Crucial Influence
A review of

Crucial Influence

Leadership Skills to Create Lasting Behavior Change

Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson and David Maxfield • McGraw-Hill • 2023
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Pull Every Lever

by Deirdre Cody

The premise is simple and the ambition enormous: A team of corporate trainers argues that anyone can learn to inspire behavior change — in themselves, their teams, and their organizations — by drawing on all six sources of influence at once.

Leadership books tend to promise the moon and deliver a motivational poster. Crucial Influence: Leadership Skills to Create Lasting Behavior Change by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler is, to its credit, more rigorous than most. Four of the authors are co-founders of VitalSmarts (now Crucial Learning), a Utah-based corporate training outfit dedicated to teaching executives how to have difficult conversations and drive organizational change. Their earlier book, Crucial Conversations, sold millions of copies and became a staple of corporate L&D departments. Crucial Influence is the logical sequel: After all, once you’ve mastered the conversation, how do you tweak behavior? The short answer, according to the authors, is that you won’t, unless you address the behavior from no fewer than six angles.

The Problem with One-Trick Leaders

True leadership is the ability to inspire others to turn a vision into reality. But behavior is notoriously difficult to change, argue the authors. Consider that fewer than 10% of people successfully kick an unwanted habit and that recidivism rates among released felons are extremely high. 

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