Persuasive management : Aristotle’s logos ethos pathos

From the ancient pyramids of Egypt last week to ancient Greece this week! I had the great pleasure of attending a training last week with the fabulous behavioural strategist and executive educator Rob-Jan de Jong with whom I had the pleasure of working in my previous role for a number of years. Once again COVID-19 required us to be online for the training, and as great as it would have been to be together physically for Rob’s session, it went extremely well delivered over half day sessions throughout the course of the week. 

One of the closing activities in Rob’s strategic leadership program is being able to sell your vision and persuade others based on Aristotle’s 2000-year-old formula in his work Rhetoric. For an accessible read about the technique Rob uses by applying ancient Greek philosophy of logos pathos and ethos, and using metaphoric imagery to enhance your managerial influence and persuasion, you can refer to this HBR article from Harvard exec education scholar Carmine Gallo on Aristotle’s five rhetorical devices, or my video summary at the end of this article below. 

Rob makes his training a playful and fun learning experience by adding an interesting challenge of selling our vision of change at the end of the session incorporating three metaphors based on randomly selected words. I enjoyed this creative exercise and took time to work on my passion and vision for the transformation to manager-coach. As I said to my learning peers I would do, I’m sharing my version here for you (a little fleshed out compared to my hastily prepared version last week).

Hopefully, in addition to the use of metaphors, you will find the right doses of ethos (some personal insight to my background, and my credibility), logos (logical argument) and pathos (emotion). Conscious that everyone is driven by different motivational drivers, its of course important to try and mix the use so there's a bit of something to appeal to everyone.

The manager of yesterday will be the manager-coach of tomorrow

As many of you already know, from reading my regular Linkedin activity, I have a real passion for people management. Whether managers like it or not, change is on the way, and the manager of yesterday will need to be the manager-coach of tomorrow, demonstrating their leadership skills to guide, support and develop their teams and help transform into a learning organization ready to face the significant changes we face ahead from a business perspective to reach our business ambition to become the responsible energy major, diversifying our production and energy products and services and get to net-zero emissions by 2050. 

My passion for management started out during the early years of my career when I was entrusted with managing a team of lawyers and translators in my first company. I have great memories of my learning lessons of how not to do management in those early days, managing the team I was once in. It wasn’t easy. In fact the job was a bit like trying on a pair of brand new designer shoes, it looked good and had a nice price tag, but I found myself quickly getting blisters and not walking as fast as I was used to. It was nevertheless an experience that allowed me completely reassess where I wanted to take my career, and what motivated me.

During the banking crisis of 2007-8 the company hit hard times, its real estate, mortgage and currency exchange businesses lines drying up quickly, and eventually went into liquidation in early 2009 after months of financial troubles. I was there to the last day helping the board negotiate with the bank and administrators. In absence of an HR team and being the lawyer in the senior management team, I had the task to lead 3 rounds of collective redundancies and parted company with, and said sad farewells to, many colleagues I had worked closely with for 6 years. 

The experience ultimately lead me to convert from legal to HR, as I was convinced if I could lead the worst and get through it with my team, keeping people engaged and performing despite these very trying times, and still be in good interpersonal relations then there was some hope I’d be good at my future job working with people in a more positive environment with less stressful challenges to our job security and financial stability. 

Some 12 years later and I am still in contact with many people from that period of my career, not so much on Linkedin, but on Facebook where contrary to my network here I have a small and tightly controlled network of less than 100 close connections. They are now personal friends rather than ex-colleagues. Of course I didn’t have the benefit of knowing it back then, but with the benefit of hindsight to look back and connect the dots, I can now see that my management through times of financial crisis set me on the road to where I am today. I’m proud these relationships have lasted overtime, and realise now that in the face of the uncertain times during crisis, our working relationship was firmly build on trust, and we were a highly effective and performing team. I certainly didn’t have the theoretical knowledge of management best practice back then, and have learnt so much since. Being thrown into managing a team of highly qualified experts, who were more experienced and credible in their professional domains than I was at the time, was a humbling experience that cemented my view that a manager doesn’t need to have all the answers, and is there to support the team and their emotional wellbeing, facilitate their work and help them to improve and grow over time.

Fast forward to today, and having managed HR teams in operational roles in the UK, and having the honor of leading a great team of learning and development professionals at global level from France and directing the leadership development programs and management training offer, I am now recognized to some extent as a thought leader in management matters. That’s probably what lead to the fortuitous position I currently hold, working on our company project and people ambition Better Together, promoting the role of manager-coach and supporting our 10,000 managers in our different business segments and subsidiaries worldwide in their role and missions. 

As one of our great HR Directors recently said, the projects we have launched with Better Together is like having a newborn baby. We have come through what was a very challenging childbirth (for those of us in the project team anyway!) and we are now enjoying the proud moments of staring our beautiful baby in the eyes. Of course our babe will grow, and will change shape and size, and will probably have some awkward ugly phases, take its first autonomous steps, stumble a bit no doubt before going from strength to strength. I am confident that it will become a sturdy, strong and caring individual and be absolutely core to the family. 

So, we are at the start of some high-adrenalin times ahead. Our company project Better Together whisks up the wind of change and it feels like standing on a beautiful sandy beach, kitting myself up ready to wade confidently out into the waves and take to the air on a kite surf. Sure there’ll be some jumps and tumbles ahead, we’re bound to get a little shaken up, but we’re going places, and we’re going there fast. It is fair to say, in the various HR and managerial roles I have had the honor to hold so far I’ve embraced the wind of change in many different contexts. Nothing so far in my career has been more exhilarating than the changes brought about by my current work impacting tens of thousands of employees in 130 different countries. Whilst it’s not all easy, I am deeply convinced that the end goal is for the better, for our employees, for the managers themselves, but ultimately for the business, and our ability collectively to meet the challenges of our business ambition. 

Metaphors

So, yes, you probably guessed it, the words I randomly selected for my three metaphors were shoes, baby and kite surf. Not the most corporate of metaphors, granted, but I hope they bring my storytelling to life. I regret just that I had kite surf, as anyone who knows me personally is aware I’m not the sportiest of chaps, and despite having grown up just minutes from the sea in the surfers’ paradise of Cornwall, I can barely even stand up on a surf board, let alone kite surf. I do, however, love being on a beach and feeling the wind in my face. 

As a manager-coach, it is your role to articulate the business’ strategic roadmap, help your team to visualise and make sense of it, support the implementation of changes that are doubtless going to impact your team in helping the business to evolve, and connect the dots for them to understand the link between the activity of your team and the wider goals of the organisation. Persuading your team to act and meet objectives is a crucial element of ensuring they understand their common purpose and goal, giving a sense of engagement and ensuring our collective success. 

Alan Lambert is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major