[.ca] Primal Leadership: Realizing The Power Of Emotional ... (ISBN 1559277432)

From Amazon.com:
Business leaders who maintain that emotions are best kept out of the work environment do so at their organization's peril. Bestselling author Daniel Goleman's theories on emotional intelligence (EI) have radically altered common understanding of what "being smart" entails, and in Primal Leadership, he and his coauthors present the case for cultivating emotionally intelligent leaders. Since the actions of the leader apparently account for up to 70 percent of employees' perception of the climate of their organization, Goleman and his team emphasize the importance of developing what they term "resonant leadership." Focusing on the four domains of emotional intelligence--self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management--they explore what contributes to and detracts from resonant leadership, and how the development of these four EI competencies spawns different leadership styles. The best leaders maintain a style repertoire, switching easily between "visionary," "coaching," "affiliative," and "democratic," and making rare use of less effective "pace-setting" and "commanding" styles. The authors' discussion of these methods is informed by research on the workplace climates engendered by the leadership styles of more than 3,870 executives. Indeed, the experiences of leaders in a wide range of work environments lend real-life examples to much of the advice Goleman et al. offer, from developing the motivation to change and creating an improvement plan based on learning rather than performance outcomes, to experimenting with new behaviors and nurturing supportive relationships that encourage change and growth. The book's final section takes the personal process of developing resonant leadership and applies it to the entire organizational culture. --S. Ketchum

Highly recommended for leadership development:
I have to admit, I enjoyed the first half of the book (devoted to personal leadership styles, competencies, and learning) more than the second half (which focuses on organizational development). I've assigned this book and related exercises to a number of my executive coaching clients. Even if they only breeze through emotional intelligence domains and associated competencies (page 39) and the styles of leadership (summarized on page 55), we have plenty to work with. Clients come back amazed at how often they employ non-resonant styles (and begin to notice the consequences), at how transparent their moods are to others, etc. One client, hugely successful in prior businesses, wondered aloud if he should "go back" to his former hard-driving (Pace-Setting) style, given his lackluster experience in his current tech start-up using a softer approach. It helped him to distinguish between his former endeavors (where his teams were highly self-motivated, competent, and connected to one another) and his current endeavor (where there was less intrinsic trust and some questions about competencies on the team). Rather than the often dissonant Pace-Setting style, he realized the need to emphasize more resonant styles, especially some very specific Coaching style interventions to address competency issues. After working together, it wasn't just about "hard" or "soft" styles in business, but about appropriate styles for different situations. If you're interested in "integral theory" then this is one of of the ones that counts. Here's a quick mapping of models that Primal Leadership explores and how they relate to the the domains of integral theory: * Self-awareness and self-management map to the subjective world, my world, the world of "I." While "mood" is covered, I would have liked to see more of a distinction between mood (a person's ongoing "climate") and emotions (a person's current reactions or "weather"). * Social awareness and relationship management map to the intersubjective world; the world of business, culture, and relationships, where many rules are unwritten and must be sensed. Social competence is the world of "We." * The "neuroanatomy of leadership," with its focus on how the brain works and learns, maps to the objective world, the world of physical phenomena and measurements, the world of "It." Primal Leadership is an easy read, but it's also a great reference, with models that people "get." Highly recommended!

