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What it argues
Primal Leadership is the application of emotional intelligence to organizational leadership, written by Daniel Goleman with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee. The central argument is that a leader's emotional state is literally contagious — it spreads through teams and organizations through a neurological process the authors call emotional contagion — and that this makes emotional intelligence not a soft skill but a primary driver of organizational performance.
The "primal" in the title refers to this biological priority. Before any other leadership task, a leader's emotional impact on the people around them sets the context for everything else that happens. A leader who creates a climate of anxiety produces anxious decisions. A leader who creates warmth and clarity produces engaged, creative work. The leader's emotional reality is the organizational climate, and that climate predicts performance across teams.
What it gets right
- 1.
The leader's emotional state spreads through the organization through emotional contagion — a neurological process that makes leadership emotional climate the most powerful determinant of organizational performance.
- 2.
Six leadership styles vary in their emotional impact: visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic are generally resonant; pacesetting and commanding produce short-term results at the cost of long-term climate.
- 3.
Resonant leaders are in tune with both their own emotional states and those of the people around them. Dissonant leaders are out of sync with the emotional reality of their organizations.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Daniel Goleman is a psychologist and science journalist who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence. Richard Boyatzis is a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the creator of the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, a tool for measuring leadership competencies. Annie McKee is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and a founding member of the Teleos Leadership Institute. The three co-authored Primal Leadership and its companion, Resonant Leadership, and have continued to produce research on leadership effectiveness and development.
