Motivation That Sticks with Tara Landes

Want to stop pushing people and start pulling results? We brought in Tara Landes, a certified Cialdini influence trainer who’s advised 300+ leaders, to unpack why most managers overestimate their people skills—and what to do differently when the stakes are high. From the moment you hear the 15.5% lift that a single authority sentence can create, you’ll see why intros, handoffs, and meeting setups are the hidden levers in sales, fundraising, and recruiting.

We dig into ethical influence—persuasion that benefits both sides—and show how small, honest shifts create outsized outcomes. You’ll learn how to build quick, real rapport that improves negotiation results, how to pre-frame price with smart anchoring, and why endowed progress keeps momentum alive in long buying cycles. Tara connects these to motivation that lasts: belonging, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Expect pragmatic tactics like scripting third-party credibility in your inbound flow, adding “you’re free to choose” autonomy cues, and designing strengths-first performance systems that compound talent.

We also tackle the fastest way leaders tank morale: inconsistency. Your team can handle tough goals, but they won’t follow a moving target. We share simple ways to be predictably you, even in hybrid and AI-heavy environments where communication shifts channels but human drivers don’t. If you lead people, sell ideas, or negotiate complex decisions, this is your field guide to influence without manipulation and motivation without gimmicks.

If the playbook helps, follow the show, share it with a founder or manager who needs it, and drop your biggest takeaway in a review—what tactic will you try first?

Transcript

Meet Tara Landis

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operational finance, and people, plus product and leadership, to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Skilling with People Podcast. I'm Gwynavere Curry, your host and CEO and founder to Guide to HR. All right, strap in founders, because today on this podcast, we're cracking the code on the three things every leader thinks they're good at, but most get wrong: managing people, willing influence, and actually motivating humans who don't just work for a paycheck. Our guest, Tara Landis, has been the behind-the-scenes force helping 300-plus business leaders untangle messy operations and master persuasion. If you want to stop pushing people and start pulling results, this is the playbook you've been missing. Well, welcome, Tara. I'm so excited to have you on the call. Would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, thanks so much, Guinevere. Um, as you said, I'm Tara Landis. I'm based in uh Vancouver, Canada, and I've been helping other businesses for about 25 years. I started my own firm in 2008. So I come at things from both the perspective of a business owner as well as a business advisor.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

I love that. Okay, so really quickly, as a business owner, a lot of my guests know I put them on the hot seat. I'd love to hear from you a lesson learned as you've been growing your business to share with the other founders out there.

Pay For Quality Expertise

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I am delighted to share a lesson. And my major lesson is if it's possible to throw money at the problem that you're facing, do that. It's the easiest solution you will ever have. Most of the problems we have are people-related, emotional, messy, um, strategic, all of these kinds of things. If it's something that just requires you to hire somebody to some sort of expertise to get it done, just hire them. Don't scrimp on your lawyers, don't scrimp on your accountants, don't scrimp on your IT professionals. Just pay to get good work.

The Science Of Authority

SPEAKER_00 2:26

I love that. That's uh very smart. And I'll throw in also HR as well. As well, yes, of course. A shameless plug for myself. Okay, so I want to jump into the influence piece because as we were preparing for this, you actually taught me something new. And I think that this is great for our audience. So as we were preparing, and I said that I wanted you to share who you are because I thought that was more engaging to the audience. You actually provided a reason why that it's not.

Ethical Influence, Not Manipulation

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Yeah, so I uh am a certified influence uh trainer from the Cialdini Institute. And I won't go on and on about who Robert Cialdini was. Suffice it to say he's the godfather of influence and wrote a great book called Influence that I would recommend everyone pick up. But in it, he codifies seven principles of influence. And one of those principles is authority. So authority means we rely on those whose superior knowledge or or wisdom. They have superior knowledge or wisdom to us. And it's really interesting because when we are in the presence of an authority, our brains kind of tend to switch off and go to automatic pilot. So let me give you an example of a study. One of the things I love about Cialdini's work is that it's all research-backed and research-based. So he's actually proven these concepts. And there was one study that a colleague of his, Steve, did in the UK in London. And there was a company that was a commercial real estate rental company. They would an agent that rented out commercial real estate. And they did this study where in the control case, somebody would call up and say, Hi, uh, I'm looking for a property to let in Chelsea. Do you have anything? And the receptionist would say, Sure, let me put you through to so and so. And then in the experimental case, they would call up and the receptionist would say, Sure, let me put you through to so and so. She's got 20 years experience letting properties in the Chelsea area, and I'm sure she's going to be able to help you out. And the difference in signed contracts between those that got the introduction versus those that didn't, it increased by 15 and a half percent. Wow. 15 and a half percent more deals just by adding that little bit of authority to the person as they were introducing them. And unfortunately, it doesn't work when you introduce yourself. If I walk up and say, Well, I've been doing it for 20 years and I've got this and I've got that, people are like, oh, that person's just bragging. But if somebody else says it, even somebody in their organization, it changes everything in terms of the way our brains process the information. So the lesson here is if you have a receptionist in your organization, or if you're ever introducing anybody, make sure you give their credentials. You're gonna help them boost their authority. And you're also going to create some what we call liking and reciprocity, which are two other principles of persuasion.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

