This book, by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, boasts a handful of plaudits on the back cover. There’s one copy at ROLI and it wasn’t well-thumbed.
If you’ve been assigned a team, and had to steer everybody through the maelstrom of adversity, distractions, and competing opportunities that circumstance will generally chuck your way, this book argues that there are two broad categories of approach. First, the resonant approaches, which are great for teams that are already motivated and capable. Then, the dissonant ones, which are best applied in determined bursts to teams or individuals who aren’t.
Experienced leaders of quality will naturally pick an appropriate style for the circumstance, although different people will have different favourite tools.
The book suggests that there are four resonant styles:
- Visionary. Persuading the team to buy into an audacious long-term strategy.
- Coaching. Orienting people to the organisation’s goals, individual by individual.
- Affiliative. Encouraging harmonious interpersonal relationships to exist within the team.
- Democratic. Soliciting individual opinions and perspectives.
and two dissonant ones:
- Pacesetting. Applying aggressive individual targets and grinding these out of the team.
- Commanding. Providing direction without supplying rationale or getting buy-in.
They are all suitable under certain circumstances and problematic under others. The democratic style, for example, will paralyse an organisation if its survival depends on making quick decisions. Coaching can fail if individuals’ styles don’t match those of the coach, or for people who need regular, detailed feedback and excessive contact hours.
Dissonant styles are great when you think people have lost motivation or are underperforming. They are engaging and can actually help reconcile people with their work, but there’s a risk of damaging the morale of those who feel rewarded when they’re given greater autonomy (most engineers I’ve met are like this).
Much of the rest of the book is about building emotional intelligence through coaching, introspection, and honest solicitation of feedback. Emotional intelligence is the thing that tells you which tool is best to deploy at a given time. There are a few pages explicitly on not being a dickhead, as it’s a poor long-term strategy — but how many tech CEOs, with their shareholdings and their eyes on a lucrative exit, are interested in building companies to last these days?
There’s also a section on why leadership can fail with even the best of styles and intentions. These reasons will be familiar to anybody who’s read MSP or received training in programme management: lack of executive buy-in; failure to align with the culture; failing to motivate people to understand why they need to change their behaviour.
A leader must be part of the team, so that bad news and drifting goals do not get withheld from them, and also so that respect can naturally be cultivated. However, leaders must also be visibly removed from the team. They are concerned about wider priorities, and the relationship of their team to the others, so they must not become engrossed in the minutiae of fine-grained problems and tasks. This is a hard balance to maintain.
Essentially, if you live to learn, you love what your company does, you’re genuinely interested in the welfare and dynamics of your team, and you’re supported by a functional mentorship scheme, you’ll be all right without this book.
At a little under 300 pages, it’s another seam of great information that might have been written as a twelve-page pamphlet, if only they’d removed all the flaccid case studies that people seem to think are needed in a book like this. This book’s volley of supporting stories are so generalised that they are neither memorable nor convincing. Added to this padding is the occasional foray into neuroscience. Without any central thesis about how neural anatomy relates to emotional intelligence, this ends up reading like the marginal scrawlings of a New Ager: it’s all amygdala here and occipital lobe there, and then a digression about radiating spiritual harmony.
So I suppose I’m fortunate that I found this book so hard to digest.