Primal Leadership

Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

About the Author

Daniel Goleman is a co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He is widely recognized for his work on emotional intelligence. Richard Boyatzis is a professor and chairman of the Department of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Annie McKee is a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and consults with business leaders worldwide. Together, they bring a deep understanding of how emotional intelligence can transform leadership and organizational performance.

Main Idea

"Primal Leadership" explores how emotional intelligence is the key to effective leadership. The authors argue that great leaders move us by igniting passion and inspiring the best in us. This primal aspect of leadership works through emotions, and leaders who drive emotions positively bring out the best in everyone. In contrast, leaders who drive emotions negatively create dissonance, undermining the emotional foundations that allow people to thrive.

Table of Contents

1. The Vital Emotional Component of Leadership
2. Why Good Leaders Must Read Emotions
3. The Four Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence
4. The Leadership Repertoire
5. Developing Emotionally Intelligent Leaders
6. The Motivation to Change
7. Building Emotionally Intelligent Organizations
8. Reality and the Ideal Vision
9. Creating Sustainable Change

The Vital Emotional Component of Leadership

Gifted leadership occurs where heart and head—feeling and thought—meet. Effective leaders execute their vision by motivating, guiding, inspiring, listening, persuading, and creating resonance. This ability lies in the design of the human brain, specifically in its open-loop system. We rely on connections with others for our emotional stability. Scientists describe this as "interpersonal limbic regulation," where one person's emotions can influence another's physiology and emotions.

"Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us." - Daniel Goleman

When leaders drive emotions positively, they create an environment where people work at their best. Negative emotions, however, disrupt work, hijacking attention from tasks. Positive emotions enhance mental efficiency, helping people understand information and make complex judgments better. Studies show that upbeat management teams perform better and experience more cooperation, leading to improved business results.

A study on 62 CEOs and their top management showed that the more positive the overall moods of people in the top management team, the more cooperative they worked together and the better the company's business results. The longer a company was run by a management team that did not get along, the poorer the company's market return.

Laughter, in particular, demonstrates the power of the open loop in operation. Unlike other emotional signals which can be feigned, laughter is largely involuntary. In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. Laughter in the workplace signals trust, comfort, and a shared sense of the world.

Why Good Leaders Must Read Emotions

Dissonant leadership, characterized by a lack of emotional attunement, creates discordant groups and wretched workplaces. In contrast, resonant leaders are attuned to their people's feelings and move them in a positive emotional direction. Resonant leaders use empathy to connect with their teams and create an environment of mutual comfort, collaboration, and high performance.

"Resonant leaders are attuned to their people's feelings and move them in a positive emotional direction." - Daniel Goleman

Emotionally intelligent leaders understand and express the emotions of their group, fostering an atmosphere where ideas are shared, learning is collaborative, and decisions are made collectively. This connection makes work more meaningful and enjoyable, enhancing overall performance and satisfaction.

Dissonant leaders, on the other hand, produce groups that feel emotionally discordant, in which people have a sense of being continually off-key. Ranging from abusive tyrants to manipulative sociopaths, dissonant leaders are out of touch and create wretched workplaces - although they have no idea how destructive they are, or simply don't care. Meanwhile, the collective distress they trigger becomes the group's preoccupation, deflecting attention away from their mission.

Resonant leaders are attuned to their people's feelings and move them in a positive emotional direction. Resonance comes naturally to emotionally intelligent leaders. Their passion and enthusiastic energy resounds throughout the group. When there are serious concerns, emotionally intelligent (EI) leaders use empathy to attune to the emotional registry of the people they lead. For example, if something has happened that everyone feels angry about (such as the closing of a division) or sad about (such as a co-worker's serious illness) the EI leader not only empathizes with those emotions, but also expresses them for the group. The leader leaves people feeling understood and cared for. Under the guidance of an EI leader, people feel a mutual comfort level. They share ideas, learn from one another, make decisions collaboratively, and get things done. Perhaps most important, connecting with others at an emotional level makes work more meaningful.

The Four Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence comprises four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Within these domains are 18 competencies that effective leaders exhibit.

"Even the most outstanding leader will not have all competencies. Effective leaders exhibit at least one competency from each of the domains." - Richard Boyatzis

These domains and competencies include:

• Self-awareness: Emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment, self-confidence.
• Self-management: Emotional self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative, optimism.
• Social awareness: Empathy, organizational awareness, service orientation.
• Relationship management: Inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, change catalyst, building bonds, teamwork, and collaboration.

Self-awareness involves reading one's own emotions and recognizing their impact and using "gut sense" to guide decisions. It also includes knowing one's strengths and limits and having a sound sense of one's self-worth and capabilities. Self-management includes keeping disruptive emotions and impulses under control, displaying honesty, integrity and trustworthiness, flexibility in adapting to changing situations or overcoming obstacles, the drive to improve performance to meet inner standards of excellence, readiness to act and seize opportunities, and seeing the upside in events.

Social Awareness involves sensing others' emotions, understanding their perspective, and taking active interest in their concerns. It also includes reading the currents, decision networks, and politics at the organizational level and recognizing and meeting follower, client or customer needs. Relationship Management involves guiding and motivating with a compelling vision, wielding a range of tactics for persuasion, bolstering others' abilities through feedback and guidance, initiating, managing and leading in new directions, cultivating and maintaining relationship webs, and cooperation and team-building.