That is so intriguing. So I'm curious because influence, in my experience, can sometimes go sideways or feel a little bit manipulative. So, how do you teach leaders to use it ethically but effectively?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

I think this is a wonderful question. And actually, Cialdini specifically practices ethical influence, which in the simplest terms means it's good for both of us. So manipulation is when I'm trying to get you to do something that is not in your best interest, but it is in mine. But ethical influence is when it's good for both of us. If it's good for you and it's good for me, then we're good to go.

Liking: Build Real Connection

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So what I mean, this is so interesting because influence, we haven't talked a lot about that on any of the podcasts in the past. I want to dive into so when stakes are high, right? Like, you know, a founder is doing fundraising or they're talking to tough clients, maybe some key hires. What is one of the influential techniques that never has failed, or from your perspective, is really a positive, like solid technique that could be used?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Um I I literally think there are hundreds, and I hope people uh come to my website and take a look at uh the different things there. But um, but I'll just give you another example. So this was on the principle of liking, which again is another principle of persuasion, which states basically people like to do business with people that they like. Um, no surprise, right? We know that. I mean, it's it's obvious. If I if if all things are equal and I like this person more, I'm gonna give the contract to them. But it's interesting how you can establish liking because it's so simple. Now, they did a study between two MBA pro uh uh cohorts in the US. I don't remember which ones, but let's say it was, you know, Harvard and Stanford. And they had them negotiate deals, fake deals, but they had them negotiate deals actually over email. So this is really relevant because we spend a lot of time on email these days, and it's not necessarily an easy communication method, especially for building liking. So in the control case, they said, okay, time is money, get down to business, make the try to make the deal as quickly as you can. And in the other group, they instructed them, come to a deal, but first get to know each other a little bit. And the group that got to know each other a little bit had a significant improvement on their ability to come to some sort of negotiated deal. The ones that just got down to business didn't do nearly as well. And so what's the tip? Well, whether you're looking for funding or you're looking for sales or whatever you're looking for, make take the time to invest in knowing that other person. Uh, check out their LinkedIn profile, stick their name in AI and see what comes out and what it suggests. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

But be careful because it can hallucinate. I've had that happen to me before.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Yeah. So do your due diligence, but it can also scrape a lot more content than than most humans can, or at least do it more quickly.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

And so the advice is learn a bit about them and hopefully find some sort of commonality. It doesn't have to be much. You have a dog, I have a dog. Um, you know, you you like to go to fancy restaurants, me too. Uh, you're from this hometown, I'm from that hometown. It doesn't matter what it is, it just establishes that connection. And again, what it does is it puts our brain back into autopilot and out of this sort of rational thinking, hmm, what's what are they trying to really get here? What's going on? So it just helps in uh in overall influence.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Yeah, I love that. Okay, I want to dive a little bit more into this because I think there are founders and listeners, even sales leaders probably out there. Yeah. So myself too. I'm a consultant and I and I've been able to engage in that like the person's like, I like you, I want to work with you, but I'm getting to know from budgeting perspective. And I try to do it through ROI. Do you have any tips on how to like build the influence a bit more to help that person make like influencing them to be influencers inside of their organization to get to a yes for them that they can come back and say yes to you?

