When Winston Churchill wanted to inspire the British to victory in World War II, he stirringly asked them for their “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” So, how do America’s corporate leaders try to motivate their people in these demanding times? They strike a bargain: If you do this for me, I’ll pay you that.

We’ve forgotten what leadership is. Historically, great leaders have succeeded by creating a powerful emotional relationship with their followers. Yet the history of business in the 20th century could be described as a continual attempt to drive emotion out of the workplace in the name of scientific management.

The only way to recover—the only way to lead an organization to success in times of rapid, confusing change—is to give emotion its due. In particular, leaders have to learn to help their followers find the emotion they crave most: self-esteem.

Now, as a word, “self-esteem” has lost its punch. Its meaning is almost as gelatinous as “leadership.” So, why am I such a proponent of self-esteem?

It doesn’t take much, in fact, to believe that people like to feel good about themselves and that they seek out those who help them do so. People do this at work at least as much as they do it in their personal lives. Work can determine our feelings of competence, mastery, and achievement. Work is even more important than it used to be in determining self-esteem because people don’t separate their work and private lives as much as they once did, and because e-commerce success stories have made so many people believe that they can aspire to greatness.

People will follow those who make them feel good about themselves at their jobs, because they will perceive those leaders to be charismatic. That willingness to follow is crucial. Without it, organizations get tangled up in political infighting and can’t react quickly enough to changes in the marketplace. In fact, the disgruntled may just leave. The good ones certainly have the opportunity, given all the competition for talent, and there are plenty of companies that hold out the prospect of great, ego-satisfying success.

Even as people have increased the demands they place on their jobs, so have employers increased demands on their people. Management no longer wants just quantifiable output from employees. It wants creativity, commitment, even psychological identification from its workers. But these are emotional responses—possible only from people who are fully engaged in their jobs. No amount of scientific management will evoke these emotional responses.

Yet, rather than focus on people’s need to succeed, businesses have followed in the tradition of the time-and-motion studies that Frederick Taylor popularized in the early 1900s, to break work down into simple, repeatable tasks. In addition, re-engineering and the union movement have made emotional engagement difficult because employees are suspicious of management’s intentions. Finally, the addition to the work force of so many women and minorities has left white male managers rather confused about how to deal with them. So, managers have become carefully distant.

The good news is that leaders aren’t just born, they’re made. Even the great leaders practice constantly. Think again of Churchill, the childhood stutterer who became perhaps the finest orator of this century. A new butler once heard him speaking loudly during his daily bath and rushed in. “Did you call me, sir?” he asked. Churchill replied: “No. I was addressing Parliament.”

But what should we practice? How do we learn to feed our employees’ emotional needs so well that they will perceive us as charismatic and follow us, helping all of us attain great heights?

Drawing on the psychological study of how parents nurture children, I’d suggest four principal techniques that will help your employees build their self-esteem:

MIRRORING: When a mother and infant look into each others’ faces and spontaneously smile, this is pure mirroring. When a great leader takes pride in “my men and women,” the feeling is reciprocated. In one of the greatest motivational speeches ever made, Nelson Mandela began his presidency by praising the great South African people, black and white, who peacefully brought about a revolution in the country’s social system. You can bet the audience felt good about his genuine regard for them.

IDEALIZATION: The roots of this technique are in a youngster’s feelings that his parents are omnipotent, the best. “My dad can lick any dad on the block” becomes: “Our company kicks butt.” People derive tremendous ego gratification from working for a person or firm perceived as being at the top of its field. Leaders encourage this.

TWINSHIP: This technique builds on a child’s delight in doing something special with a parent. At its core, twinship’s message to followers is that you can accomplish your goals through me, not by going around me. Mandela, for instance, was essentially telling his listeners: Together, you and I will transform South Africa according to our dreams.

SELF-OBJECTS: This involves followers’ identifying so closely with their parents—or, later in life, an enterprise or concept—that it becomes a part of them. When people identify themselves with schools, teams, and companies, they gain self-esteem if those organizations succeed. New York fans got a huge boost when Joe Torre’s Yankees won the World Series. Great leaders encourage this kind of identification. Just so, Jack Welch got people to identify with General Electric, then amassed great psychic credit for making it successful. (One caution: This principle works on the downside, too. So, leaders need to encourage identifications with self-objects they can make successful.)

Using these four techniques will greatly increase the charisma that you have with your employees, helping you keep your organizations nimble as times and circumstances demand quick strategic changes.

But here’s a warning: The booming economy and surging stock prices make leadership all the harder. Almost anyone can convince people to change during a crisis. It’s far harder to do what Charles Schwab did when he convinced a thriving business that it would become obsolescent unless everyone pitched in and quickly prepared for on-line stock sales. The business world seems to need lots of Schwabs these days, because successful businesses are having to change fundamentally, long before problems show up in earnings.

There is only one way to obtain a mandate for change in anticipation of marketplace shifts: through strong leadership. Through leadership that is charismatic. Through leadership that motivates people by engaging their hearts. Through leadership that understands the dreams and aspirations of those who will actually accomplish the task.

Zonis is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he teaches an extremely popular course on leadership. He is also a principal of Marvin Zonis + Associates, a political-risk consulting firm. He can be reached at zonis@mza-inc.com.