Leadership Is All About Emotional Persuasion

A leader would better understand both your own emotions and those of the people you lead.

The communicating a leader does is all, essentially, persuasion. That's what leaders do. They persuade people to work together, to achieve more than they ever thought they could, to reach for apparently impossible goals, to put personal interests aside (at least temporarily) in favor of some larger group purpose.

Persuasion means changing someone's mind. If the mind isn't changed, the person hasn't been persuaded. It's that simple. So a leader's job is to change minds, to push followers to make new decisions.

Here's the surprising thing: Decision-making is fundamentally emotional. Recent brain research shows that if you incapacitate the part of the brain concerned with emotions, through a stroke or other brain trauma, people can't make decisions. That's because, far from clouding our ability to decide, emotions make it possible. It works this way: We tag our experiences and memories with emotions in order to be able to retrieve them at crucial moments later on. For example, if we burn our hand on a hot stove, we tag our memory of the incident with an emotion. That emotion makes the memory easy to retrieve at a later date, and we never forget not to touch the next hot stove. No emotion, no retrieval. No retrieval, no decision.

Because persuasion lies squarely at the center of leadership, of changing minds and making decisions, an emotional process is central to what successful leaders do. More than that, it's a process that requires both intellectual finesse and nonverbal skill. A successful leader, in other words, has to be comfortable with emotional arguments and comfortable in his or her own skin making and responding to those arguments. Self-awareness is critical; understanding your own emotional tendencies and responses is essential if you're going to evoke and shape emotional responses in others.

In the end decision-making is nine-tenths emotion and one-tenth intellectual justification. Most reasoning about decision-making is ex post facto justification of decisions already made on emotional grounds. We decide to go for a stretch second-quarter goal, for example, because we want it, or it feels right, or some other equally intangible reason. Then we collect intellectual reasons for the decision that we've already made, in order to justify it to ourselves.

Let's go one step further. Most of us have a commonsense understanding of how our minds work that goes something like this: My conscious mind is in charge. I get thoughts, like, I want to walk over there and talk to that person, and then I direct my body to act on those thoughts. It's as if there were a little director sitting in my head calling out orders and running the show.

Again, recent brain research turns that commonsense idea on its head. Most of our brain power is unconscious. The ratio of neurons that govern unconscious thought to conscious thought is roughly 10 million to one. We are primarily unconscious beings on automatic pilot. Indeed, it has to be that way. That unconscious brain keeps us alive. If we had to think consciously about everything from keeping our heart pumping to breathing to avoiding large predatory mammals, we'd be dead in no time.

That's how we evolved, but now that we're in a modern world, some of those unconscious thought processes trip us up. For example, as soon as we see a large group of people--in fact, long before we're consciously aware of them--our unconscious brain goes to work getting us ready for fight or flight. And because we've got neurons in our head that pick up on the emotions of everyone around us, once one person in a group goes into fight or flight, the whole group soon does.

Back to leadership communication. If you as a leader stand in front of an audience of your employees trying to persuade them to go for that stretch second-quarter goal, before you even open your mouth everyone in the audience has begun to panic, at least a little, because of the fight or flight signals you send out without being consciously aware of them.

Suddenly the job of persuasion is harder than you might have expected. How do you persuade a room full of stressed-out people to work harder or change radically or give up vacations and weekends to save the company? You do it by taking that audience on an emotional decision-making journey, beginning with an authentic acknowledgment of where they are right now.

But before you address that audience, you need to do some homework as a leader to gain conscious control of your own unconscious body language, so that you can send out messages of openness and connection rather than danger and distance. If you don't start with that, your leadership journey will be over before it has begun.

Leadership is persuasion. Persuasion is emotional. Emotion is unconscious. Leaders need to master their unconscious emotional thought processes in order to succeed. It's essential work for anyone who wants to persuade others to achieve anything worthwhile.