Teach: Emotion Tools

The following tools are some of our favorites for teaching the emotions of leadership.

  • Please tell our community about how you use these tools and ask people for advice about how they use the tools on our LinkedIn groups page.
  • If you have tools that you like to use when overviewing leadership, and you are willing to share them with us, please let us know by sending a message to ppl@louisville.edu.

The Other-Praising Emotions Exercise

Free! This tool can be requested from the Project on Positive Leadership.

  • Activity
    • By Ryan Quinn
    • Date of Publication: 2021
  • Summary: This document provides a worksheet for personal reflection and an interview protocol, so that participants in a class can reflect on their personal experiences with other-praising emotions such as awe, elevation, admiration, gratitude, inspiration, and respect. When the reflection is complete, participants are then assigned to pairs and given questions to interview each other about their respective experiences. The interview questions are designed to help participants learn about emotions generally, about other-praising emotions in particular, and most particularly about how other-praising emotions make positive leadership work. They do so in a visceral way that taps into participants’ personal experiences. A teaching note (PPL-2021-113-TN) suggests useful ways to put this tool to work in the classroom or outside of the classroom.

Praise: Elevating Team Appreciation

Free! This tool can be requested from the Project on Positive Leadership.

  • Activity
    • By Vivian Blade, MBA, MBB, PMP
    • Date of Publication: 2021
  • Summary:  Praise, the fifth Resilience Ready Principle, is a gift that gives back when you give it away. This resource helps you to engage your team in building a practice of praise and recognition within your team culture.

Andrew Thornton

  • Case
    • Price: $4.25
    • London Business School
    • Date of Publication: 2018
  • Summary: This case already focuses on emotion in followers and can be re-purposed to focus even more explicitly and comprehensively on the topic. Specifically, students could be assigned a reading on emotions, and then the instructor could ask them to (a) distinguish positive and negative emotions in the case, including the benefits of negative emotions and the drawbacks of positive emotions; (b) specifically identify other-praising emotions such as admiration, inspiration, elevation, gratitude, respect, and awe and how they help us to see where leadership is occurring in the case; (c) examine the effects of other-praising emotions, both with regards to followership and in general; (d) how the emotions of leadership differ from the emotions of management; and (e) why it matters that we make these distinctions.