• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

This Manager’s Change Initiatives Lacked Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Case Study on Aristotle’s Persuasion Framework

January 22, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Persuasive Manager

In my previous article, I reviewed Aristotle’s framework for persuasion and argumentation: to win over others to a particular point of view, it’s necessary to appeal through ethos (credibility,) pathos (emotion,) and logos (reason.) In this article, I give a case study of organizational initiative that lacked ethos, pathos, and logos.

Consider the case of a young mid-level manager I coached last year. Helen (name changed for anonymity) recently joined the finance department of a capital-goods company. Two months into her job, she was bothered by her lack of initial success in bringing about change at her workplace.

Helen was smart, driven, and had a great professional track record. During her interviews, she had impressed her supervisors by her hard work, drive, and creative ideas. They recruited her to implement rigorous audit processes.

Just a few weeks after joining, Helen drew from her previous experience and generated many new and creative ideas to overhaul the financial audit processes. Her supervisors had given her all the responsibility and authority to bring about the necessary changes. However, she quickly encountered a problem: her peers and team members would not buy into her ideas.

In meetings where Helen spoke of her vision for change, her peers and team members would politely pay lip service to her ideas, but when it came to actually implementing her suggestions, nothing seemed to happen. Helen received a 360-degree feedback exercise about how her peers and team members perceived her and her ideas.

How to be More Persuasive

Helen was startled by the feedback she received. In response, she decided to improve her approach to selling her ideas by working on all three dimensions of Aristotle’s persuasion framework.

  • Ethos: Helen lacked ethos among her peers and her team members. She possessed ethos in the eyes of her superiors who’d recruited her and granted her authority to bring about the necessary change, but not with her peers and team members. She realized that she needed to prove herself and her ideas’ credibility.
  • Pathos: Helen had failed to elicit pathos and never took the time and effort to involve her peers and team members in the decision-making and convince them of the need for change.
  • Logos: Helen assumed that the problems she had faced at her previous employer were the same problems her new employer faced. Without learning about the corporate culture and the existing audit processes by interviewing her peers and team members, Helen had made all her recommendations for change based on things she had seen work in other settings. Her suggestions found no resonance for her new colleagues—to them she seemed to be trying to fix problems that did not exist.

Idea for Impact: To persuade others to your point of view, you must understand what truly moves your audience and then appeal through all the elements of Aristotle’s ethos-pathos-logos framework.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Related

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression
  2. Don’t Say “Yes” When You Really Want to Say “No”
  3. What Most People Get Wrong About Focus
  4. How to Make Others Feel They Owe You One: Reciprocity and Social Influence
  5. If You Can’t “Think on the Spot,” Buy Yourself Time

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Character, Communication, Likeability, Negotiation, Persuasion, Presentations, Relationships

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Popular Now

Anxiety Assertiveness Attitudes Balance Biases Books Coaching Conflict Conversations Creativity Critical Thinking Decision-Making Discipline Emotions Entrepreneurs Etiquette Feedback Getting Along Getting Things Done Goals Great Manager Leadership Leadership Lessons Likeability Mental Models Mentoring Mindfulness Motivation Networking Parables Performance Management Persuasion Philosophy Problem Solving Procrastination Relationships Simple Living Social Skills Stress Thinking Tools Thought Process Time Management Winning on the Job Wisdom Worry

About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

Get Updates

Signup for emails

Subscribe via RSS

Contact Nagesh Belludi

RECOMMENDED BOOK:
How Will You Measure Your Life

How Will You Measure Your Life: Clayton Christensen

Harvard business strategy professor Clayton Christensen's exceptional book of inspiration and wisdom for achieving a purpose-filled, fulfilling life.

Explore

  • Announcements
  • Belief and Spirituality
  • Business Stories
  • Career Development
  • Effective Communication
  • Great Personalities
  • Health and Well-being
  • Ideas and Insights
  • Inspirational Quotations
  • Leadership
  • Leadership Reading
  • Leading Teams
  • Living the Good Life
  • Managing Business Functions
  • Managing People
  • MBA in a Nutshell
  • Mental Models
  • News Analysis
  • Personal Finance
  • Podcasts
  • Project Management
  • Proverbs & Maxims
  • Sharpening Your Skills
  • The Great Innovators
  • Uncategorized

Recently,

  • Racism and Identity: The Lie of Labeling
  • Why Your Partner May Be Lying
  • Inspirational Quotations #982
  • How to … Make Work Less Boring
  • How to … Communicate Better with Defensive People
  • How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed
  • How to … Plan in a Time of Uncertainty

Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.