This blog will be reflecting about some of the persuading characters I have observed recently. Some of them are from the movie SKG sir had assigned us to watch: “The Devil Wears Prada”. One more character I will talk about is Rusty (“Rascal Rusty” as it is called) from the novel “Mediocre But Arrogant”.
Let’s talk about characters from the movie first. The lead character in the movie was a girl named Andy, who is appointed as an assistant to Ms. Miranda Presley (Chief of a fashion magazine). Andy is totally the reverse of what her boss wanted her to be. She is ignorant about the fashion and does not think it is necessary to be fashionable to work for a fashion magazine. The first instance of her persuasion comes when she appears for the job interview in front of Ms. Presley. The tactic she used there was Assertiveness & insistence. She used the same strategies to gauge the work assigned to her from her colleague, Emily. She has also used Friendliness, Assertiveness and collaborative strategies to get the Harry Potter books from a journalist she met in a party. She also used strategy of Coalition to extract some of the information about possible change in magazine chief.
Ms. Presley was a dominating and strong character in the movie. She used Non-Verbal communication to convey her Authority to her sub-ordinates. She was the one who made Andy wear fashionable attires by the simply scanning her from the top to bottom. She had built her credibility and personality by the knowledge she displayed and authoritative tone of voice she used. She dismissed any arguments by simply saying, “That’s all!” She used the strategies of Coalition and Bargaining when her position as the magazine chief was under a threat.
Bozo (fashion designer) was another character in the movie, which had used some of the influencing strategies. At one instance when Andy was about to quit her job, Bozo used strategy of Reasoning to influence her. He also offered her counsel and influenced her by Friendliness. The freelance journalist tried using strategies like Bargaining, Friendliness and Coalition to influence Andy.
The movie effectively showed how various psyche of people requires different strategies to be applied on them. For instance, a decision maker who is more of Controller type, strategies like bargaining, coalition and assertiveness would work. The charismatic decision maker would be more influenced by Assertiveness, reason and insistence. A thinker would be looking for reasons in the persuader. A sceptic would need a lot of reasons, friendliness and assertiveness to be influenced & the followers would be influenced by friendliness, higher authority and collaborative strategies.
I recently read a novel- “Mediocre But Arrogant”. Which is a fictional story on a campus of a B-school called Management Institute of Jamshedpur (XLRI). Rascal Rusty, who is a friend of the lead character in the book, is a very persuasive personality according to me. The character has various traits of influencing others with different strategies at different times. He has been shown to be using Reason & Logic backed by the credible sources to influence some of the professors. He used to help others in the assignments on paid basis. He showed the bargaining and coalition in those trades to extract more amounts. He used friendliness and bargaining with the Mess contractor in getting good supply of foods from the mess. In fact, he was such an influencing character that people fell into his trap many a times. His mischievous practical jokes gave him the tag of Rascal in the book.
At the end of the session-5 we ourselves performed a persuasion task (apart from the assignment). We were facing the problem of excessive sunlight in the classroom that made the projector ineffective. Three of us (Me, Shobhit & Shashank) went to Mr. Vipul for possible solutions. He told us that the curtains were ordered but somehow GERMI had cancelled the order for that. We then went to GERMI office to sort the matter out. We shared our concern with him in an Assertive way and insisted not to let our education suffer. We explained that this was a permanent problem and required urgent attention. He agreed that we required the curtains on the windows. But the same took some time to be delivered. In response to that we suggested him to give an intermediate solution till the curtain was installed. We asked him to stick a chart paper in the meantime. We gave the reasons and bargained the solution to be taken effect immediately. Next day when we walked into the classroom, we saw the chart papers stuck and some people taking measurement of the window for the curtains.
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