories about why people do this, why they do that, why they think that way, how I can get them to think another way. And so every time I go into an organization, everyone there has certain ideas about what they think works and what they think doesn't.

Now, some of those are borne out in the data more than others. And so my job is to really help them understand that even if something has worked for you in the past, or this belief of yours has been shown to be true in the past, it is not always true in all situations. And what I'm here to do is I'm here to equip you with a more holistic perspective of if we were to take all the data, everything we know about people.

Here are the approaches, the strategies, the maneuvers that tend to work best for the greatest amount of individuals under these circumstances, right? And I'll give you a really quick example of kind of a misconception, right? So many people operate under the impression that persuasion is a battle of arguments, right? That if I have an argument,

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (29:49.582)
That can overpower your argument, then you're gonna be forced to concede that I'm right and just take take my position. And it's so interesting because in many ways, this is like antithetical to what actually creates persuasion. I I I talk about persuasion sometimes, I refer to it as as the paradoxical physics of persuasion. And what I mean by that is we find in the research that oftentimes the more you push someone to try to take your position.

mykel (29:56.651)
Yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (30:18.81)
The more likely they become to push back. And so a lot of times persuasion needs to feel less like a wrestling match and more like jujitsu, where you kind of use someone's momentum in order to get them to move in the way you want them to move. It's a very big difference.

mykel (30:37.141)
Yeah, yeah, it it is a very big difference. And you know, it's not that I'm trying to get it down to the basics, but in our personal lives, you know, we all have different personalities. And I'm just listening right now at this misconception about persuasion and it makes me think sometimes for some people when you're having a hard conversation, chat, it's all about how you convey the message.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (31:06.79)
Yes.

mykel (31:07.055)
So I'm listening to you right now and the what it comes to my mind it's we all go through it. We all go through that friend of ours or that family members that depending on how you convey the message is how the message is received. And they may be, you know, put in a defensive mode depending on how you are delivering the message.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (31:27.29)
That i I couldn't have said it better myself, Michael. You are that is exactly what we're talking about here. So principle four, okay, is your approach matters, right? If if humans were perfectly rational, perfectly logical decision makers, it wouldn't matter how you approach someone, right? If you have a logical argument, it wouldn't matter how it's delivered. A fact is a fact is a fact. But that's not how people work.

Right. And you kind of talked about, you know, those coworkers or those family members that you don't see eye to eye with, right? With these individuals, approach is everything because they are often prepared for a fight. They're prepared to defend themselves. And so, for persuasion, when it comes to these individuals, if you want to stand a chance of changing their mind, it's less about the content of your argument.

And it's more about the way in which you approach the situation, right? Can you create a space where they feel comfortable opening up to you, where they feel comfortable truly thinking about their own opinions and why they hold them, right? And kind of evaluating, you know, whether they should hold them or that shall only. This has nothing to do with the quality of your arguments at all. It has to do with the approach and the space that you create. And I'll give you just a quick example, right? When I

work with clients. I will often tell them to think about someone else's brain, especially someone who you don't agree with. Think of their brain as private property. And what I mean by that is if I was to barge onto your private property, right, without your permission, what's the first thing you're gonna do? You got to push back, you're gonna get defensive, you're gonna get hostile towards me. In the same way, get out of here, right? That's exactly right.

mykel (33:11.189)
Get out of here. Yep, absolutely.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (33:15.364)
In the same way, if I try to kind of change your mind against your will, right? If I try to force my facts and my arguments on you at a time when you're not ready to hear them or in a place when you're not ready to entertain them, right, you're gonna do the same thing. You're gonna get defensive, you're gonna get hostile. And what ends up happening is you just have two people defending their worldview. In reality, what you wanna do is you want to create this space and this opportunity where someone invites you onto the problem.

Right, where they say, okay, I'm I'm interested to hear what you have to say. I I'm willing to do this very vulnerable thing, which is interrogate my own views, right? And really think about whether they are right. And once you're on that property, Michael, you mentioned it already, right? When you have the opportunity to deliver your message, the way in which you deliver it determines whether or not it's going to stay.

