Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections

by Scott Edinger
Harvard Business Review | Originally published July 21, 2022

If you want to inspire and motivate others to achieve high levels of performance, tap into the power of emotion. In the research for our book, The Inspiring Leader, my coauthors and I analyzed 360-degree survey data on 25,000 leaders. We discovered that those who were most inspiring (the top 10% of the group) had something unique in common: their ability to establish a strong emotional connection with their employees.

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 pathos 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 that flows from enthusiasm.

Most of us have felt an added wind in our sails when we are excited about a project or the work we are doing. As a leader, you can channel this energy by sharing your passion for the results that need to be achieved. But first, you may need to access it yourself.

I worked with a chief data officer who was easily the most knowledgeable person in the business when it came to analytics. I wouldn’t call him negative, but certainly lacking a positive charge. His focus in meetings was like Agent Friday from Dragnet: “just the facts, ma’am.” He recognized the need to get out of the spreadsheets and use data to connect with others — both about the issues they cared deeply about solving, and the business outcomes they were excited to achieve. I suggested he focus on three questions:

1. What about this [meeting/idea/topic] gives me reasons for optimism?
2. How does it connect to a greater outcome than we are talking about?
3. How can I share this with positive energy?

After six months of consistent efforts to create more productive energy, his peers, direct reports, and the CEO observed that he was a better collaborator and had a broader perspective on the business. They found him more strategic and motivating…[MORE]

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To read the entire article by Gene Marks at The Harvard Business Review, visit: Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections