If you’re leading a transformation, now or in the future, It will be well worth your time to read what Gloria Steinem, and other community organizers, know about how to lead with influence.
How to Lead with Influence
It’s not about YOUR vision. It’s about THEIR needs.
In her book, My Life on the Road, Steinem reveals how she learned to lead with influence during her first stint as a community organizer. In her 20s, Steinem traveled to India to escape marriage. There she joined Ghandi’s campaign to achieve a new vision for his country. Steinem and her Ghandian peers walked from village to village, to gain support for Ghandi’s vision. But they did not begin by sharing Ghandi’s picture of a bright future, as consultants often advise leaders to do.
This is the wisdom they followed instead.
- If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
- If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
- If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye to eye.
They listened. The villagers were heard.
They saw. The villagers were seen.
Together, they broke bread.
Then, the villagers followed.
Steinem’s next lesson concerns people in positions of power.
One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.
To that I would add,
The more powerful you are, the more listening you should do.
A Mayoral Candidate is Transformed
Next, we turn next to Kassim Reed, Atlanta’s 50th mayor. He also learned to lead with influence while on the campaign trail.
Kassim Reed, was super-losing his bid for Mayor of Atlanta, a dream he held since age nine. His highly paid political advisers told him to go knock on hundreds of doors every day.
One day an elderly woman answered his knock. Reed gave his stock phrase. “Hello. I’m Kassim Reed. I’m a Georgia State Senator and I’d like to be your mayor. May I talk to you about the campaign?”
She opened the heavy steel door, with protective bars across it, and said, “Come on in baby. Would you like something to drink?”
She handed Kassim a tall green plastic cup filled to the brim with Kool Aid. Then she asked why he wanted to be mayor.
Reed replied. “Atlanta is the cradle of the civil rights movement. We have the third largest concentration of Fortune 500 businesses. We have the busiest passenger airport in the world. We have great restaurants. And I believe I can make the city stronger.”
Those were the last words Reed uttered before his transformation as a leader took place.
“Come with me Baby,” she said. “Let me show you the Atlanta I know.” She took him to her back door and pointed to a public swimming pool with no water. At the bottom of the pool sat four young men playing dice. Nearby was a broken down gazebo, where families used to picnic. It was covered with graffiti and inside five young men played their music too loudly. She continued, “I don’t go to those restaurants you’re talking about, and about that airport, I don’t fly. This is the Atlanta I know.”
Within a few minutes Reed was outside the house, knowing he didn’t win a vote or a friend. He was, however, transformed by what he learned.
Until you see a city how the people most in need of help see it, you’re never going to reach them.
To which I add:
Begin by solving their problems, before you ask them to join you in making your vision their reality.
Mayor Reed fixed that pool behind the house and re-opened every recreation center in the city.
Mayor Reed tells the full story on the Ted Radio Hour