Right? If you trigger their defensiveness, if at any point, it's kind of like diffusing a bomb, right? If at any point they put that wall back up, you're back to square A, right? You need to figure out how do I present this message, how do I frame this message in a way that they can be receptive to it, right? That they can consider it, that we can kind of plant it in a way that gives them an opportunity to maybe let it grow, maybe think about it.

mykel (34:38.699)
Yeah, it's really the power of influence. It's it really is. And and you know, not every manager

It's a leader. Okay. That's we know that, right? it takes more to really, you know, consider yourself a leader. And and I'm wondering with every, you know, all organizations that you work with and and and and all your experience, Tat, if you can share with us what do you think are really the main difference between managing people and really influencing behavior as a leader?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (35:18.404)
Yeah, that's a great question.

I think managers

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (35:27.532)
Managers look at the role as I'm going to do this my way, and my team is going to follow me, right? And I'll get I'll give you a quick example, right? Like a lot of managers will kind of take these tests to figure out like what type of leader am I? You know, am I a reflective leader? Am I an authoritative leader? Am I they have all these different sort of personality dimensions of a leader and they find out like who I am.

mykel (35:50.252)
Right.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (35:58.552)
Managers kind of take that, right? They say, I am this type of tool, and I'm going to approach every problem using this type of tool. Leaders tend to say, what type of tool do I need to be for this particular problem that I'm having?

Right? Like what type of leader, rather than saying what type of leader I am, what type of leader does my team need today? Right? What do they need me to be for them? And I think that's a very subtle thing, but I think there's also an element, which I think is probably the most underappreciated element of this. There's an element of humility in being this type of leader, right? Rather than saying, I'm going to lead like this and they're going to follow, the leader that is willing to try to understand, like

There's this saying I came upon that said, you know, the water, the same water, the same boiling water that softens the potato, hardens the egg. Right? And it's this idea that the same approach you use that works for someone has the opposite effect on someone else. And and so a leader needs to recognize that they need to have a repertoire.

Of influencing strategies, right? They need to understand that the tool for one individual is not going to be as effective as the tool you need to use for another individual. And so one of the biggest things that I advise my clients to do is to build a toolkit, right? I can't go out and tell you this is what you need to do. And anyone who tells you anything with certainty about human nature is selling you a lie, right? Anyone who's like, do this and it will 100% work, they don't understand people well enough. People are complex.

And so the best thing we can do as leaders is to build a big enough toolkit, to build tools that we didn't have beforehand that work with certain people in certain situations. And sometimes it's trial and error. Sometimes it's saying, okay, this one didn't work. And rather than getting angry that they're not responding to my leadership style, how do I take a step back and think to myself, okay, what other tool might be more appropriate here?

mykel (38:11.947)
The beauty of working with human beings. And you know, ninety-five percent of what we see on LinkedIn and YouTube, it's follow these three steps and you you gotta and you and you're gonna get rich. It's you know, it's like really people, it's it's this doesn't work like this. it's it's really it's it's a lot more in between

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (38:22.779)
I h I hate it. I hate it.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (38:34.853)
I can't. I can't. I really like I have such a I I don't want this to derail the conversation, Mike, because I'm having a great conversation. I have such like a visceral distaste and aversion to like the gurus and stuff you see on LinkedIn who tell you exactly here are all the micro hacks and micro tips that you can that you can be the most persuad. It doesn't work like that, right? And some things, like people, it's worth spending a little more time to actually learn as opposed to just looking for short.

mykel (38:48.961)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (39:04.359)
cuts and hacks, you know.

mykel (39:05.249)
Yeah, yeah.

It really doesn't work like that and you know it's it's it amplifies the the things that we don't like a lot about human beings. This is this is part of it, right? And and especially, you know, in times of organizations, you know, d trying to implement AI, for example, right now. they're all hitting the same wall, right? And this is not something that you can

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (39:18.461)
That's

mykel (39:36.729)
And deploy it and then the next day, it's up and running, life is good. This is a technology initiative that the means people need to implement it.

