Book: Primal Leadership
Where there is no vision the people perish. Leaders from the most profitable businesses don't need to inflate their emotional competencies ratings because the people supporting and working for them will provide an accurate rating. Visionary leaders paint a larger picture illustrating the purpose for the organization. Visionary leaders have the ability to increase corporate focus and enthusiam. The leader is the focal point of the organization. Everyone looks to the leader during a crisis. Leaders who are empathic and understanding impact people both personally and professionally. Workers measure their performance based on expectations and feedback provided by their leaders. The book "Primal Leadership" describes a perception and behavioral model for to help leaders change behavior and significantly improve their organizations.
"Primal Leadership" attempts to gain the readers focus by illustrating a new leadership model, a leadership model centered on emotional perception where increased trust is transferred to the leader through iterative improvement. Elements to the model are ideal self, realistic self, planning agenda, and behavior modification. The authors authors original emotional competencies remain: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management with these competencies helped us measure the quality of leader, but does not necessary describe how to improve a leader. "Primal Leadership" goes to the next step by providing an leadership model designed to strengthen an leader by empowering for greater impact through greater levels of trust. The organization improves as the result of leadership improvement.
The leader looks first at the ideal condition. "Describe what you want to be doing in fifteen years". The ideal condition describes the future and drops the barriers of reject and fear. The interesting observation is that 80 percent of the ideal has nothing to do with work. The ideal condition feeds into planned agenda. The planned agenda conceptualizes a course of action to achieve the ideal. The ideal self plans for and builds the future of the company. Without an vision new product lines and service centers would not likely be created. The ideal self has the potential to energize the company.
The realistic self narrows the focus to the leaders strengths. Diversity is the enemy with increased product and service not leading to increased profits. Diversity is often viewed as method to improve profit, but more often a long term drain on the company. The key is to narrow the range of products and services to those where the strongest core competencies exist. The realistic self helps center the leader back to the areas where clients are willing to pay the most money. The realistic self keeps the company from engaging in activities that lose money.
Faith, hard work, and practice facilitate behavior modification. The paradim "You can't teaching a old dog new tricks" is not true. Leaders are expected to improve behavior. The authors go to great lengths to explain when command , coaching, and democratic styles of leadership work; but fall back to the visionary leader as having the greatest long term impact on an organization. Behavior modification can dramatically change the organization culture.
The model works to gain the trust of all members in the organization. It works to gain an deeper understanding of "how well the leader is doing" and "how to improve behavior". I think "Primal Leadership" is an excellent book.