I’m willing to bet that there’s not an ad agency in business that isn’t or hasn’t flooded the market relying on emotion to sell everything you can imagine. Their best tool appeals to our sense of fear, jealousy, or desire. Ad agencies do this with a great deal of research and a comprehensive understanding of their target audience. Without this forethought, they are likely to miss the target, because emotions are “an essential part of being human. Emotions drive us.”

In the event that indeed this emotional appeal is so effective for selling goods and services, then why have business leaders been expected to show up at work every day without their humanity? You might argue that selling with emotion has nothing to do with leading with emotion in business. I encourage you to seek a more worthy argument to have. Without emotions, you have created a robotic workforce that lacks creativity and will not appeal to customers. Hence one of the reasons why I often hear from leaders about their challenge with team’s inability to be innovative.

In addition to my years of coaching executives, from entry-level leaders to the C-Suite, I’ve studied the effects of expressed vulnerable emotion in the corporate environment. I’ve also studied the impact of changing emotional behavior in the Organizational Change Management work I’ve been leading for even longer, dating back to 1983 in the nonprofit space. Two decades before, I began working in the for-profit space.