Overcoming Price With Anchoring

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Yeah, I mean, uh uh it's a common objection with um complicated uh reasons behind it. So um again, I'll I'll I'll try and I'll try and give you an example um based on on principles. We're gonna use the principle of anchoring. So in it when it comes, so if the objection is price, the price is too high, you might be able to use some what we call pre-suasion, which is doing things beforehand to make them feel like the price isn't too high. For example, Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPad for the first time, when he first came out with this revolutionary product, you know how he always does those big conferences with the big thing behind him. So with that one, um, what he did is he had this price up on the screen,$999. And he's going on and on about how great the iPad's gonna be and and and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, uh, after it's been up there for a couple of minutes, he says, and how much do you think this is going to cost? And he drops the$999. Prices starting at$499. And people were expecting it to be a thousand bucks. Yeah. So when it was half that, he anchored them to this high price. So when it was half of that, people were like, oh, it's cheap. Um, and so that's one way to deal with the pricing objection is to start out anchoring people at a higher price than what you can actually deliver it at. Now, is that manipulation or is it ethical persuasion? That's up to you.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah, I kind of feel like even when you go to department stores and you know, like, here's a sweater for$100, but everything's always on sale. Like Hobby Lobby, I'll pick on I love Hobby Lobby, but like you can always get everything at like 40% off. Well, that's probably what they're doing, right? It's like, oh, it's it's here's$10, but it's really gonna be$6 because it's 40% off, instead of just saying it's$6 and no sale.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yeah. They even do things like when you've got um a car, you know, those card stamp cards you get for coffee or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Eventually you get like your tenth one free.

Endowed Progress As Motivation

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Exactly. Exactly. They did a study there where they had um uh one card had eight, you could have eight stamps. It was actually a car wash, but you could have eight stamps, and uh that was the control group. And then in the experimental group, they had one that had 10 stamps, but they gave you the first two for free. So either way, you had to get eight car washes to get the free one. Yeah, but it had this uh effect, it's called endowed progress. And so the one where they had the 10 stamps, but the first two were free, they ended up getting, I think it was 36% more people completed the card.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Just because they felt like, well, I've already gotten started, I might as well keep going. I'm practically there. Um, but there was no rational difference between the two cards.

Beyond Money: BAMP Framework

SPEAKER_00 12:49

That is so fascinating. Oh my gosh. All right, cool. Well, um, love to kind of flip this switch here about uh, you know, going from influence, persuasion to motivation behind me beyond money, right? Because you know, a lot of people are motivated by money. I mean, especially I'll call it the sales organizations typically are the individuals that are mostly uh motivated by that. But beyond that, what really drives people to give their best inside of a business?

Consistency As A Leadership Edge

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Well, I love the question, especially when you just get it gave it, because that thing I was talking about with endowed progress, the giving people a couple things for free, that actually is motivating, right? Yeah. That motivated the people to continue on that journey. And so that is a tip of motivation is giving people showing them how they've already gotten started. Even in sales, you know, when I send a proposal to a client, I will always put at the bottom um whether you select us or not, congratulations on taking the first step in this journey, which is encouraging them to say, you've already gotten started, let's keep going. And so there's all sorts of motivational principles. Um, another one to look at is Dan Pink's research on this. Uh, and you may have discussed this before on your podcast, it's not new. Um, but uh the acronym is BAMP. And so Dan Pink talks about four categories of motivation: belonging, um, which Cialdini talks about unity, but Dan Pink talks about belonging, but they're meaning the same thing, which is feeling like you're part of the group, part of the team. You know, we want to we're motivated to help others and to do more with people who we feel are one of us. So, for example, I'm in Vancouver, Canada. We have a hockey team, it's called the Canucks. Okay. I'm a fan. So if I'm a fan of the Canucks and you're a fan of the Canucks, that would be activating on liking. We we both like the same thing. But if you and I are both on the Canucks, that's unity. We're on the same team. And when you can establish relationships on the same team, that makes people far more motivated, even more motivated to move to your thinking, right? Um, another uh principle is autonomy. Uh, people like to feel that they have control, control over their day, control over what they do or who they do it with or why they do it. From an internal company management perspective, you can think about that um like giving people a little bit of control over their schedules or over projects that they do. When you think about it from a sales perspective, um it's there's a concept called starting with no, or but you are free to choose. It's weird, right? Because they know they're free to choose, clearly. And yet when we give them the ability to be able to choose, they tend to choose us more often. So that's autonomy, uh, mastery. Humans like to do things that they're already good at and get better at those. Um, so what that really relates to from my perspective inside a community is uh a company is focusing on people's strengths. So there's a whole raft of managers out there that when they get to performance evaluation time are trying to figure out what negative feedback they're going to give people. Yeah. Try focusing on what they're already good at and make them great. Um, there's no tennis coach that ever said, This is where you suck, keep working at that. They say, This is what you're good at, keep working at that. That you'll make you a superstar, right? And then another motivational um driver is purpose. So uh working for something greater than ourselves, working for our contribution to humanity. You know, I'm I'm the mother of two boys, and I gotta tell you, it's possible the only reason people have children is so that they have this purpose greater than themselves, because it's a lot of hard work. Um, so so purpose is gonna also be very motivating trying to do something more for society than just for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

I love that. That's a lot to digest for our audience, but I want to also ask what have you seen is the fastest way uh founders accidentally, or maybe on purpose, but I think more accidentally, kill motivation on their teams?