Based on this, Tad, why do you think these initiatives really stall? when maybe the strategy is good and the plan is clear, but people are not adopting it or they're not following, for example, which is the most important part of this.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (40:12.326)
Yeah. I'll I'll I'll give you one particular perspective on this. So so so let me take you back to some some interesting research on so so principle five, okay, it's all about how you structure and present information makes a big difference. Okay. really quick example of what that looks like is if you're in the mood for some frozen yogurt, right? And you go to the first aisle.

You see a frozen yogurt, it says 80% fat-free. You think, okay, that sounds pretty good. But let me let me see my options. So you go a little further down the aisle, you see second option, it says frozen yogurt contains 20% fat. Which one sounds better? Now, you and I are very smart people, so even though the first one sounds better, we quickly realize, as does your audience, these are the same exact yogurt, right? 80% fat-free is necessarily 20% fat, and vice versa. But in spite of these being statistically identical, we can't help feeling.

mykel (40:55.66)
Yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (41:09.126)
Initially, like we like one of them better than the other one. Okay. And this is what we call framing effects, right? Framing effects are taking the same message and slightly altering or slightly emphasizing different facets of it and eliciting very different responses in people. There was this really amazing study that was done back in 2011 where they gave people vignettes about crime, okay? And they used different metaphors to describe crime.

Half the group read that crime is a virus infecting our city. The other half read that crime is a beast attacking our city. But the rest was exactly the same. But they asked people, what should we do about crime? Well, naturally, if you receive the beast metaphor, you ask yourself, well, what would I do about a beast? I want to cage it, I want to capture it, I want to punish it. Whereas if you receive the virus metaphor, you kind of intuitively ask yourself, well, what would I want to do about a virus? I want to inoculate people, I want to protect people from being infected.

What they found is that when they asked people what we would do about crime, their recommendations varied based upon the metaphor they were given. Those that were given the beast metaphor became more likely to recommend enforcement strategies. We need harsher penalties for criminals. We need more cops on the streets. Those who received the virus metaphor ended up recommending more reform strategies, social reform strategies. How do we create communities where we can protect people from whatever is causing crime to spread?

point is this, Michael, is that even the way in which we talk about the same exact thing can change the way people approach that. And AI is no different. A lot of organizations are talking about AI as a way to replace humans, right? As a way to kind of replace them and take over what they're doing. And then they're wondering why people aren't getting on board with kind of training their replacement and getting their replacement in place.

mykel (43:03.265)
And and sometimes it's it's it's not even the organization talking about that, but what we see in the news in a way, right? Yeah, right.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (43:03.314)
We're out of

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (43:10.11)
Absolutely, absolutely, right? Like there are these narratives about replacing it, and that is a legitimate fear. But what I'm finding is the organizations that are getting people to actually change their behavior, to actually embrace AI adoption, are the ones that are positioning AI as an extension of employees, right? That we are not trying to replace you. We want to give you superpowers, right? We want you.

To be able to do the work that you've done faster, to get through the busy work without it taking up more of your time, and be able to kind of spend your time doing what you do well, critically thinking, managing social interactions and social engagements, right? Ensuring the dynamics of the teams are healthy and effective. All you have to do, it's this, they're trying to do the same thing, but they're talking about how we're doing it and why we're doing it.

In slightly different ways. And by doing so, they're getting people to have a different relationship towards that technology. And ultimately, it's the ones that see this as a boon to their experience, as something that's going to enhance their experience and their effectiveness that are going to be more willing to shift their behavior in that direction than those who are being talked about as a replacement who are naturally going to resist that.

