Doing business involves making many, many decisions on a daily basis. Business professionals regularly decide things like how to allocate scarce resources, what vendors to select for a project, who to hire, whether to make changes to company strategy, when to schedule events, where to locate a new office, and more.
For every decision that needs to be made, there often are multiple options, with pros and cons for each. Complicating matters further, stakeholders usually have different opinions about what the best course of action should be. That’s where persuasion comes in.
Persuasion is the act of motivating a receiver through communication to change a particular belief or behavior. For example, sales professionals may need to convince their manager to purchase a new software program to better track clients’ preferences. When there are multiple requests and not enough budget to fund them all, they have to show that their idea is the most critical. Entrepreneurs may seek funding for their start-up ventures from prospective investors. When investors want to only invest in ideas that have a strong likelihood of succeeding, entrepreneurs have to demonstrate that they will be successful.
Being persuasive is the most complex of all the business communication competencies. That is because being persuasive requires you to be skilled in all the other competencies, too. You have to be professional to get people to pay attention to your message and view you as a trustworthy communicator. You need to be clear to present your bottom line and organize your argument so that your receiver will know exactly what you are proposing. You need to be concise so that you don’t waste your receiver’s time. And you need to be evidence-driven to ensure that your receiver is confident that you have a solid case.
Persuasion has its own set of special skills as well. People who are competent at persuasion have the ability to make sophisticated choices about how to set overarching persuasive positions, how to build a structure of supporting claims, and how to leverage evidence to advance those claims. They also know how to apply advanced persuasive techniques and avoid fallacies in their persuasion attempts.
Persuading Ethically
Before getting too far into the how-to of developing persuasive messages, it is important to step back and consider the big picture of ethical persuasion. Ethics are systems of moral, social, and cultural values that govern behavior, beliefs, and interactions. Put another way, ethics are a standard of what is considered right or wrong.
Ethics can be shaped by personal and social backgrounds, family, religious beliefs, and community. In business contexts, additional sources of ethical guidelines can include laws, industry-based codes of ethics, and company policies. For example, accountants are required to follow federal, state, and local laws regarding financial reporting, as well as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants’ Code of Professional Conduct and the policies of the respective accounting firms where they work.
Being ethical means knowing standards of right and wrong that are appropriate to the context and then upholding those standards. Specifically, ethical business professionals do more than just ask, “Am I legally allowed to do this?” They ask, “Is doing this the right thing to do?” While it is important to be an ethical communicator at all times, it is even more critically important to uphold ethical standards when you are persuading someone. That is because when you are engaging in persuasion, you are attempting to influence someone’s beliefs and behaviors. Whatever actions are taken as a result of your persuasion attempts can have real implications—for your receiver, for the business, for stakeholders beyond the immediate exchange, and for future decisions as well.
Receivers Expect the Truth
Receivers rely on honest information to evaluate claims and make good decisions. Therefore, they expect the truth in persuasive appeals. Unethical influencers, however, can resort to deception to achieve their instrumental goal. Deception is an unethical attempt to induce agreement by making an untruthful case. Deception can serve the purpose of making an alternative appear better than it really is or supporting a claim when there is not sufficient support. There are three primary types of deception common in business.
Lying occurs when an unethical influencer presents as true claims and/or evidence that are known to be false. An example of lying is knowing that a product breaks after three months of use, but telling your receiver that it will last five years.
Fabrication involves creating or manufacturing information to be presented as true. An example of fabrication is writing several product reviews and then presenting them as evidence of having highly satisfied customers.
Omission is the intentional exclusion of negative or unflattering information that is relevant to the decision-maker. An example is knowing that several people have been hurt using your product, but not alerting your receiver about the problems.
Receivers Expect Straightforwardness
Receivers often are confronted with multiple claims and mountains of evidence as they evaluate persuasive attempts. Being able to trust information that is presented to them on-face value reduces their cognitive load and helps them make decisions more readily. Therefore, they expect straightforwardness in persuasive appeals.
Yet, unethical influencers sometimes resort to manipulation. Manipulation is an unethical influence technique used to induce agreement by distorting the truth. Here are two common types of manipulation that occur in business contexts.
Cherry picking involves presenting only selective evidence instead of representative information. For example, when only a few customer service reviews are favorable and most are negative, sharing only positive reviews—even though they are truthful reviews—would be cherry picking.
