Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #60

Show Notes:

This week Sara provides another Business Bite on Influencing Others. She shares three different ways to influence or make appeals: logical appeals, emotional appeals, and co-operative appeals. Each speaks to a different part of us such as our head, heart and hands. Consider each of these perspectives when engaging with the other party to make an appeal that is most effective for them. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode!

Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.

Episode #60: Business Bites: Influencing others

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week we're going to be talking about influencing others or using different kinds of appeals. The Center for Creative Leadership talks about three different ways to influence others or to make appeals, with logical appeals, emotional appeals, and cooperative appeals.

Now, each of these speaks to a different part of us. For example, logical appeals speak to our head, thinking about our minds, the logic orientation, what's the data that supports a particular decision? What might be some of the organizational and or personal benefits to the specific choice that we're trying to make? And to think about people's rational and intellectual passions as part of the way that we influence them to do the thing that we want.

For emotional appeals, we're going to be thinking about other people's hearts. How do we tug at the heartstrings, connect perhaps our goal to what their goals might be, and help that other person see how the appeal that we're making is in service of them, or helping others in some way, or speaking to their well-being, or thinking about how can we best gain that individual support.

The last kind of appeal is the cooperative appeal, which speaks to the hands. Thinking about how do we extend a hand to others, thinking about collaboration, consultation, community, and engaging with other people in being able to do that thing together towards accomplishing a mutual goal.

Now, when we're thinking about using each of these different appeals, I'd like to provide an example of how each of them might be used. Let's say I am on the board of your local food bank, and I'm trying to get you to raise money for the organization or to donate funds to it. When we're thinking about making a logical appeal, I might speak to you, for example, thinking about what the numbers show, what is the greatest impact that you can provide? What is the difference to a food bank for raising money versus thinking about the amount of food they can buy?

On the surface, the end goal is we want to reach more people that have food insecurity. But how do I appeal to your logic? What is the rational decision around that choice? And if I can speak to your logical appeal, helping you understand things like, let's say for this particular food bank, giving cans, giving dry products, that's a great way to serve. But if you provide money, that is the best way to provide the largest impact. That is a rational approach.

An emotional approach or emotional appeal might be for me to tell you a story about how the funds will be used, how we are going to make an impact with a specific person. I might tell a story about an individual who is struggling with food insecurity and for their family, what lengths they need to go to access that food, to be able to provide healthy meals for their family. That's an emotional story, which has you, the person I'm trying to get to donate money, react in a different kind of way than it would for the logical appeal that we just talked about.

The last angle is to talk about a cooperative appeal. As I mentioned, this is thinking about that community orientation. So again, if I'm the food bank, I want to think about how I can speak to you about how this impacts our community, how it can provide service, how we are supporting our neighbors and other folks in our community with the much-needed resources. And this is talking about us, how we help each other be able to get this thing done.

Now, I know I've been mentioning the food bank in this context, but when we're talking about this type of appeal, it sounds familiar probably. When we're thinking about giving campaigns, donating to nonprofit causes, oftentimes they will use a combination of these three appeals to be able to speak to us. Now, I'm not revealing any kind of secret in the development world or in philanthropy, but I'd like you to think about this in ways around how we try to influence others in a professional context.

You may have folks that you work with who might speak more to the logical appeal. What is the business case for what we're doing and how do we get that to work? If we're thinking about the emotional appeal, you may have colleagues or you may have clients who speak more to the reason, the rationale, the storytelling concept behind the purpose of what we're trying to do.

And for those who cooperative appeals is a more successful approach, you may find it best to work with them thinking about how are we moving this forward? How do we get this done as our organization, as our unit serving our community? Now, regardless of which of these three appeals you use, or if you try to use all three at once, it's thinking about these different perspectives of how we can engage with the other party and make an appeal that's most effective for them.

This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.