Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections
When I discuss emotional connection with executives, I’m not suggesting excessive displays of emotion, oversharing of personal information, or getting into therapy sessions with colleagues. Rather, it’s about connecting with our teams, our peers, and our bosses as humans with emotions, not task-focused automatons. It’s the emotions that you as a leader evoke within others that enable you to bring out the best in them. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle identified p athos as a critical element in communication and persuasion. Pathos , in philosophy and rhetoric, is a purposeful appeal to emotion to evoke specific feelings in one’s audience. Aristotle understood way back then that the human connection makes a huge difference in provoking action. As the maxim suggests, logic makes us think, but emotions make us act. Here are three ways I’ve coached executives to harness the power of emotion to motivate the people they work with and drive better results: 1. Cultivate the energy tha