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Uh inconsistency, I think. So one of the one of the main characteristics of really strong leadership is is character. People really want to feel safe with their leader. Not that, not that they're not striving for audacious goals, but they want to feel like they can trust that that person will act in rational ways. And so when a leader is, you know, this way and then that way, and oh, there's a squirrel and there's that thing, and there's and they don't stay consistent, I think that that is a really fast way to devo demotivate people.

Hybrid Work, Same Human Drivers

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah, that makes sense. And I've seen that in both scenarios. So yeah. So put a lot of thought into how you're showing up every day as a leader and to be consistent with that and uh making sure that you have that consistent message and response, I guess. Uh at the end of the day, that you most of that is going to be who you are as a core human being. So it's gonna come out.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Uh so yeah, and I'll just add that it doesn't have to be that doesn't mean you have to be some sort of perfect person. Um, I have one client that I was working with last week, and they are out of town, the leader of the company, they're out of town a lot, like they take a lot of vacation, which some might see as, oh, you know, leaving the the ship behind and you know, like, you know, stay in charge. But because everybody knows that's the way it works there, it's no big deal. It's just how it is. That's fine. If he were to dip in and all of a sudden be all over everybody every day, that would be very inconsistent. And that would cause motivational problems.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm curious now, you know, we're in 2025, 2026 time frame, especially with hybrid working and the generational shifts. How can leaders be thinking about motivation now, maybe uh differently than maybe what they were doing three to five years ago?

SPEAKER_01 19:21

It's a great question. You know, our brains haven't really evolved that much in the last millions of years. Um, and so a lot of the principles that applied before continue to apply. They just maybe come out in different ways. You know, instead of speaking to someone directly, maybe we're having a conversation with them on Teams. So the vehicles may change, but the principles, they haven't really changed all that much.

Managing With The Platinum Rule

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Okay, that's interesting. All right, so kind of now switching a little bit more to managing people. Uh, many founders think managing people just means hiring and giving them direction. What's the most common blind spot you've seen where leaders Kind of fell in quote unquote managing people.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Well, I like that you uh reference the generational differences because I think that is a place. I think that in general, there's this thing that many people have heard of called the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't think that that's the right rule. I think the platinum rule is the right rule, which is do unto others as they would have you do unto them. And so different people like to be managed in different ways. And so in the past, it there was this sort of idea that, oh, once I'm the manager, like I can sit back and relax and like everyone, oh minions, everyone's gonna chiller to me as the manager. Do what I say. Um, and what we've what we've seen over time is in fact, it's almost like the organizational chart pyramid is is upside down, right? It's that we are all in service of the frontline staff. So the higher up you go, the lower you are in many ways. Um and so we need to tailor our approach to the individuals that we're managing.

Closing Thoughts & Optimism

SPEAKER_00 21:08

I love that. Uh well, as we wrap up, I feel like there's so much more I want to dive into with you today. But as we wrap up here, any last final thoughts or tips or tricks you want to share with the audience?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Yeah, the final thing I'd like to share is um approach whatever is coming next uh with optimism. Because even you know, you can be skeptical of the future, you can be afraid of the technological changes that are coming. That is a choice that you can make, but another choice is to be more optimistic. And I think you're gonna get a lot more value out of that perspective.

CTAs & Guide2HR Plug

SPEAKER_00 21:43

I can't agree more. I think that uh what you perceive is what you create. And if you're perceiving positive, optimistic, that is what's gonna come at you. So, with that, that's a great way to end it. Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much, Tara, for joining us today. Uh, so much great tidbits. I've learned so much about influence. I'm definitely gonna want to dive in a bit more with you. And for our audience, if you want to learn a bit more, she's got a bunch of freebies on her website. We'll put we'll put the link in to the description below and check it out. And if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to Tara or myself. And thanks everyone. I hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you on the next podcast. Thanks, Guinevere. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Guinevere Cuery, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.