A mostly good read. Gets bogged down toward the end

There are a lot of great ideas in this book, with a lot of data to back them up. Emotional Intelligence is very important in leadership today, and this book does a good job explaining why and how to work towards it.

My only complaint is towards the end when trying to explain how to spread out at the organizational level, they use some case studies and examples, then fall into self help speak... They get back on track for the summary though.

In all, a good book that will help leaders introspect and grow.

This book is showing them about leaders, and how leaders act, and how leaders should be. Leaders push people and they also do their job too and their difference between boss is that they also participate, not just pulling them but they also participate and push and pull people. And it is hard to also know if you are a reader or a boss. Leaders need confidence in what they are doing and you got to be proud of yourself. Leaders aren't easy it is hard but if you become one people will respect you and rely on you. Leaders are cool so let's become one.

Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions.

Emotional Intelligence is one of my interest fields. It teaches us about the primordial part as human. We can't escape from the emotions. We can only regulate it by practising the function of frontal cortex.

This emotional task of the leader is primal—that is, first—in two senses: It is both the original and the most important act of leadership.

My review:
The first time I heard of the term emotional intelligence, was when a colleague of mine was referring to a boss as having low EQ (emotional quotient). The concept of emotional intelligence was new to me at the time and I wanted to learn how to improve this quality in myself.

What I remember:
The book is split into 3 major parts, the power of emotional intelligence, making leaders and building emotionally intelligent organizations.

The author also introduces the concept of a resonant leader. A resonant leader is someone who can use emotions that empower to help their followers reach their top potential. There are 5 steps to becoming a resonant leader. Step 1, what is my ideal self, who do I aspire to be. Step 2, what is my current self, what is the current reality you are being. Step 3, creating a learning agenda, a plan on getting you to that ideal self. Step 4, take action on the plan, put it into practice in real life. Step 5, build a team to support your change because the people around you directly affect the outcome of maintaining this new way of being.

Comments:
Great book overall, especially if the concept of EQ is new to you. My only complaint is that the lessons are a bit hard to recall over a few years.

Takeaways from reading the book:

Understanding values people have
- Preface: One of the most important, emotional tasks of leadership is to help yourself and people, whom you serve / help / lead, to find meaning in what you do.
- Page 39: Being emotionally intelligent includes understanding yourself - including your emotions, values, purpose and strong competencies.
- Page 39: Being emotionally intelligent also includes understanding others - including a) listening in order to understand their emotions, values, purpose, and competencies and b) giving feedback, coaching and managing conflicts.
- Page 7: At the start of a conversation between 2 people, the bodies of the 2 persons each operate at different rhythms. After a simple 15 minute conversation, their physiological profiles look similar.
- Page 92: The higher a leader climbs in a hierarchy, the less accurate his / her self assessment is. Why? He or she gets less and less feedback. This is a problem because the higher a leader's position in an organization is, the more the leader needs feedback.

Smile, laugh, use humour
- Page 10: Research shows that cheerfulness and warmth spread most easily. Irritability is less contagious, and depression spreads hardly at all.
- Page 11: People, who enjoy each other's company, laugh easily and often.
- Page 14: Leaders, who spread good moods, help drive success. Why? When people feel good, we understand information better, and we are more flexible in our thinking.
- Page 35: The most effective leaders use humour, even when things are tense, sending positive messages that shift the underlying emotional tone of the interaction.

Costs of pace setting
- Page 6: Three or more incidents of intense stress within a year triple the death rate of socially isolated middle-aged men. However, they have no impact whatsoever on the death rate of men who cultivate close relationships.
- Page 28: If the amygdala perceives a threat, it can command other parts of the brain, including rational centers in the neocortex, to act immediately.
- Pages 73-74: Research shows that, more often than not, pace setting poisons the climate - particularly because of the emotional costs when a leader relies on it too much. The most common problem with pacesetters occur when an expert - for example a good teacher, software programmer, or doctor - gets promoted to be a leader. Because he is so good at the tasks, he used to be doing all the time, he does not trust that others can do jobs as well as he can. He praises good work too little and criticizes poor performance too quickly. The lack of self-awareness leaves pacesetters like him blind to their own failings.

There are numerous books about leadership. A plethora of visionaries over the years have sought to improve leadership in organizations. So what makes Primal Leadership unique is that it talks about the emotional component of leadership. Speaking about emotions in business seems to have picked up a taboo. Those who do speak about emotions in business are in HR and they’re often seen as out of touch with the real issues of the organization (as the book points out.)

Click here to read the full review

A good book on leadership. It explores how the emotional intelligence of those in management positions can have positive or negative effects on individual employees and the workplace culture as a whole. It attempts to get the reader to examine their emotional intelligence and find their strengths and weaknesses, harness the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses. Filled with stories of companies that successfully employed these strategies and improved their workplaces and with stories of companies that failed to notice the toxic culture within their companies to their ultimate peril, it can be used to examine how a person can improve their management style.

The book is great if you’ve taken a college or university management course that touched on emotional intelligence in the work place. Tho book provides many relevant real world case studies that make topics covered easily digestible. If you have an interest in management or psychology in the context of business, it’s a great read.

I DIDN'T FINISH THIS.

I got through about 36-40% and had to stop. My god is it redundant. I probably absorbed a little, but nothing I couldn't have learned in a 1-5 page summary of the book- and I took extensive notes. In the end the absolutely terrible writing distracted me far too much from any real learning.

This book will likely be better for people who don't already have a psych degree and who do have far more patience than I do. I mean, some people like repetition to make sure a message really sinks in. Some people enjoy redundancies. For some, hearing things over and over again makes it all much clearer.

AHHHHHH.

Attuned not Aligned

This is the biggest concept I’ve learned in this book - people need to be attuned and not aligned. I love the contrast between dissonance and resonance and the practical way each is explained and effects elaborated.

This was a great read. Thank you

I read this book on the recommendation of a mentor. As a church leader, I realize I'm just dipping my toe into the vast sea of business leadership literature with this book. Still, the relevance of this book for congregational leadership is immediately obvious. The authors propose that emotions matter enormously for leadership, and that leaders ignore emotional realities in themselves and the organizations with whom they lead at their own peril. This means the "Primal Task" of leadership is emotional management - the self-management of a leader's own emotional life and learning how to respect and respond to the emotional realities of teams and groups. This was probably a more shocking claim in 2003, when this book was first published. It seems that everywhere people are waking up to the limitations of hard rationalism and learning how to take emotions seriously. Still, this book provides a clear and compelling argument substantiated through research. It also provides some very practical suggestions for cultivating emotional intelligence as an individual and in an organization's culture.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in leadership development for themselves and those in their field of influence.

Turns out I’m already very funny and Suprisingly down to Earth