Customer Reviews

Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

On the plus side, this book does highlight an important aspect of leadership that is often neglected - the emotional element. The book identifies six basic styles of leadership and suggests how and when each of those styles may be used effectively. This is good and useful information.

On the negative side, the authors appear so disconnected with reality that it is often difficult to take them seriously. They honestly seem to think that emotional intelligence (EI) is the only important aspect to business and that personality, ambitions, abilities (other than EI abilities), and strategy are virtually irrelevant. They never acknowledge many aspects of the real world such as some people don't belong in certain roles or organizations and need to be removed, ideally with "EI". Another example is that leaders need to be focused on the real world and not just emotions. If assumptions about the market for a new product are found to be falsly optimistic, all the "EI" in the world is not going to replace admitting a mistake was made and pulling the plug.

While it doesn't have the emotional component, I'd recommend The Prime Movers by Edwin Locke to cover the other aspects of leadership that are neglected by this book.

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.

Primal Leadership is a great book about leadership, especially since it give credence to the "emotional priming" that happens with public figures. Too often, leaders forget about the impact they have on their people.

My only complaint with the book is its length. I do a lot of leadership development work and find my clients have difficulty deriving a "take home" from the book and many won't take the time to read it because of its size. A friend just introduced me to a new EQ book, "The Emotional Intelligence Quickbook" by Bradberry and Greaves. It's short, covers the needed information, and comes with a free online copy of The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal. I recommend you try that if you've run into the same difficulty.

"Primal Leadership" is the latest best-seller in the "emotional intelligence" business book series that has become a franchise for psychologist and former New York Times writer Daniel Goleman.

It might be accurately subtitled: "Three Ph.D.s Cite Tons of Research to Convince Business Executives (Yet Again) that Feelings Matter to People at Work."

The research underlying the authors' assertions about the importance of improving one's emotional control and quality of interpersonal relationships is chronicled in end notes that run 34 pages in relatively small point type.

If you aren't an end note reader, you may not notice that the otherwise credible trio of Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee often give no credit whatsoever in the book's very readable main narrative to the scientists whose work they unabashedly appropriate or reference only in passing. This is especially surprising and disappointing given Dr. Boyatzis's own substantial and distinguished history of contributions to the academic and practical literature.

The "Primal Leadership" authors' well-documented case boils down to this: 1) People respond to their leaders either positively or negatively. And therefore, 2) Leaders need to work on developing an effective leadership style by A. Knowing themselves, B. Controlling their emotional impulses, C. Relating better to others, D. Influencing others to further the organization's work.

Hard to argue with that, even without a truckload of citations.

Now the critical question: Will reading this book give you the tools to improve your own "emotional intelligence"?

In a word, an emphatic and disappointing, no.

You may find yourself jumping up and down screaming, "Yes! Yes! Yes!," to the book's persuasive demand for better leaders, but you're inevitably left whimpering, "Now what?"

For example, the authors tell us we need to "reconfigure" our brains but offer scant help in defining a useful process for accomplishing that. In fact, that is the recurring fatal flaw for this occasionally impressive work--calling for action but specifying little but tired, overly-familiar generalities.

Its recommendations should be familiar to anyone who has ever taken the most basic leadership course (or heard even a mediocre professional speaker at a conference in the past 30 years):
1. Picture your ideal self.
2. Assess your current self.
3. Develop a learning agenda.
4. Experiment with new practices.

5. Develop supportive relationships.

To flesh out these familiar themes, "Primal Leadership" offers vague approaches such as "stealth learning"--code, apparently, for accidental learning by, uh, living.

And it points to old standbys such as using mental rehearsal and actual practice to break old habits. On what should you focus your mental and physical rehearsals?

Well, the authors advise paying attention to your 360-degree feedback, and perhaps finding a mentor or hiring a coach to find out.

Hardly the stuff that one needs reams of doctorate-level research to conclude.

The same is true of the advice offered for "building emotionally intelligent organizations." The authors suggest creating "process norms" and ground rules for teams, and holding honest conversations about the culture that people work in.

Does any of that strike you as new or even particularly insightful? Okay, how about this one. The authors urge: Have a vision.

A busy executive simply won't find much here for undertaking the self-improvement for which Dr. Goleman and his colleagues incessantly lobby. In fact, you could capture all the book's useful advice in a one-page outline. But it will take you many hours to tease it out of the lengthy prose. And once you have, it won't impress you as new or novel.

In the final analysis, this sizeable and serious-sounding book is neither scholarly nor practical. It is a resounding success in making a compelling case for action but then fails just as miserably in offering nothing but the vaguest and most uninspired plan for action.

Strip away the research citations and Daniel Goleman and his erstwhile colleagues have delivered the same old plea for better leaders with the same old solutions for creating them--all dressed up in a new best-seller.

So, unfortunately, for the intended business manager reader this well-documented work amounts to intellectual cherries jubilee: tantalizing, sophisticated, carefully prepared, but devoid of useful nutrients.

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.

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.

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.

This book has taught me the humbleness of being a leader. Seems like an oxymoran, doesn't it? However, being a leader means to serve and to be sensitive to those you see you. Seeing the world's from another's eyes is the key to leadership. Unfortunately, many leaders lack this important compentency. A good leader must be able to see the big picture and incorporate the competencies w/eloquence and skill. More importantly, at the appropriate time. I've been humbled and re-built by not only the ECI survey but the book as well. As leaders, we must learn to follow before we can learn to lead and Primal Leadership is the foundation to learning how to "serve." I have several people I informally mentor @ Roadway Express and we are studying this book right now and it has does wonders for us all. This is my second time through it and it should be part of all college curriculums regardless of the subject.

If you are in business or a management capacity, this bookis a must read. It will transform your results.