It was a very insightful book for me because I’ve never read about leadership and emotional intelligence. What made it more interesting was that I was doing an internship at a company for the first time. I acknowledged how colleagues interact with each other to be productive, how the leader behaves, and how the employees look up to the leader. Emotional intelligence is the key to being a great leader. This book covers many important concepts such as resonant and dissonant leadership, 5 leadership styles, self-directed learning, leadership competencies, and an organization’s emotional intelligence.
Who are leaders?
Leaders typically talk more than others in a company and what they say is listened to more carefully. Leaders’ emotional states and actions affect how the workers will feel and perform and how well a business will do.
Great leaders work through the emotions.
Despite the great value that business culture often places on an intelligence devoid of emotion, our emotions are more powerful than our intellect.
Resonant leadership: Resonance means that people’s emotional centers are in synch in a positive way. When leaders drive emotions positively, they bring out everyone’s best. The most effective leaders use humor more — they make resonance through laughter.
The quality of employees’ relationship with their immediate boss determines how long they stay and how productive they are.
Dissonant leadership: When leaders drive emotions negatively, they spawn dissonance. Negative emotions — especially chronic anger, anxiety, or a sense of fertility — disrupt work, hijacking attention from the task.
Emotional Intelligence: Leadership Competencies
- Self-awareness: Leaders must first understand their own direction and priorities. People with strong self-awareness are realistic and are able to laugh at their own foibles. An accurate self-assessment enables people to realize where they need to improve, welcome criticism, and know when to ask for help. The higher a leader’s position in an organization, the less accurate his self-assessment is likely to be — they have more trouble with receiving candid feedback.
- Self-management: Emotions are so contagious — especially from leaders to others in the group. When members see their leaders being calm during a crisis, admitting their mistakes, and being transparent, they begin to emulate that behavior. Leaders can’t manage emotions in anyone else without first handling their own.
- Social awareness: Empathy, which includes listening and taking other people’s perspectives, allows leaders to get along with their colleagues. People would like to feel that they belong to their organization.
- Relationship management: Leaders need to articulate the company’s vision and mission in a way that inspires others to follow. When core values and norms are clear to people, a leader doesn’t need to be physically present for the team to run effectively.
Bets motivation at work is pleasure — not incentives.
Leadership styles
- Visionary leaders articulate where a group is going, but not how it will get there — setting people free to innovate, experiment, and take calculated risks.
- Coaching leaders help employees to identify their strengths and weaknesses and give feedback that motivates them.
- Affiliative leaders create harmony, team resonance, collaborative competence, and friendly interactions.
- Democratic leaders show that they want to hear everyone’s thoughts, work as team members, and manage conflicts.
- Pacesetting leaders rely on threats and coercion to get things done.
- Commanding leaders issue others on the spot rather than pausing to ponder.
The first 4 leadership styles — visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic — are resonance builders. The last two styles — pacesetting and commanding — must be used carefully to have a positive impact. When applied poorly, commanding and pacesetting styles create dissonance.
The more of the six styles a leader can deploy, the better. Leaders who mastered four or more, especially the resonance building styles, foster climate and business performance. It is essential to choose the right leading style at the right time — good leaders adjust their style on a dime.
The five discoveries of Self-directed Learning by Richard Boyatzis
- My ideal self — Who do I want to be?
Write about what you would like to do with the rest of your life. When you go through the discovery of uncovering an ideal vision of yourself, you feel motivated to develop your abilities — you see the person you want to be.
- My real self — Who am I? What are my strengths and gaps?
Discover who you actually are now — how you act, how others view you, and what your deep beliefs comprise. Some of them will be consistent with your ideal self (strengths); others are gaps between who you are and who you want to be.
- My learning agenda — How can I build on my strengths while reducing my gaps?
Make a plan which provides detailed guidance on what new things to try that push you to your ideal and close your gaps.
- Experimenting and practicing new behaviors, thoughts, and feelings
Bring bad habits into awareness, practice a better way, and rehearse that new behavior at every opportunity until it becomes automatic. To master a leadership skill, you need to break old habits and learn new ones, which requires an extended period of practice.
- Developing supportive and trusting relationships
Others help us see things we are missing, affirm whatever progress we have made, and let us know how we are doing. Without others’ involvement, lasting change can’t occur.
Creating sustainable change
Once people learn how to improve their emotional intelligence abilities, they continue developing new strengths on their own. These competencies can continue to be acquired throughout life.
Early Learning supports competencies. The opportunity for learning effective leadership abilities extends through adolescence into the early 20s.
Some people are born with certain levels of empathy and some people learn it. When it comes to building leadership skills that last, motivation and how a person feels about learning matter immensely. If we learn something temporarily, it is soon forgotten.
Leaders are made, not born.
Summary
Resonant leaders know when to be cooperative and when to be visionary, when to listen and when to command. Such leaders articulate a mission that resonates with those they lead. Resonance is the key to primal leadership.
I think I’m not the kind of person who would learn and improve all the necessary abilities in order to become a good leader. It’s easier to just do my work than to manage my emotions, inspire employees, and find a convenient leadership style. Leading a group of people is not easy as I thought before. As mentioned in the book, it takes a great amount of practice to gain those competencies.
22.06.03