mykel (44:31.403)
Yeah, I I really believe that we should amplify more the narrative around AI is coming as a way to augment ourselves. 'Cause I think where you focus your energy, it's really what you're gonna get for your life, right? So if you want to focus on the positive, you're probably gonna find positive things. If you focus on the negative, you're probably just gonna you know, that's where your life is gonna go through. Now, I also want to be rational because we are human beings, it

when you hear in the news about layoffs, of course you are human beings. If your organization is about to implement AI, you may resist because you think you may think that you're gonna be laid off in the future, right? Because that's where the conversation sometimes is coming. But what I want to get to to to it with you is what is really happening inside of us when we focus

and we are worried about that what may happen with our jobs because of this transformation.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (45:40.884)
Yeah, I mean I think listen, these fears are not unfounded, right? Like it's it's hard to look at what's happening across the world. It's hard to look at people getting laid off by the thousands and think that your your fears are unfounded or or unjustified. They're not, you know. I I do think that I think the big challenge right now is that

Well-meaning organizations, organizations who want to thoughtfully integrate AI, who do want to use it as a way to amplify rather than replace, are going to have to contend with organizations that want to just use that as a smokescreen, right? That want to kind of make sure that we get everything set up before we start kicking people out. And so I think part of the challenge, Michael, that you're getting at, right, is that human beings are.

What we call loss averse creatures. to give you a quick example, right? Imagine you're sitting on a park bench and I offer you an opportunity for a gamble. I say, in my hand, there's a coin. It's a fair coin, but if you don't trust me, we can use one of your coins instead, right? In a moment, I'm gonna flip that coin. If it comes up heads, I'm gonna give you ten thousand dollars in cash. But if it comes up tails, you have to give me ten thousand dollars in cash. Do you accept the gamble? Now, what's really interesting about this is

If you're like most people, the answer is probably no, right? It's thanks, but no thanks, okay? And as a matter of fact, between 80 to 90 percent of people will say no to a gamble like that. Now that should give you pause, because again, if we were getting back to being kind of if we were perfectly logical decision makers, exactly half of us should say yes and half of us should say no because it's a 50-50 chance. But we don't because of this cognitive bias called loss aversion, right?

Loss aversion is this idea that losses loom larger than gains, right? Although the idea of winning $10,000 feels good, it doesn't feel as good as the idea of potentially losing $10,000 feels bad, right? Losses are more psychologically potent than equivalent gains. And this kind of weighs on things like bad news or bad bad things in the news, right? Is that although

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (48:02.845)
The prospect of kind of the good side of AI might be compelling. It's not as compelling as the bad side of AI, right? That's what most people are gonna focus on. Most people are gonna focus on what could I potentially lose from this by not adopting, I mean, by adopting it, right? What what do I potentially lose if my organization adopts AI? And so for organizations, let me put it this way: for well-meaning organizations, organizations that

mykel (48:21.633)
Yeah, what will happen, yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (48:32.893)
Are actually trying to use AI responsibly and they want to kind of get past that resistance. They want to. The first thing you can do is make some sort of public commitments, right? Put your money where your mouth is, right? Make a commitment, you know, have it sent down from the board that we're not making any layoffs in the next year, right? Like create a space where there is some sort of security and psychological safety, right? That's the first thing. But from someone like me, right, being brought in to help with this.

What I advise these kind of well-meaning organizations to do is you need to reframe, okay, this loss, right? Instead of them feeling like a loss for bringing it in, you need to ask ask them, what are you losing by not adopting AI? Right? What are you losing relative to your peer who's going to adopt it and be able to do things faster than you? That's gonna be able to do gather data more quickly than you, come to decisions in a more effective or efficient framework.

Than you can, right? What does it mean in terms of what we could lose when it comes to our competitors adopting AI, right? What if they gain a foothold in the marketplace before us? And so ultimately what we're doing is we're reframing where that loss actually lies, right? Rather than simply the loss lying in if we adopt this, I might lose. We need to kind of shift that to what are we losing if we don't adopt it? Where are the threats of inaction?

mykel (50:00.757)
And and that reframing it's it needs to come from really the leaders, right? It's it's it definitely needs to come from the leaders. It's we know any transformation, any any IT, any technology implementation, it's gonna have people that they don't want to go with it. But again, back to this topic. If you are a leader, part of you being a b a good leader is you being able to influence others, right? And and this topic is really