Misrepresentation occurs when unethical influencers present information unclearly, incorrectly, or in opposition to normal conventions with the intention of getting receivers to view the evidence in a particular way. There are numerous ways unethical influencers can misrepresent data. For instance, they might present facts without context (claiming “We are ranked in the top three financial services companies in the city,” but not mentioning that there are only three financial services companies), omit relevant details (claiming “Our employees are paid well, earning $18 per hour,” but not mentioning that only $8 is paid by the company and the other $10 is estimated based on average tips), or use deceptive data visualizations.
Receivers Expect Freedom to Choose
Finally, receivers need to retain their agency, which is their capacity to make a decision of their own free will. By doing so, they know that they are not being forced to do something that goes against their own interests or the interest of the greater good. Therefore, receivers expect that persuaders will respect their right to make a free choice when presented with the facts.
But unethical influencers do not respect their receivers’ right to make a decision and instead may resort to coercion. Coercion is an unethical influence technique used to induce agreement through limiting or eliminating the ability of receivers to make decisions based on the merits of the appeal. There are several ways in which someone could coerce a receiver.
Threats are intentions to deliver a negative consequence if someone does not agree to the persuasive appeal. Threats can be explicitly stated or implied. They might include the loss of employment, friendship, or future opportunity. They might also include threats to reveal secrets, discredit an individual, or retaliate if a decision isn’t made in the desired way.
Promises are the reverse of threats. But instead of coercing through negative outcomes, unethical influencers induce agreement through a commitment to give something valued in exchange for making the desired decision. Promises can include favors, preferential treatment, money, or anything else of value. Two types of promises made in business contexts are bribes (payments made in advance and in exchange for a desired decision) and kickbacks (pre-negotiated payments made after a decision). In many cases, bribery and kickbacks are illegal. But in all cases, they interfere with a decision-maker’s ability to make unbiased decisions.
Intimidation involves exposing and exploiting receivers’ vulnerabilities and making them feel that they do not have the power to make a different decision than the one desired by the unethical influencer. Intimidation can arise from formal hierarchy (someone being told, “because I’m your boss and I told you to”) to informal relationships such as bullying. Collectively, receivers’ expectations provide general guides for ethical persuasion: Be completely honest, do not attempt to mislead, and do not interfere with your receiver’s right to decide.
If you want to evaluate the ethics of your persuasive attempts, you can use the FAIR Test, which was developed as a standard for professional communication by business communication professor Peter Cardon. When you write a persuasive message you can ask yourself the following questions.
Facts. Am I presenting the facts accurately and completely? Ethical communicators use accurate information, include all relevant information, and present their evidence so that they do not mislead or deceive their receivers.
Access. Am I making my motives and reasoning accessible? Ethical communicators are accessible when they are transparent with their receivers. They are upfront about their motivations, declare any conflicts of interest, describe how they obtained their information, and share their reasoning with their receivers.
Impacts. Am I making a positive impact? Ethical communicators consider the impact they have on their receivers and all other stakeholders affected by their persuasion attempts. They make concerted efforts to minimize negative impacts and maximize positive impacts.
Respect. Am I respecting my receiver? Ethical communicators respect their receivers. They know that others can have different views and accept that receivers are free to choose. They don’t attempt to coerce people to make a decision and don’t take advantage of others.
If your goal is convince your receiver to make a particular choice among options, change the way something is done, or do something new, you likely will be making a recommendation. A recommendation is a persuasive appeal that involves directly advocating for (or against) a formal course of action. Formal courses of action could include such things as adopting or changing a policy, implementing a program, moving into a new market, or firing the office bully.
Recommendations usually are worded as should statements. You can present a recommendation by specifically saying “we should” or “you should.” But the word should is not absolutely necessary. You can present a recommendation in a variety of ways, just as long as it would be possible to state it as a should statement.
Example: We should implement a bike-to-work incentive program.
Alternate: I recommend that we hire Ream Case Co. as our office supplier.
It is worth noting that because recommendations are worded in a direct and rather forceful way, they tend to be more persuasive when the person making the recommendation has some sort of authority to do so. Authority can be granted in multiple ways: you could be decision maker or leader in the organization, be a member of a committee that is tasked with addressing a particular challenge, or work in an organization that has a culture of innovation and is open to ideas from everyone.
Attributions:
Information for this section was modified from
Business Communication: Five Core Competencies Copyright © 2023 by Kristen Lucas, Jacob D. Rawlins, and Jenna Haugen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References:
Cardon, P. (2024). Business communication: Developing leaders for a networked world. Mc-Graw Hill.