One novel idea in this book is the new CEO, the Chief Emotions Officer - because leadership is all about emotion, and culture is the overall environment in which you find the aspects that you must concentrate to lead through emotion. Along with culture, you come up with a strategy that defines the numbers and the methods. Culture affects what and how people carry out their strategies. Great culture will multiply the results you want to see in your people; it is a natural consequence.

You cannot accurately define culture, but you can see its effects. Culture is like gravity. You know it is there, and you can feel it. Culture must be coupled with a value or belief system. Therefore, culture could sometimes be defined as the common set of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. All of these are invisible, but you can see the behaviours that identify a group. Specifically, a positive culture is any of these that helps developing “a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and community, an atmosphere of commitment and trust, self-esteem, pride, hope, passion, happiness, gratitude, and any other positive state of mind in your people”.

Culture is not replicable. Given enough time and money, your competitors can copy almost everything you did, hire away some of your best people, and reverse-engineer your processes. However, they cannot copy who you are or what you believe in. You should hire someone who would be a great culture fit. That is, “the best employees are not necessarily those that stand out purely for their technical skills”. Rather, they are “those capable of doing the job, adhering to the company’s values, and living according to its corporate culture on a daily basis”.

Your role as a leader is to create and manage the culture in your team. By creating cultures, you produce certain emotions to multiply results. Emotion is “the driving force behind motivation, positive or negative”. Emotion comes from the Latin emotĭo or “the state of being moved out of rest or put in motion”. Emotions, then, are the physical and mental reactions that lead human beings to move, to act. Examples of positive emotions include trust, pride, belonging, purpose, passion, and confidence; examples of negative emotions include distrust, dissatisfaction, disengagement, helplessness, frustration, anxiety, and apathy.

To manage the culture in your team, you should manage your own emotions and the emotions of your team members because your team is a state of mind. When people in your team feel the purpose, committed, and other positive emotions, they are able to inspire the rest of the group to act on. To manage emotions, you need to create and promote an environment and work practices that encourage positive states of mind.

Here are a few examples to create positive emotions in your team:

• To give people a sense of purpose, you will create a dream, a reason. By giving your team an important direction, you give them pride and hope in their work.
• To give people a sense of belonging and community, you establish your team with an identity and common values. You take care of each person’s well-being.
• To achieve commitment and trust, you relentlessly communicate who you are and what you are aiming for. You listen to your people and be empathetic. You are honest, have clear values, and practice what you preach. You connect with your team members.
• To improve self-esteem in your team, you establish a support system that promotes delegation, learning from mistakes, and openness to ideas from your team members.

As you create positive emotions in your team, you become the leader in your team. As a leader, you define and ignite a clear vision and strategy for the people in your team. You are a good coach. You have key technical skills, so you can help advise your team. You recruit and take care of your people, develop their talent and well-being as much as possible. You establish formal and informal systems for people to communicate and connect with each other. You design a decision-making system that empowers people without micromanaging them. Finally, you develop and leverage the appropriate culture for the success of your team.