Primal Leadership is a book by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie Mckee. Primal leadership defines the new paradigm of leadership as being emotionally intelligent. This book discusses how leaders can use their emotional intelligence to create an environment that supports creativity, innovation, and productivity in the workplace. Primal leadership also offers strategies for developing self-awareness, managing emotions, relationships at work, and transforming power into constructive action among others.
Primal Leadership – What I loved
Primal leadership has a lot of great information about the power that emotional intelligence plays in creating an environment where innovation and productivity can thrive. Primal leadership discusses how leaders need to pay attention not only to what is happening around them but also, more importantly, how they are feeling so their responses will be appropriate for the situation at hand.
The book offers insights on building strong relationships with employees by developing trust which leads to open communication which then helps everyone work together as a team towards common goals rather than working against each other.
Another thing I really liked about this book is that they spent a lot of time talking about how to modify your leadership style depending on the circumstances. Not every leadership style works best in every scenario, but many books seem to miss this and attempt to force one method on every scenario.
Resonance Leadership
This book introduced us to the concept of “resonant” leaders. These are leaders who people believe are great. And While these skills are often attributed to strategy and vision, in reality, it’s because they were emotionally aware. These excellent leaders had a technique to create success by controlling their own and others’ emotions.
Primal leadership is all about understanding how managing emotions can provide a clear road map for creating resonance in self, others, groups, and organizations. The authors discuss how being aware of emotions helps people understand their own behavior better which then leads them to make more positive choices.
Primal Leadership – Improvement Opportunities
One thing I thought could have been done better in this book was fewer examples or moving them to an appendix. This book was very long and I found myself less intrigued than I would have been if the examples had been more concise and to the point.
Another improvement would be to have a workbook or materials that would have gone with the book to provide a way to practice some of the things they wanted you to think about or do. Learning and applying new skills need to be repeated and this would have been a way to accomplish that.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Primal leadership is a very interesting and eye-opening book for anyone looking to improve their emotional intelligence. This book has a lot of great information and is definitely worth the read. Give it a try and then tell me what you think.