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (50:05.738)
Definitely.

mykel (50:30.681)
Right on that 'cause I want to get next to what are the difference, Tat, between influence and manipulation? Where is the red line and and 'cause sometimes I even feel you know when I think about this, it's sometimes it may not be totally clear if you are influencing or manipulating.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (50:51.23)
Yeah. I I think that this is a very important question, right? And I think, you know, hopefully I've done a good job conveying that, you know, persuasion gets a bad route. And

Rightfully so, in a lot of ways. So many people have misused persuasion, right? They they they've kind of talked about, you know, they they they they've created this veneer that they're persuading when in reality they are manipulating, right? They're kind of using people's things, biases against them in order to get them to do things that they otherwise wouldn't want to do, right? That is manipulation. So, but for me, you know, again, I hope I've kind of done a good job of of conveying that persuasion is actually.

It it's such a humane process, right? It it's so much about creating this space where there's civility and mutual respect, and it's about listening and giving people an opportunity to think rather than trying to force them into something, right? True persuasion is simply about encouraging someone to see something from a different perspective and giving them the opportunity to consider something from a vantage point they wouldn't have considered before. It's a very gentle process, it respects autonomy and agency.

But if we were to talk about kind of what crosses the line, for me, there's two kind of lines in the sand that when you cross them, you've moved from influence to manipulation, right? Because you're right, there is a lot of gray area. It's very hard to kind of define concretely, like, is this what this person did, you know, persuasion or manipulation? But for me, there's two kind of very clear violations. The first one is coercion, right?

Anytime you are applying pressure, whether that be fear, threats, the potential for things like social consequences or financial consequences, right? Anytime you are trying to coerce someone into doing something, pressure someone into doing something that they otherwise wouldn't want to do, right? That they wouldn't realistically do in the absence of that pressure.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (52:57.076)
That's manipulation, right? Anything involving coercion is manipulation. The other thing for me is coercion on the one hand and deception on the other. And what I mean by deception is I mean any type of inaccuracies, right? Factual inaccuracies, manufactured falsehoods, misrepresentations, misinformation, and disinformation. If you need to lie to convince someone.

Okay, then maybe your side isn't as compelling as it should be because ultimately influence is not about lying. Like I said, it's about taking the same information that they've had all this time and being creative enough to show them a different way of looking at it, right? That's what influence is. And it doesn't involve pressure, it doesn't involve deception or lying, it involves creating a space.

where they're comfortable doing that, and then using the tools at our disposal, things like message framing, things like storytelling, to give them an argument that is palatable to them, digestible to them, and gets them to see the world in a slightly different way.

mykel (54:11.117)
Such a fascinating topic. We can't spend the whole hour just talking about because there's so many layers to this conversation. And and I don't think we as leaders we discuss this a lot. and I think it is so important. because it it it depends on how you approach it and and the things that you do to try to influence people can go one way or the other.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (54:14.568)
Yeah.

mykel (54:41.091)
Because it's important for me to discuss with you where belonging trust and why the tech really doesn't change any culture, right? And when I talk about belonging, right, I really want to talk about social pain and the difference about social pain and how social pain, like rejection, exclusion, it's process in our brain, like physical.

pain is right and to me this is fascinating and I want to to to hear from you kids when I when we're talking now about two different things but our brain process them like it's the same thing

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (55:24.223)
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a really, you know, it's something we alluded to earlier, right? When I when I said principle two is that belonging is a survival instinct, right? And I'll give you the the the best example I can give you of this. it's kind of part of the research that really spawned this entire kind of domain of of of research into things like belonging and exclusion and social disconnection. if we were to go back into like

The late 90s, early 2000s. there was a man named Kip who was kind of sitting in his in his courtyard of his his his college campus, and a frisbee lands next to him, right? So he grabs the frisbee, picks it up, turns around, and sees another young man calling for it from across the quad. So he tosses it in the frisbee. The young man catches it and says, Hey, nice throw, man, and tosses the frisbee back to Kip.

