Extraordinary Influence

About the Author

Dr. Tim Irwin has spent over 25 years assisting corporations in various industries. He is the author of three other critically acclaimed books, including Impact: Great Leadership Changes Everything, a New York Times best-seller, Run With the Bulls Without Getting Trampled, and Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership. Irwin's work focuses on leadership development and enhancing organizational performance through effective influence and communication strategies.

Tim Tassopoulos, author of the book’s foreword, is the President and Chief Operating Officer of Chick-fil-A.

Main Idea

In Extraordinary Influence: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others, Dr. Tim Irwin explores how leaders can transform those under their influence to achieve their highest potential. By leveraging recent discoveries in brain science and insights from top CEOs, Irwin reveals that traditional methods of feedback, such as performance appraisals and multi-rater feedback systems, are often counterproductive. Instead, he advocates for the use of positive affirmation to ignite motivation and align employees with an organization’s mission, strategy, and goals. Affirmation, as Irwin argues, can trigger significant positive changes in the brain, enhancing well-being and performance.

Table of Contents

• The Science of Extraordinary Influence
• How Extraordinary Influence Works
• Special Applications of Extraordinary Influence

The Science of Extraordinary Influence

Leaders often face the challenge of motivating others to excel and find meaning in their work. Traditional methods, which focus on negative consequences for non-performance, often fail to produce the desired outcomes. Instead, Irwin suggests that affirmation can lead to transformative changes in behavior and performance.

He explains that many of the methods leaders use to motivate, such as constructive criticism, engage the brain's negativity bias, which is counterproductive. Instead, positive affirmation can activate parts of the brain associated with well-being and higher performance.

"We gain an extraordinary ability to transform others when we affirm them versus when we apply what might euphemistically be called 'constructive criticism.'" - Tim Irwin

Brain research indicates that affirmation can:

• Buffer stress and improve higher cognitive thinking
• Positively affect self-worth
• Improve self-control and efficiency
• Increase happiness and productivity
• Foster innovation

Irwin argues that leaders must master the art of affirmation to exert extraordinary influence and bring out the best in their teams.

How Extraordinary Influence Works

Tactical Affirmation: Affirming Style and Competence

Affirmation should be directed towards three dimensions of the human psyche: style, competence, and core. Affirming someone's style and competence is part of tactical influence, which involves daily, transactional initiatives to do our jobs. Affirming someone's core is part of strategic influence, which has a far-reaching and transformational impact.

Irwin identifies four types of styles: