The 6 Sources of Influence: How to Change Team Behavior

The 6 sources of influence are a way to diagnose and change behavior at work. Every behavior depends on two things, whether people want to do it (motivation) and whether they can do it (ability), and each of these is shaped at three levels: the person, the people around them, and the structures they work in. Combine several sources at once and change becomes far more likely.

That is the core idea behind the influencer model. This guide explains each source in plain language, shows how to diagnose a stuck behavior on your team, and gives you a six-source plan you can copy and fill in this week.

What are the 6 sources of influence?

The model comes from Influencer: The Power to Change Anything (2008) by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, four of whom also wrote Crucial Conversations. Crucial Learning, the training company associated with the authors, teaches it to managers around the world.

The model crosses two questions with three levels.

The six sources: two questions at three levels

	Motivation: do they want to?	Ability: can they?
Personal	1. Does the person value the behavior or find it satisfying?	2. Does the person have the skill and knowledge to do it?
Social	3. Do peers, leaders and respected colleagues encourage it?	4. Do others help, coach or cover for them when it gets hard?
Structural	5. Do rewards, targets and consequences support it?	6. Do tools, space, data and routines make it easy?

Here is what each source means in a small company.

1. Personal motivation. People do what they find meaningful or enjoyable. If a behavior feels pointless or embarrassing, a reminder from the boss will not fix it. Connect it to things the person already cares about, such as pride in their work, a customer they like, or their own career.
2. Personal ability. Many “attitude problems” are skill problems. People avoid what they do badly. Break the behavior into small skills and give people real practice with feedback, not a single slide deck.
3. Social motivation. Humans watch what respected colleagues do. If the senior salesperson laughs at the new process, the rest of the team will follow the laugh. Recruit the informal opinion leaders first and model the behavior yourself.
4. Social ability. Some behaviors need help from others: a second pair of eyes, a buddy, a quick answer from an expert. Make that help easy to get.
5. Structural motivation. Pay, bonuses, targets, praise and consequences send a message about what really counts. They should point the same way as everything else. If you ask for quality but reward only speed, speed wins.
6. Structural ability. The environment shapes behavior quietly: how the office is laid out, what the software makes easy, which numbers are visible, what time the meeting starts. Often the cheapest change is to remove a step.

Why do people not change, even when they agree?

Most managers have seen this. The team agrees in a meeting that something should change. A month later, nothing is different. The usual explanation is “they are not motivated”, and the usual fix is a speech or an incentive.

The six sources show why that so often fails. A speech touches personal motivation. An incentive touches structural motivation. That leaves four sources untouched, and any one of them can keep the old behavior in place. People may lack the skill, their peers may quietly disapprove, nobody may help when they get stuck, and the tools may make the old way faster.

There is research behind this. In a 2008 article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg described surveys of managers about entrenched problems in their organizations. One survey covered 900 managers and supervisors. Leaders who combined four or more sources of influence were up to 10 times more likely to succeed than those who relied on a single source. Yet fewer than 5% of the managers surveyed had actually used four or more sources together.

The lesson is simple: the problem is rarely a lack of effort from the manager. It is effort concentrated in too few places.

How to change team behavior with the influencer model

The influencer approach has three parts: focus on a result, find the vital behaviors, then use multiple sources. In practice it works well as five steps.

A five-step influence plan

1. 1Name the resultOne measurable outcome and a date.
2. 2Find vital behaviorsThe one to three actions that drive it most.
3. 3DiagnoseCheck all six sources for what helps and what blocks.
4. 4Act on four or morePick at least one action per weak source.
5. 5Measure weeklyTrack the behavior, not just the result.

Step 1: Name the result

Write one sentence: what will be different, by how much, by when. “Better customer service” is not a result. “Reply to every customer email within four working hours by the end of next quarter” is.

Step 2: Find the vital behaviors

The authors of Influencer stress that a handful of behaviors usually drive most of a result. These are the vital behaviors. To find them, look at your best performers and ask what they do differently, or look at the moments where things go wrong. Keep the list short. One or two behaviors that everyone actually does beat ten that nobody remembers. If you need help turning a vague goal into a behavior you can track, our guide to lead and lag measures shows how.

Step 3: Diagnose with all six sources

Ask the people doing the work. Run through the six questions in the grid above and write down what helps and what blocks. Be honest about your own role: managers are part of the social sources and usually control the structural ones.

A quick test separates motivation from ability. Ask yourself: if I paid this person a large bonus to do it tomorrow, could they? If yes, the gap is mostly motivation. If no, start with ability.

Step 4: Act on four or more sources

For every source that is blocking the behavior, pick one concrete action. Aim for at least four sources in total. Do not skip ability: training and environment changes are less exciting than incentives, but they often matter more.

Step 5: Measure the behavior every week

Track whether the vital behavior is happening, in a simple count on a visible board. Review it briefly in your weekly team meeting. When the behavior holds for several weeks, the result usually follows. If the result does not follow, you picked the wrong behavior, and you adjust.

A worked example: getting a sales team to log calls

Here is a hypothetical example to show how the pieces fit. Imagine a 30-person distribution company. The owner wants better sales forecasts. The vital behavior is clear: every salesperson logs every customer call in the CRM on the same day. Today about half of the calls get logged.

The owner has already sent two emails and mentioned it in a meeting. That is personal motivation only. Here is what a six-source diagnosis and plan might look like.

Hypothetical six-source plan: same-day CRM call logging

	What blocks it today	What we will do
1. Personal motivation	Feels like admin for the boss	Show each rep how call notes win back lost deals and protect their commission
2. Personal ability	Two reps find the CRM confusing	A 30-minute hands-on session, then a one-page cheat sheet
3. Social motivation	Top seller jokes about the CRM	Ask her to co-design the process; manager logs his own calls visibly
4. Social ability	No one to ask when stuck	Pair each rep with a buddy for two weeks
5. Structural motivation	Only revenue is discussed	Review logging rate in the weekly meeting; recognise steady loggers
6. Structural ability	Logging takes 12 clicks on a laptop	Set up a mobile form with four fields

Notice how small most of these actions are. None costs much. Together they change the situation the salespeople work in, which is far more powerful than asking them to try harder.

How the six sources connect to everyday management

You do not need a big change project to use the model. It is a useful lens for many daily problems.

• Delegation. When a task you handed over keeps bouncing back, ask whether the person lacks the skill (personal ability) or the authority and tools (structural ability). Our pillar guide on how to delegate tasks effectively covers how to set up handovers that stick.
• Motivation. If you cannot raise pay, you still have five sources to work with. Our guide to motivating employees without money goes deeper on the personal and social sides.
• Feedback and conversations. Telling someone a behavior is not working is itself a social source. The SBI feedback model gives you a clean way to do it, and our guide to difficult conversations at work helps when emotions run high.
• Larger change. For a company-wide shift, such as a new system or a new way of selling, combine the six sources with a change process like Kotter’s 8 steps.

Managers matter here more than they might think. Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. In six-source terms, the manager sits inside the social sources and usually controls most of the structural ones.

How do you diagnose a stuck behavior in one conversation?

You can run a six-source diagnosis with one person in about 20 minutes, for example in a regular one-on-one meeting. The aim is to understand the situation from their side before you suggest anything. Ask open questions, listen, and take notes under the six headings.

Here are questions that work well. Use your own words and skip the ones that do not fit.

• Personal motivation: “When you do this well, what do you get out of it? What makes it feel like a chore?”
• Personal ability: “Which part of this is hardest for you? If you had to teach it to a new hire, where would they get stuck?”
• Social motivation: “What do the others on the team really think about this? Who would notice if you stopped doing it?”
• Social ability: “When you get stuck, who do you go to? How long does it take to get an answer?”
• Structural motivation: “What happens, good or bad, when you do it? What happens when you skip it?”
• Structural ability: “What in our tools, schedule or setup gets in the way? What would make it twice as easy?”

Two habits make these conversations more useful. First, stay curious when the answer is uncomfortable. If someone says the process is pointless, that is valuable data about personal motivation, not insubordination. Second, ask the same questions to two or three people. One person’s view may be unusual. When three people mention the same block, you have found a source worth fixing.

After the conversations, sort what you heard into the grid. You will usually find that one or two sources explain most of the problem, and that at least one of them is something you control directly as the manager, such as a meeting agenda, a target or a tool. Start there. It shows the team you took their answers seriously, which in turn strengthens social motivation.

What are the most common mistakes?

A sixth mistake is impatience. Behavior usually changes in small steps. Expect a few weeks of uneven progress, and keep the weekly review going until the new behavior feels normal.

A six-source checklist you can copy

Use this before you launch any change, large or small.

Six-source check for one vital behavior

• We have named one result with a number and a date.
• We have named one to three vital behaviors anyone could observe.
• Personal motivation: people can see why the behavior matters to them, not only to the company.
• Personal ability: people have practised the hard parts with feedback.
• Social motivation: respected peers and the manager are visibly doing it.
• Social ability: everyone knows who to ask for help.
• Structural motivation: rewards, targets and praise point the same way.
• Structural ability: tools, space and routines make the behavior the easy option.
• We count the behavior every week and review it as a team.

Summary

The 6 sources of influence give managers a complete map of why people do or do not do something: motivation and ability, at personal, social and structural levels. Start with a clear result and one or two vital behaviors. Diagnose every source with the people involved. Then act on at least four sources at once and track the behavior weekly. Small actions spread across several sources usually beat one big push.

Map your own team’s behavior on all six sources in a few minutes.