So Kip's excited because he thinks he might be invited to go play Frisbee with this young man and his friends. So smile on his face, Kip grabs it and then tosses it back. And much to his dismay, the young man catches it and without saying a word, turns around and walks back to his group, leaving Kip standing there feeling kind of foolish, right? So he sits down and he's he's bothered. He's bothered for two reasons. Number one, he's bothered by the fact that this bothers him at all. Why should he care?

What a complete stranger did or didn't do to him, right? Why does it matter to him? But he's also bothered by the fact that he did have this visceral reaction, right? Like w why did he have this visceral reaction to social rejection, if that's what it was? A very mild form of it, but that's what it was. Kip fortunately was a PhD student at the time, studying neuroscience. He decided to run an experiment, okay? He called it Cyberball.

So basically, what it was is if you were a participant in Kipp's lab, here's how it would work. You would be welcomed into Kipp's lab. He would bring you into a back room where he would hook you into an FMRI machine, right? Just a fancy machine that monitors your brain as you go through a series of tasks. Then he would put a screen in front of you. And on that screen, there were three avatars. There was an avatar at the bottom in the middle. That was you. You controlled that avatar. And there were two other avatars, which he explained are being controlled by two other players in the next rooms.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (57:45.397)
In a moment, it's gonna be really simple. A red ball is gonna appear on the screen, and you're gonna play a game of catch, right? You three are gonna play a game of catch. Okay, simple enough. So you Kip leaves the room, the game starts, the red ball pops onto the screen, and you start passing it around, right? And for the first 30 seconds or so, you're having a good enough time, as good a time as you can have with a silly ball-tossing game like this. But after 30 seconds, something weird happens. Because unbeknownst to you,

The actual participant, the other two players aren't players at all. They're computer programs. And they're designed to stop sharing the ball with the participant after 30 seconds. So for the final 30 seconds of this game, you're left sitting there watching what you think are two other players pass the ball back and forth and not pass the ball to you, right? Completely ostracize you from this game of kick, completely exclude you. And what Kip and his team wanted to do was they wanted to see what happens.

mykel (58:36.887)
Wow.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (58:43.328)
At the level of the brain, when we are socially excluded. And what they stumbled upon was one of the most fascinating, fascinating findings in like decades of neuroscience, because what they found is that the areas of the brain that are activated when we experience social rejection overlap almost perfectly with the areas of the brain that are activated when we experience physical pain, right? At the level of the brain,

At the level of the brain, social rejection and physical pain are nearly identical experiences. And again, this gets back to how we evolved. We talked about how without the group, we couldn't survive. And so we've evolved to experience social disconnection, someone rejecting us, as a very, very visceral fear because in our ancestral past, it was a threat to our survival, right? Now that

Persists to this day. And it's why when I go into organizations and they want to learn about something like inclusion and belonging, these are not the soft things that people think they are, right? These are not the kind of nice to have things in organizations. Someone who feels like they are socially disconnected, like they're not part of the team, right? Like they're trying to fit in rather than actually being accepted. This impacts performance. It impacts

The health of the individual, both physically and mentally, it derails their critical thinking skills. They don't solve problems as well. It makes them less motivated to take on challenges. They become more apathetic when they're faced with things like tough problems. This has a myriad of consequences that are relevant to organizations, right? So it's not just a nice thing to do. I like to frame it as dealing.

With a lack of belongingness in your organization is a tax on your talent. That's how you should think of it. It is holding your talent back. It is affecting your bottom line.

mykel (01:00:50.717)
Hmm. It's it's like an athlete, right? You can have the best physical performance, right? But still inside, if you are in pain because of social related issues that you're going through, your personal lives or whatever, you're still not gonna have the best performance ever. Yeah.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:01:11.094)
love that. I l I love that comparison. I mean that's fantastic.

mykel (01:01:14.771)
It's it just makes me think this is all part of what we we need to discuss more and more because sometimes we approach performance at just looking at numbers. To get to good performance we you need to understand the human beings going through it. Right?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:01:32.086)
Yeah, absolutely. You do. And the thing is too, is like even if you look at something, you know, so many companies want to innovate. They say, I want to innovate, I want to innovate, I want to innovate. And then they look at something like belonging as like a nice to have, like a bolt on. Well, guess what? What inspires innovation, what makes people courageous enough to propose out-of-the-box ideas is psychological safety.

