Which football team do you support?

I was recently at Generation CFO event in London. Chris Argent the founder of Gen CFO was one of my students many moons ago and it is great to see how he has grown his following to nearly 80 000 and is listed as a LinkedIn influencer.

At the event a successful digital CFO Nadim Ahmad was asked What was the key to his success? He said he was always open and interested with the people with whom he had to interact. I probed this further and asked him to give an example of the kind of things he did and his answer reflected the traits of a successful finance business partner. 

A technique he often used was to find out which football team the particular person he was going to talk to supported before meeting them. On meeting them he began with a conversation about current form, players etc. before talking about finance. Some may question the validity of such an approach in a time pressured world, however Nadim’s approach has proof from psychological research. This shows that people are more likely to say yes to people who they like.

We tend to like :

• People who are similar to us

• People who pay us compliments

• People who co-operate with us towards mutual goals.

In a series of negotiation studies at two leading business schools, one group was told when entering negotiation that time is money and to get straight down to business – the outcome of their negotiation success was an agreement rate of  55% . However, for the other group that was told to share something personal and try and identify an area that you might share in common before getting down to business, they achieved a success rate of 90%.

Therefore, to take advantage of this psychological phenomena be sure to look for areas of similarity which you share with others, and genuine compliments which you can give before you get down to business.

If anyone has any similar stories of success, I would love to hear them.