Strategic HR Logos, Pathos And Ethos

Leaders of organization they use these elements to convey their messages about organization vision, mission, goals and strategy to help them get the buy in from middle managers, employess and external stakeholders, then the middle managers can easily work with employess to achieve it using different style and methods of management.

The three elements stand for as follow:

Logos: 

Means to convince an audience by use of logic or reason.To use logos would be to cite facts and statistics, historical and literal analogies, and citing certain authorities on a subject.Logos is the Greek word for “word".

Pathos:

Means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions.

Leaders use pathos to invoke sympathy from an audience; to make the audience feel what  the leader wants them to feel in order to prompt action. Pathos is the Greek word for both “suffering” and “experience.” The words empathy and pathetic  are derived from pathos.

Ethos:

Means to convince an audience of the author’s credibility or character.

Leaders would use ethos to show to their audience that they are a credible source and  worth listening to. Ethos is the Greek word for “character.” The word “ethic” is derived from ethos.

From the explanation of the three elements we can see how they mix togather and work in favor of leaders who really know how to mix it in the right manner and obtain the buy in. Combining mind (logos), heart (pathos) and soul (ethos) in a message is so powerful to resist or divert away, successful leaders in the world use it wisely which differentiate them from other leaders.

In contrast strategic HR is all about using these three elements in the organization to support the successful achievement of objectives, strategy, goals that will realize organization mission and vission, strategic HR as Dave Ulrich state in his books must convert from achieving and providing outcomes to specific measured deliverables for units, departments and functions in the organization through the services they provide.

Traditionally HR was seeing by organization top management as only pathos that they only want help employees and provide comfort to them on the expense of organization interests, while employees seeing HR as only logos that they only care about attendance records, wage and salaries calculation and cut off, employees productivity and tool for top management to cut cost and downsizing, while HR they see themselves as ethos making sure everything is going by the organization and top management book, rules and regulations, labor law, policies and procedures, this how it was before that is why the HR today is trying to show this is not the situation anymore, HR has become out of it and introduce the strategic HR concept drived from Dave Ulrich model of four HR strategic roles administrative expert, employee champion, strategic partner and change agent by using the combining elements of logos, pathos and ethos in the process.