And if you do not have psychological safety, right, people don't feel like they can stick their neck out because they're worried about getting it chopped off, right? They're not gonna propose any type of innovative ideas. And you can't have psychological safety without feeling like you actually belong, like you are accepted. And so in this way, you have to look at something like belongingness as not a bolt-on, right? This is a foundation of building a culture where innovation is actually a realistic possibility. Otherwise, it's just not.

mykel (01:02:27.553)
Yeah, it's really not a nice to have. and it's kind of the the basis of a successful organization and culture. People need to be learned and that's how we human beings we react. If we if we feel that we are accepted, the best of us come into play. If we don't feel part of it, we're just gonna be, you know, not our best for sure. Tad, one last question for you because I know that we are already

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:02:52.738)
Yeah.

mykel (01:02:57.487)
There, what is the most human skill that you're gonna refuse to let a machine replace?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:02:58.85)
Ha ha ha.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:03:07.361)
Most human skill that I wouldn't let a machine replace.

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:03:14.495)
Listening. I think listening is the thing that we really you you you don't want to outsource it. I mean, I guess that's the best way to put it, you do not want to outsource listening because listening is so powerful not only because it helps you understand someone better, but it's also the glue that builds relationships, right? Like if you want to be an influential person.

You need to be a good listener. You need to be a curious individual. You need to have try to understand someone because this is something that's also reciprocal, right? Like if I'm opening up and I want to learn about you and I'm saying, you know, tell me about you, well, that makes someone like you who maybe is resistant to my point of view, who's resistant to my way of life, all of a sudden you want to reciprocate that. You want to learn a little bit more about me. And so listening kind of opens this door.

To conversations that otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to come in. So many people, when they think about influence, they want to get to the tactics. They want to get to let me just tell me what to say, right? Tell me the how to make the argument to make it stick. And that's great, but that's step four or five, right? It starts with creating this space. And listening is arguably the most human thing we can do to create a space where you can open up the opportunity.

Have an argument land and stick.

mykel (01:04:38.337)
Beautiful. Thank you for that. And do you want to share with us how can people reach out to you?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:04:44.481)
Yeah, yeah. The so the best way is gonna be the website, influence fifty one, that's influence five one dot com. a lot of free stuff on there. There there's resources, there's a free newsletter, there's videos, there's leadership guides. So that's definitely the the place to go if you wanna learn a little bit more about about what I do. And ultimately if you wanna contact me, you can do so there. If you for whatever reason you love LinkedIn.

you can find me on LinkedIn if you can figure out how to spell my name. I am not great on on being super active on LinkedIn. I'm trying to be better, but I always respond to direct messages. So if you if you if anyone sends me micro hacks on how to influence anyone, right, we're probably not gonna get along well. But send me a micro

mykel (01:05:24.491)
Just don't send him a three steps on how to become a millionaire or that type of thing. boy, micro hacks

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:05:38.903)
Say hello, always happy to answer any questions anyone has.

mykel (01:05:42.781)
Awesome Tat. Thank you very much. And I'll make sure that I'll amplify your contact information when the episode is out. Thank you very much for taking the time. This has been an a very interesting conversation. I feel like we can go hours and hours talking about a lot of things, but I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today, okay?

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione (01:06:03.009)
It was absolutely my pleasure, Michael. Thank you so much for facilitating such a great conversation. Appreciate you having me.

mykel (01:06:07.938)
Yep. Awesome. And if this made you rethink how you lead people through change, share it with the leader to bring their team into the A AI era without losing trust in them. Follow the human protocol and we talk to you guys next week. Thank you all.