Emotional Commitment: The Missing Link Between Leadership and High Performance

Why do some teams simply go through the motions while others accomplish extraordinary things?

In this episode of On the Shoulders of Giants, Jeff Wells explores the difference between employee engagement and emotional commitment—and why that distinction changes everything.

When people can connect their personal values to the work they do, they don't just perform better—they solve bigger problems, build stronger teams, and create lasting competitive advantage. But it starts with leadership. Leaders who aren't emotionally committed themselves can't expect their teams to be.

In this episode, you'll learn why emotional commitment is the foundation of high-performing organizations, why it begins with personal values and integrity, and how great leaders create workplaces where people genuinely want to contribute.

This conversation lays the foundation for the practical framework you'll explore in the next episode to help build emotionally committed leaders and teams.

What got your revenue here won’t get it where it needs to go next. On the Shoulders of Giants is the podcast from High Achiever
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Hosted by Jeff Wells, each episode explores the leadership principles, operating systems, and decision-making frameworks behind scalable, sustainable performance.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There might be a little dust on the bottle, but don't be fooled because what's inside is wisdom. I'm Jeff Wells, and this is on the shoulders of giants. First principles. In this session, we're going to talk about the necessity of leaders to be able to develop emotional commitment in themselves and their people. Doug Conant, the former president and CEO of Campbell's Soup, makes a perfect point when he says, to win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace. Those words are timeless, but had never been more appropriate than they are today. To understand why, all we have to do is take a few minutes to look at the statistical data related to our current state of work. Now the data is vast, but it's important to make a point. Today there are over a hundred million employees in the American workforce. About one-third of them are what Gallup would define as engaged at work, meaning they like their jobs and work to make it better every day. 51% are not engaged as defined by Gallup. They're just there collecting a paycheck with little to no purpose while many look for their next job. And tragically, 16% are what Gallup would define as actively disengaged, meaning they're miserable at work and are often negatively impact or destroy when engaged employees build. I don't share these statistics to be negative. I share them so that we as leaders have a baseline understanding of the real problem and can begin to focus on the things that will turn the problem around. You see, the data is clear and the numbers don't lie. What's perplexing is that virtually everyone we talk to is focused on how to run the business better and spends their time looking for better strategies, offerings, and markets to grow revenue. When we talk to executives, those are the topics that lead the discussion. It's rare to find an executive that comes to us and says, I have a leadership problem and I need to invest in my people. Leadership doesn't sell like tactics that promise revenue growth do, which is tragic because its leadership is the very thing we need to solve the problems we see in the current state of work. And the irony is that is that leaders who can build emotional commitment and continuity within the workforce create the most prolific competitive advantage there is for a company. It's the fastest way to accelerate revenue growth. We have found it to be so important that we no longer talk about how to drive better employee engagement. Great employee engagement is table stakes. We're focused on the higher bar of building emotional commitment within ourselves and our teams because it's the difference that makes the difference. Stan Slap, the founder and CEO of the Slap Company and author of the amazing book, I Left My Heart in Conference Room B, says leaders are the rare human beings who have the emotional commitment and can inspire it at will in others. Our goal is to help you remove the word rare from his quote and to build leaders and teams where emotional commitment and the ability to develop it is the rule and not the exception. So let's start by getting clear on how Mr. Slap defines and explains what emotional commitment is. Emotional commitment is an employee's intellectual head and emotional heart connection with a leader or employer demonstrated by motivation and commitment, their hands, to positively impact the company's vision and goals. You see, any organizational success on a legendary scale is the work of a team of emotionally committed people. Any manager can at will make it appear like they are engaged, fully, productive, and enthusiastic simply because they are financially, intellectually, and physically committed. But there's a difference between that and emotional commitment. Have you ever witnessed an individual emotionally committed to a cause working like they got paid a million dollars when they got paid nothing? There's a difference, and the difference is big. The neurobiological source for emotional commitment is not a mystery. It is the ability to live your own values in whatever you're involved in. As an example, the relationship with the company or your environment at work. Stan Slav sums it up like this: if you want an emotionally connected environment, anyone connected in that environment needs to be free to bring all of who they are into that environment unvarnished. A leader's emotional commitment is worth more than all of their financial, intellectual, physical commitment combined. Emotionally committed people will solve problems that even engaged employees can't begin to solve. People inherently want to be part of something bigger than themselves. We have a natural desire for purpose and long for something greater than just our day-to-day. We want to make a difference and a difference that matters. And we want to do it in a way that's integrated with who we are. Now, this desire exists across every generation, but it's upfront and center in what is now the largest generation of the workforce, millennials. They're vocal about it and not remotely afraid to vote with their feet if the companies they work for don't share the same perspective. And unfortunately, a lot either don't or do, but don't understand how to build an emotionally connected environment. There seems to be a misguided belief in business that we should live the company values and leave our personal values at the door on the way in, which implies that the company values are the priority and that personal values are subordinate to the company values. Now, while this is the perception, and this perception is alive and well in our companies, I'm inclined to believe that it's rarely the actual intent of executive teams who sit in rooms until the wee hours of the morning creating company values. It is, however, clear that good intent alone is not enough, and that in many cases the unintended consequences of good intent is evidenced by the experiences of employees in the workforce and the measured outcomes of those experiences communicated to us through research and analysis. You see, when employees and managers were surveyed and asked what their most important personal their most important values were, the overwhelming majority reported that family and integrity were most important. Those same people, then, when asked, what do you feel the most pressure to compromise in the pursuit of success in your role? The answer was family and integrity. The point is this, we have a workforce that is struggling to rationalize and integrate who they are with what they do. We have leaders who are struggling with it themselves, and as a result, they don't know how to build corporate environments that support it. The outcome is the measured results you see in the state of work data. What's so exciting is that companies and leadership teams who can learn to create this emotionally connected workforce will also experience the byproduct of it, which is massive competitive advantage and rapid growth. As we said before, emotionally committed people and teams will solve problems that just engaged or worse, disengaged people can't begin to solve. And as we have also said before, it starts with you first as leaders, then moves to your people. It's impossible to lead a high-achieving team who is emotionally committed in the absence of your own emotional commitment. Your personal values and the ability to live them out in the workplace is the root of your emotional commitment. When you learn to do this, then and only then can you help your teams do it. Before we lean into the how, we felt like it was important to create a foundation of what emotional commitment is and why it matters. In session two, we will show you how to develop and ensure that your emotional commitment as a leader is clear and resolute and give you the tools to begin to facilitate and empower your people to do the same. I'll see you in the next session.