Using Heartfelt Emotion to Increase Team Creativity

Get into the habit of drawing on “heartfelt emotion” to increase creativity within your team.

Drawing on your own, genuine emotions doesn’t just keep things positive. Ultimately it deepens the impact of positive interactions. Creativity is going to come that much more easily.

“Strong heartfelt emotions can halt our rational mental processes and connect us to people in a much more profound way than relatively mild feelings, such as relief or satisfaction or thankfulness. Heartfelt emotions make our hearts sing, and they set fire to our cognitive and perceptual abilities – traits that every business prizes.”

It seems obvious that heartfelt emotion should create more positive feelings and therefore drive creativity but truthfully, few of the companies take this approach, most likely out of ignorance.

“When team members experience heartfelt emotion, their creative ability ratchets up a notch. That’s why primal team leaders try to deepen team emotion.”

Have you ever worked for someone who exhibited such heartfelt emotions?

Why Some Startups Fail

There are a million ways to keep your company alive, but there are billions of ways to kill it. One of them is narrowing your market to dominate just that tiny part of it and calling it a great success. Of course, it is a success, but you're limiting yourself to the atom-sized portion of that market.

We all want to be successful. Those of us who have businesses and companies hope for victory in our ventures. And why wouldn’t we? Try to imagine someone thinking, “I think I’ll invent a new product and hope that it fails miserably”. That just seems ridiculous. However, in our excitement and hard work, we tend to do certain things that amplify the reality of our success, thus causing it to fail.

For example, have you ever found yourself with something you think is a really good idea? Let’s say you want to make really neat buttons. Bear with me here; it’s just an example. There are already tons of button manufacturing companies out there. This is made clear to you, but you think, “Oh, but my buttons won’t be like any other buttons. I’m going to make odd coloured ones with cool designs that no one will be able to find anywhere else”. Ok, great, but consider this: is there someone that would even want to buy these slightly unusual buttons? Maybe the reason why no one sees fancy buttons everywhere is because not a lot of people are interested in them. You’re trying to do something that’s already been done a thousand times over, but you think it’ll be successful because you change one thing about the idea.

You have to avoid blinding yourself to the reality of competition. Small minor differences in your ideas won’t take you far enough to make your business as successful as it could be. Differences have to be large and attractive. You have to have leverage on your competition by having something new and exciting to offer. Keep your eyes open to the possibilities, but be objective about your own ideas, too.

Impression Management, the Emotional Side of Leadership

Influence is part of your Social Skills- a component of your Social Competence.

While Social Skills, in general, is related to your adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others -Influence relates to your ability to wield effective tactics for persuasion.

People who have this competence usually:

•     Are skilled at winning people over.
•     Fine-tune presentations to win people over.
•     Anticipate their audience reaction to a message
•     Use complex strategies like indirect influence to build consensus and support
•     Manage events to effectively make a point.
•     Are strong at building rapport and solid relationships.

Influence is managed not only with logical arguments but also on an emotional level - known as impression management.  A top performer will usually have solid arguments and actions and will build behind-the-scenes support

Empathy is crucial for wielding influence, you can only have a positive impact on others if you sense how they feel and understand their position and their perspective.

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