Emotions Are a Terrific Thing to Value

Here's what the world's most successful organizations don't do. They don't suppose that either superior college grades or comprehensive training is the only accurate or dependable indicator of the right person for the right job. Neither do they expect that employee incentives will guarantee consistently better job performance.

Instead they depend on the reliable source that other businesses disdain: human nature. They know that the emotions of both employees and customers create feelings, which drive their behavior. Great organizations are aware of the power of emotions and therefore set up the conditions that generate and cultivate emotional mechanisms among employees and customers. The only way to achieve this is through human interaction, the fastest and most powerful trigger of emotional states.

By recognizing and unleashing the innate abilities of employees and matching their gifts to the positions that will best take advantage of them, thus making them even stronger, great organizations look inward in order to move forward.

They cherish the fluctuations in human behavior because they understand that these create a pathway as electric as any inside a brain:

• Employees who use their natural talents in their jobs produce significantly more than average workers.
   
• Emotionally committed employees form teams that deliver exceptional outcomes.
   
• Customers recognize the passion and commitment employees feel toward them and cannot help but respond in an emotional way.
   
• This emotionally driven reaction builds a bridge between employees and customers that creates engagement.
   
• This engagement becomes the key factor that drives sustainable growth.
   
• Sustainable growth is the route to profits and, ultimately, higher stock value.

In the end great organizations know that a reason-driven economy can travel only so far. The missing link is the engagement of deep-seated emotions as the driver of growth and profits. These -- and only these -- feelings are the fuel that propel talented individuals to do more, and inspire customers to return. And while reason influences both employees and customers, emotions are indispensable because they drive the best in both of them.