Rene Rodriguez - Amplify Your Influence: Transform How You Communicate and Lead

1. Chapter 9
2. Chapter 10

TRANSFORM HOW YOU COMMUNICATE AND LEAD

REN RODRIGUEZ

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ISBN 9781119858683 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781119858768 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119858751 (ePub)

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To Maddy.

Everyday. For the rest of my life.

Technology has advanced our society more than we could've ever imagined. Sadly, our wisdom and emotional intelligence haven't advanced at the same speed. Amplify Your Influence is the first book of its kind to finally take what we have learned through science and make it applicable and approachable to not only leaders but anyone who needs to influence behavior. This book could not have come at a better time.

Years ago, I began my career at a leading US university. In contrast to the typical business professor, I had already founded, managed, or actively participated in several businesses in addition to having the requisite academic credentials including a PhD in economics. I saw this professorship as a real opportunity to observe and get to know students, with the goal of attracting the best ones to work in those businesses. What I discovered surprised and disappointed me. While I found those students to be remarkably well educated on the functional aspects of businessthe hard skills such as knowledge of accounting, finance, business law, and project managementthey struggled in important social interactions, with the basic soft skills such as delegating, communication, emotional intelligence, and mentorship. I brought this to the attention of the MBA director, stating that if I were encountering these difficulties, so were the other companies who were hiring our graduates and that we should be including these skills in our curriculum. He looked at me somewhat confused and said, You understand that we do axioms, theorems, formulas, and principles here, hard skills; we don't get into that training stuff.' Almost in disbelief, I asked, So you want me to stand in front of 200-plus MBA students and tell them what it takes to be a great leader knowing we are setting them up for failure? To which he responded, Yes, as long as they pay tuition. So I did the only logical thing: I quit and started my own business school.

According to the president of the AACSB at that time, the major accrediting association for business schools, it was one of the very first business schools created by a private person. We began immediately to address these missing elements in leadership that I had observed and experienced. We engaged cognitive scientists, social psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, instructional psychologists, and neuroscientists. Motivated and excited by the potential we observed in neuroscience, we organized the first ever NeuroLeadership Summit at our campus here in Italy. (If you have the ability to create a business school, why not put it in a great location?) Shortly thereafter, we co-created the NeuroLeadership Institute, giving us access to some of the world's best neuroscientists. Among many discoveries and wonderful aha moments, we created a personal development program called LIFE. A dear friend and student of LIFE, Marcelo Montero, was leading Cargill's Salt business at the time; he told me about this consultant he was working with who was applying neuroscience to help his leadership team communicate more effectively through storytelling, congruent body language, and the science of influence. He referred him to our LIFE program, and that is where I met the barrel-chested, deep-voiced, statuesque person by the name of Ren Rodriguez. He sat front row, taking every possible note, asking every question he could. I was quite surprised at how engaged he was. I was the teacher; Ren was the student.

Ren had had a powerful LIFE experience, and then we went our separate ways, connecting from time to time.

A few years later I got a call from Marcelo saying that he felt I should connect again with Ren because he was doing something new, which might fit in with the work and research we were doing on leadership. Shortly thereafter, Ren and I connected again immediately, and the ideas began to fly. He asked me an interesting question: Given my 40+ years of experience researching leadership best practices, what did I see as being the next big step in leadership development? This was a question we had been wrestling with for years, and at our program, we had come up with a definition of leadership as being a