Primal Leadership

My top 25 points:

1. The first half of Emotional Intelligence (EI) is internal- self-awareness and self-management. This is the ability to monitor and manage your feelings and mood. Most leadership problems are caused by poor self-management.

2. The second half of EI is external- social awareness (knowing how to see emotions in others) and relationship management.

3. The nuance of EI comes in when deciding how much of someone else’s mood or attitude to take in. We must be able to define the boundaries between where our responsibility begins and where it ends.

4. Learning about how to set boundaries can be difficult work for those who didn’t learn boundary setting as a child. Learning to communicate your desires and to not take ownership of someone else’s feelings is tough.

5. There are 6 leadership styles-commanding, visionary, affiliative, democratic, pace setting and coaching.

6. Commanding / coercive. While it’s poisonous in the long run, it can be effective during disasters where a quick and energetic response is needed, during turnarounds, or with difficult employees. It’s terrible for keeping great employees though.

7. Visionary. Works well when the business is adrift. It’s not effective when working with a team of experts who know more about the leader. In this case, they can become disillusioned and cynical about the leader.

8. Affiliative. The strong focus on encouragement and praise helps the team’s mood, but it can allow for poor performance to go unnoticed. When the affiliative style does not provide corrective feedback or criticism, it can leave employees wondering.

9. Democratic. It makes people feel heard and understood. But when it’s too much democracy and less decision-making, people can feel like they are in a leaderless organization. And when decisions take too long, it can result in many meetings and little decisions.

10. Pacesetting. A leader who sets high standards and shows he meets and exceeds them is highly motivating for those employees who are equally competent and self-motivated. Other employees who are not as good can feel overwhelmed and they can end up resenting him.

11. Coaching. It works great when the leader is competent and well-learned and employees want to learn from him and want to improve. It doesn’t work nearly as well with unmotivated employees or with employees who don’t want to change and improve (and with employees with a  fixed mindset , such as employees who don’t even believe they can even improve).

12. Resonant leaders understand human nature and leverage their emotional intelligence to connect with people and get the most out of them. Resonant leaders embrace emotions and humanity. Resonant leaders know when to be collaborative and when to be visionary, when to listen and when to command.

13. Dissonant leaders don’t understand the human side of business. Of the four leadership styles, the ones that are dissonant are pacesetting and command.

14. The fundamental task of a leader is to prime good feelings in those we lead. Great leadership works through emotions. The best leaders are those who can recognize and manage their own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.

15. The impact of emotional contagion is huge. Leaders can influence the emotional state of their team members. Positive emotions can lead to increased motivation, productivity, and engagement, while negative emotions can have the opposite effect.

16. The book talks about how powerful laughter is. Outstanding leaders tend to use humorous comments three times as often as the average leader.

17. Can we learn leadership skills? Absolutely! But it will take time and dedication. Because the competencies part of EI like empathy and self-regulation are linked to the limbic system, which is not the rational part of our brain. To change the limbic system, we need to unlearn old habits, develop new habits, and repeat them over time until a new neural pathway is formed.

18. Why do leadership development initiatives fail? They don’t focus on the whole person or on discoveries that lead to sustainable change, they ignore the real state of the organization, they attempt to change only the person and not the norms of the group and they drive the change process from the wrong place in the organization (i.e. it needs to come from the top).

19. Change does not just happen because one decides to do it. Self-directed learning is crucial. It involves a 5-step process:
    1. Develop a clear vision of your ideal self, the person you want to become.
    2. Reflect deeply on your real self. Identify strengths (overlaps) and weaknesses (gaps).
    3. Develop a learning agenda which builds on strengths while reducing gaps.
    4. Experiment with new behavior, thoughts, and feelings and practice new behaviors and skills.
    5. Develop trusting relationships that help, support, and encourage each step of the process.

20. Great athletes spend a lot of time practicing and a little time performing, while executives spend no time practicing and all of their time performing.

21. Primal Leadership emphasizes the role of mindfulness in leadership. Mindfulness helps leaders become more present, focused, and aware of their own emotions and the emotions of others. This awareness allows leaders to respond effectively to various situations and manage their emotions in a healthy way.

22. An information vacuum around a leader is created when people withhold important (and usually unpleasant) information. To become more effective, leaders need to break through the information quarantine around them – and the conspiracy to keep them pleased.

23. There’s a delicate tension between folks feeling safe to fail – and not feeling enough pressure to succeed. We experience stress even when there’s not an immediate threat to our survival, becoming stressed based entirely on our own perception of longer-term issues. We are then flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and the effect of these two chemicals isn’t conducive to learning.

24. Which is the best of the six leadership styles? Each one is “best” depending on the situation, but the best leaders  are the ones who can switch from one to the other depending on the situation.

25. The core premise of Primal Leadership is that emotions cannot be kept out of the work environment and that leaders who understand this and who learn how to harness their own emotions and the emotions of their followers are more effective.