Primal Leadership

by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee

Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

Who Should Read?

Anyone who is interested in leadership, or simply is interested in group dynamics and how to improve them. This book would serve as a good lead-in to "Conscious Business" by Fred Kofman.

TLDR

• The basis and starting point for this book is brain science, and how emotions are processed within. This is a unique approach to this topic, at least in my experience, and increases interest.
• The book talks about 4 domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. This then gets broken down into competencies that make up each domain. This is a solid and valiant attempt at categorizing and explaining emotional intelligence and makes the application of these concepts less daunting.

Why?

This book does more than just draw patterns between successful companies, which never feels actionable, it actually breaks it down to the emotional skills required to be a successful leader. It also does a great job of explaining how these skills are developed and how to improve them. That makes improvement from this book much more obtainable.

Important concepts

• Leadership Styles: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, and Commanding. These are the 6 styles of leadership, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The book goes into detail about each style and how to use them effectively together. Most interestingly to me, Pacesetting is seen as a dissonant (negative), not resonant (positive) style culturally, which was very interesting to me.
• The 4 domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Each of these domains has a set of competencies that make up the domain (16 competencies in total). The book goes into detail about each competency and how to improve them, but also has strategies to gather where you are beginning from, which might be the more difficult and more valuable proposition. It also allows for a focus on strengths instead of purely focusing on weaknesses, which can help buy-in from yourself and others.