3 Golden Rules of Driving Audience Towards Action
Convincing your target audience about your ideas, goals, and objectives is difficult. When you present a new policy to your employees, you will often feel resistance and defensive body language from them. The prime reason is the lack of appeal, intention, or persuasion in your voice, body language, and how the words roll out of your mouth.
As a leader or company executive, you have often faced difficulties while dealing with situations where you have angry and annoyed employees at hand. Convincing them for a cause or driving them toward action is not easy. There are several obstacles that you may have to face. This is where the following discussion will come into play.
The following section will discuss the three golden rules driving your audience toward action. To put it in simpler words, we will talk about how you can convince your employees or drive them towards executing your vision or work towards achieving your goals as if they were their own.
Preparation
The preparation stage is the very first rule to drive your employees towards taking action or following your principles and vision. Here, you have to focus on understanding what others are feeling or what their mindset is at the present instead of devoting your time and efforts to conveying your message to your employees. Let’s take an example where you want to launch a product.
In the preparation stage, first, you identify your long-term and short-term goals and then decide what you have to do to achieve them. Since you are the leader or the executive, you will be in sole discretion for orchestrating the workflows to achieve long-term and short-term goals. While doing so, you may forget that your goals or how you present them to your employees might not help you onboard them and meet them at the same time.
Therefore, you must orchestrate your goals and the process of achieving them in a way that sounds empathetic, convincing, humble, and understanding. For instance, start by thinking about your employees’ thoughts about your goals and the preparation workflow you just orchestrated. Once you have an understanding of their mindset, you will be able to gain better insights into their pain points and address them at the very beginning.
Appealing or persuasion
The next stage of driving your employees towards action is applying appeal or persuasion principles. Here, we can draw examples from an ancient way of persuasion developed by the Greeks. In this, we have three things to focus on: logos, ethos, and pathos. Each method of persuasion appeals to a certain section or attribute. For instance:
- Logos means presenting your appeal in the form of logical facts and reasoning. In this case, you may use logic to answer your employees’ questions, solve their pain points, and persuade them to join your plan.
- Ethos is a process where you appeal with the help of values and ethics. Your ultimate goal will be to influence your employees by taking references from common ethics and values they usually follow, like tapping into their frustration and annoyed mindset, overwhelmed feelings, and so on.
- The third method of persuasion is pathos, where you tap into the pool of human emotions to convey your message and ensure your employees come on board to join you in your agenda.
Now, when you want to influence your employees, you can choose either of the methods or create a plan by properly combining all three. For example, if the first three attempts were a complete failure and you want to convince your employees to take the fourth attempt, you cannot start with logos or make an appeal based on logic. Instead, you have to combine ethos and pathos, where you will target their ethical values and emotions and then make room for applying logic to answer their questions.
Convincing through intention
The last rule is to convince your audience through intention. Until you clarify what you are thinking or intend, never expect your employees to completely understand your goals and vision. You have to meet them somewhere, and this is where the topic of intention comes into play.
Once you present your intention in an influencing manner, you can easily convince them to walk on the road you have formed. However, do not expect to move them through intentions that might not resonate with their goals, ethics, and morals.
For example, suppose you intend to make the fourth attempt at product launch successful. In that case, you need to prepare a convincing speech that resonates with your employees’ problems and frustration and then shift towards explaining what you intend to do to make it a success.
Conclusion
This article presents the three most important rules one should remember while orchestrating a plan to drive their target audience toward action. It is not easy to convince others to follow your goals and ideals. But with the help of these three rules, you can succeed in doing so, provided you focus properly on your body language, tone or voice, and the way you present the words.