We read this book for a class assignment - mixed reviews:
We read Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. The authors are well educated and actively participate in the organizational field through consortiums, boards, and consulting. Each author has written numerous best selling books, articles, and programs to help leader become great leaders. The book is broken into three parts: The Power Of Emotional Intelligence, Making Leaders, and Building Emotionally Intelligent Organizations. The main points of The Power of Emotional Intelligence are that leaders are not born, with opportunity and training leaders can be made, and leaders either create resonance or dissonance. Resonant leaders bring positive energy, create excitement and passion for an organizational goal or objective, inspire excellence, and promote collaboration. Dissonant leaders are out of touch with the feelings of others, create emotionally toxic environments, and dispirit by misleading or manipulating. The authors describe four traits that emotional intelligent leaders have in varying degrees: self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. The main points of Making Leaders are that many leaders do not get appropriate feedback, training and seminars rarely provide lasting change, and self directed learning is the best way to change behavior. Self Directed Learning is a five step process that address who you want to be, who you are, developing an agenda, practicing, and feedback. The main points of Building Emotionally Intelligent Organizations are that the most effective teams are those where the leader relinquishes complete control to the team and sustainable changes should be an ongoing process rather than a one time program. Overall, we felt that the book was well presented. We, each had a different break-through with the book. For instance, one group member felt that the discussion about leaders being made instead of born was beyond prevailing mainstream thinking. Another group member had never heard of the CEO Disease, which describes how, as a leader ascends in power and influence, the quality of feedback diminishes and the leader becomes unable to correctly self assess their effectiveness. Others related to the differences between resonant and dissonant leaders and the realization that many of our leaders are untrained and have no organizational opportunities to grow as a leader. Our action plan includes making sure that leaders have 360 degree feedback, access to mentors and coaches, establish weaknesses and goals to bridge the gaps between their strengths and weaknesses, and have opportunities both social and professional to practice. In conclusion, we would recommend this book to some people but not to everyone. The book focused more on theory rather than practice. We would have preferred several different applications of the theories to case studies, and a more in depth discussion of the four main skills used by managers. Overall, the book was relatively easy to follow, but difficult to remain engaged in. There were some discussions about neuroanatomy that some of us found hard to understand and that tended to break the flow of the book. Primal Leadership had great leadership philosophies in it, but we found many of those philosophies were not knew. We agreed that there are other books on the market that are easier to read and provide more application.

More connections of "Primal Leadership" and Neuroscience:
This is a very interesting and substantial book and I recommend it highly. It illustrates one thing that'd probably be too trivial in the context of child development, yet is very surprising when applied in the context of leadership: a leader would probably be considered autistic if he/she leads by being just intellectually or analytically superior - the leader must connect affectively with troops to be effective, explicitly or implicitly. Having said that, I think the main points can be further elucidated if it spends a bit more time in incorporating more findings from neuroscience. In particular, I find its arguments for the main themes inadequate by just employing brain¡¯s cognitive and emotional functions. In fact, there are two other brain functions that are orthogonal to the fore-mentioned functions, but nonetheless play key roles in the leadership as well: the automatic and controlled function of the brain. Some of leadership behavior can probably be better explained by the following framework: cognitive and controlled, cognitive and automatic, emotional and controlled, and finally emotional and automatic.

Opens up another dimension for leadership:
Emotionally intelligent leaders connect with their people. This leadership quality speaks for itself, unites employees behind the leader's mission, encouraging them to be more productive. This book is uniquely valuable in that it explains the value of different types of repertoire -- visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic -- and when to apply them. Daniel Goleman should be applauded for restoring humanity into the workplace with his concept of Emotional Intelligence. Personally, I achieved emotional intelligence with a practical how-to book called "Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self." Optimal Thinking explains the message behind each emotion and provides the best questions to ask ourselves and others to obtain emotional resolution and optimal results.

Disappointing :(:
Though I've always liked Daniel Goleman's writings on the subject of emotional intelligence, I found this book frustrated me, and here's why: - It's heavily theoretical without also being concise. I don't have a problem with a theoretical text in principle, but I found the material extremely repetitive. The authors found a dozen ways to say the same things, often one after the other. The use of jargon is excessive and didn't contribute anything useful. - It is, in large part, a reworking of Goleman's previous material. There is a tendency among authors who come out with a big success to milk an idea for all it's worth. Goleman has fallen victim to this. Apart from more anecdotes, there is nothing new here, and precious little in the way of new *quantitative* information, despite copious references to "studies": Percentages are dropped without an explanation of how they were measured or arrived at. Even from an academic point of view (especially from an academic point of view!) that's sloppy. Theoreticians tend to stay theoreticians. What I was hoping for was a more practical guidebook. Unfortunately, this isn't it. (It looks like a way to make some more money on "emotional intelligence" -- but that's only my opinion.) If what you're looking for is a roadmap and some truly practical ideas for using emotional intelligence in leadership in your organization, you will need to look elsewhere.